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Hellenic Literature SocietyHellenic Literature SocietyThe program offers a variety and range of classes that together provide a well-rounded picture of Greece. Students in many majors -- from archaeology through European studies to philosophy - are able to find a choice of courses each semester that qualify for credit within their concentrations. Students whose disciplines are not covered often use a semester in Greece to fulfill some distribution requirements. Previous knowledge of Modern Greek is not prerequisite; classes are taught in English. There are still some places available for the upcoming spring semester. To request a catalog and application, students may call (617) 547-6141 or use e-mail CYAthens@aol.com.
Through the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Foundation, the Hellenic Heritage Endowment Fund has been established to offer student scholarships and to further enhance the Greek Studies program. In that spirit, the college has engaged Dr. Ippokratis Kantzios to teach the new courses. A graduate of the of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki Greece, he also holds Masters degrees from Temple University and Bryn Mawr College, where he is a Ph.D. candidate.
In addition to Greek language studies, Stockton's literature program offers courses in "The Greek Tragedians," "Homer's Epics, Homer and his World," "Sophocles and his World," and "Greek Mythology," taught by classics scholar Dr. Fred Mench.
Applications are available for Scholarship Committee, Hellenic American Medical and Dental Society of Southern California, 4619 Browndeer Lane, Rolling Hills Estate, CA 90275-3911. The deadline for acceptance of applications is June 30th. For information call (310) 222-4000 or (310) 377-6643.
Excerpt of the minutes of the meeting between Stalin and the Bulgarian leadership, June 5, 1945. Stalin addressing Gheorghi Dimitrov and Kolarov:
"You must confer cultural autonomy to the Macedonia of Pirin within the borders of Bulgaria. Tito is proving more adaptable than you, perhaps because he lives in a multiethnic state and has to confer equal rights to the nationalities. The autonomy will be the first step to unify Macedonia, which under the present conditions may not be considered immediate. Otherwise in the conscience of the Macedonian people the entire effort for the autonomy of Macedonia will be credited to Tito and you will be blamed. Apparently you are afraid of K(imon) Georgiev and owe him something for not wanting to give autonomy to the Macedonia of Pirin. The fact that the people has not yet developed a Macedonian national consciousness means nothing. In Bielorussia there has not been this kind of consciousness until we proclaimed it a Soviet Republic. In the end it was proven that there was indeed a Bielorussian people."
From an anthropologist's point of view "The Macedonian Conflict" attempts
a study of the crystalization of a separate national identity within the
slavophone element in northern Greece and in the global diaspora established
by slavophone emigrants from Greece. The national identity is seen here as a
category of "self ascription" involving the emergence of two dichotomous and
mutually exclusive identities; one slavic, which Danforth calls Macedonian,
and the other Greek. The recent polarization of nationalist feeling is shown
splitting diaspora communities down to the family level.
Loring Danforth describes national identities as being "constantly...subject to negotiation and change,..they emerge in times of conflict...and their construction involves a process of shared forgetting, as well as shared remembering". He states that in today's global world the subject of ethnic nationalism should be approached as a transnational "cultural war" as the dispute over the "Macedonian" identity is being waged by Greek and slavophone expatriates in Australia, Canada and the United States. This "cultural war", he writes, claims exclussive ownership to the history, symbols and geography of Macedonia.
In conversations with older emigrants established overseas, Danforth attributes the emergence of a separate national identity among the Greek slavophones, to resistance to forced Hellenization, discrimination, repression and social marginalization during the metaxist and post civil war years.
In Chapter III, "The construction of a Macedonian national identity", Danforth concedes that it is difficult to answer if a "Macedonian" nation actually existed in the 1940's. Its creation was the result of a political decision of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to eliminate the sense of Bulgarian national identity shared by many local inhabitants, in order to retain control of the region occupied by Yugoslavia. Realizing that the policy of serbianization had failed, Tito's policy was directed to the construction of a distinct "Macedonian" nationality. Through this artifice Tito attempted to extend Yugoslav control over Bulgarian and Greek Macedonia. A west-central slavic dialect that was most different from both Serbian and Bulgarian languages was codified into the new standardized language, based on political rather than on linguistic criteria. Here, strangely enough, Danforth's analysis of the emergence of the "Macedonians" within Yugoslavia stops.
He does not mention the indoctrination of postwar generations with the mythology of "Macedonianess" in Yugoslavia, the cultivation of irredentism through maps and school books, or the incessant radio propaganda directed to the slavophones in Greece. The contribution of teachers and priests sent by Skopje to the diaspora communities in Australia, Canada and the United States, to shaping and reinforcing this national identity from the 1960's onwards is also omitted.
Danforth sees Macedonia as a unitary geographic area anchored firmly to a past reaching back to Alexander. But whose Macedonia ? Listing the names proposed by the Greek side or third parties he writes "These names represent attempts to qualify the name of the republic in order to undercut its claim to embody Macedonia in either its temporal or its spatial entirety".
The name "New Macedonia" similarly serves to dissociate the modern Macedonian state and by extension the modern Macedonian nation from Alexander the Great and the ancient Macedonians" (p.155). Again in the vein of cultural determinism he writes "Adopting an approach that is more consistent with the contemporary anthropological perspective on ethnicity ....in their own time the ancient Macedonians were generally perceived by the Greeks and by themselves not to be Greek" (p.168).
Trying to define Macedonia historically, Danforth feels that it is being deprived by the fact that since 1944, "Macedonia" was a constituent part of former Yugoslavia. By calling it a region in northern Greece, Danforth writes that the existence there of a distinct slavic language is ignored, however, when referring to the number of slavophones he admits that they constitute a minute fraction of the total population in the region.
After stating the objectivity of his research and narrative Danforth proceeds to employ the anti-greek biases of many newspaper articles of the early 1990's. For example he does not find fault with the practice of using slavic names for cities in Greece on maps printed at Skopje using prewar Bulgarian maps, although this is in contravention of current international law. He finds fault with the Greek practice of using Greek names for cities, citing as examples Constantinople instead of Istanbul (the Turks used Kostantinye for Constantinople until 1923) or, Monastiri instead of Bitola (again, a Greek name) etc.
Greece is accused for not recognizing a "Macedonian" minority within its territory (p.108) while at the same time supporting the rights of the Greek minority in Albania (p.148). Danforth does not tell the reader that the Greek minority in Albania is an internationally recognized minority on which the birthright of Albania itself is based. Likewise, the Muslims of Greece are an internationally recognized religious minority. The "Macedonians" in Greece have not been recognized as an ethnic minority for the simple fact that there were no reciprocal agreements with Greece's neighbors to ensure such a status for the Greek slavophones. (There was an attempt to recognize the slavophones as a Bulgarian minorityin northwestern Greece, following bilateral talks between Greece and Bulgaria in the 1920's. The agreement was soon shelved following strong opposition from Serbia. In the late 1930's the Metaxas regime began a forcible Hellenization program. Similarly, the Greeks of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were not recognized as ethnic minorities, had no rights to schools, newspapers and churches and were either forced to assimilate or leave.
Danforth's study touches superficially the postwar history of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the orientation of its state organization to a policy of territorial, historical and cultural revisionism. He appears to suport the idea that history is culturally determined. It follows that a community developing a "Macedonian" conscience has the right to claim for itself the territory and history of the larger Macedonia. Far from being dispassionate or balanced "The Macedonian Conflict" cloaks in a theoretical approach the views of the "Macedonian" government at Skopje. In the last ten years Afrocentrists, feminists and homosexuals forced upon American universities their program of cultural determinism. According to its practitioners, history can be manipulated in such a way as to project current motivations into the study of the past, no matter how irrelevant or factually inaccurate the analysis of the past becomes. The idea that history is culturally determined and each group can rewrite history for reasons of group, ethnic or national pride has undermined serious scholarship with grave consequences for the future. Emphasis on cultural motivations allows for the presentation of history as myth, without any factual support. In many ways "The Macedonian Conflict" is representative of cultural determinism at work.
This first comprehensive, illustrated history of the spectacularlybeautiful monasteries of Greece starts in the Egyptian desert at St. Catherine's on Mount Sinai, where the "Desert Fathers" exercised an early influence over subsequent Eastern Orthodoxy architecture. The book moves on to discuss numerous and varied monasteries in mainland and island Greece, including those on Patmos, Crete, and Egina and those of Hosios Loukas and Agnountos. Most striking of all are the monasteries the so-called "monasteries in the air" at Meteora in central Greece, perhaps the strangest group of buildings to be found anywhere in the world. This volume is illustrated with superb new photographs of the buildings, their treasures, and the dramatic landscape.
232 pgs, 8.0x10.0 inches, Cloth, $ 50.00
PANDORA: WOMEN IN CLASSICAL GREECE, by Ellen D. Reeder
The publication of Reeder's landmark volume "Pandora" marks the culmination of nearly a century of devotion to classical art at The Walters Museum. With the arrival of Reader as Henry Walter's Curator of Ancient Art, and especially now with "Pandora", a new plateau of ancient art scholarship has been reached, characterized by a ground-breaking multidiciplinary approach that explores classical art for what it reveals of the peoples and culture that gave it birth. More than fifty lenders from fourteen countries are cited on their own page in this volume.
431 pages, 9.0x11.0 inches, Paper, $ 35.00
SAPPHO'S IMMORTAL DAUGHTERS, by Margaret Williamson
The author conduct us through ancient representations of Sappho, from vase paintings to appearances in Ovid, and traces the route by which her work has reached us, shaped along the way by excavators, editors, and interpreters. She goes back to the poet's world and time to explore perennial questions about Sappho: How could a woman have access to the public medium of song? What was the place of female sexuality in the public and religious symbolism of Greek culture? What is the sexual meaning of her poems? Williamson then looks closely at the poems themselves, Sappho's "immortal daughters." Her book offers the clearest picture yet of a woman whose place in the history of Western culture has been at once assured and mysterious.
196 pages, 6.4x9.3 inches, Cloth, $ 25.95
SOPHOCLES' TRAGIC WORLD: Divinity, Nature, Society, by Charles Segal
Much has been written about the heroic figures of Sophocles' powerful dramas. Now Segal focuses our attention not on individual heroes and heroines, but on the world that inspired and motivated their actions - a universe of family, city, nature, and the supernatural. He shows how these ancient masterpieces offer insight into the abiding question of tragedy: how one can make sense of a world that involves so much apparently meaningless violence and suffering. He examines the language and structure of the plays from several interpretive perspectives, drawing both on traditional philological analysis and on current literary and cultural theory.
276 pages, 6.4x9.6 inches, Cloth, $ 40.95
EDW SMYRNH ... EDW SMYRNH, by Ifigeveia Hrysohoou
H guvaika emeive movn. Kavei boltes. Kovtosteketai kathe toso. Metraei me to mati tns tnv apostasn. Kati psaxvei va brei. Apelpismevn stamataei mprosta se mia limvoula. Tremouliazei to avtikathreftisma twv devtrwv sta vera. Saleuouv oi korfes sto butho tns limvoulas, les kai filave tis idies tous tis rizes. Mporei akoma kai va koubevtiazouv mazi tous.
H guvaika agkaliazei eva devtro. Ystera allo, allo. Kati thelei va rwtnsei. Tnv ekveurizei n astamatntn fluaria twv sivtribaviwv.
Pnre va bradiazei. Avapsave kiolas ta fwta. Feugei o kosmos. Ernmwthnke to parko. Apokamwmenn peftei s'eva pagkaki. Skepazei me ta xeria to proswpo tns. Stous siwpnlous lugmous tns, psithurize: "Pou eivai n Smurvh; "Pou eivai n Smurvh;" Kamia apokrisn. Movo n fluaria twv sivtribaviwv kai ta poulia pou leve tous dikous tous skopous.
H LYGERH, by Andreas Karkabitsas
"H Lugern" avaferetai se mia istoria pou tnv eznse o idios "kapws etsi" kai tnv egrapse, afou katastalakse mesa tou o povos kai gvwrise perissotero tov avthrwpo. Duo eivai ta themata pou tov apasxolnsav s' auto to ergo: h guvaikeia upotagn stov avtra-afevtn, patera, suzugo h aderfo, kai o kaivourios kosmos pou erxotave, pou ntave n arxn tou snmerivou, dikou mas kosmou.
"H Lugern" exase to paixvidi tou erwta, oxi apo mia polu omorfn guvaika pou arpakse tov agapnmevo tns Giwrgn, opws givetai apo tnv epoxn tou Trwikou Polemou, alla giati upoxwrnse autn se evav asxnmo avtra, pou dev eixe kamia sxesn me tov erwta tns, ma mporouse va kavei xrnmata ...
Paper, $ 14.75
Rare and renowned works of Hellenistic sculpture are the subject of an exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled "Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar." For more information, call (212) 879-5500.
March 16 * Buffalo, NY - FOLK DANCE, MUSIC AND SONG
"Tribute to the Hellenic Heritage," a gala evening of traditional dance and song, will be presented by the celebrated dance troupe of New York's Greek American Folklore Society at the State University of New York. The program will include traditional dances by 40 dancers in authentic costumes accompanied by folk musicians on traditional instruments. In connection with the performance, a historical and cultural exhibition on Hellenism will be presented in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts. For information call (716) 645-ARTS.
March 17 * Chicago, IL - LECTURE
Noted author and lecturer Christopher G. Janus will speak about his book of short stories "Angel on My Shoulder, Remembrances at Eighty." At the Hellenic Museum & Cultural Center; 168 N Michigan Ave, 4th Flr. 3:00 PM. Admission $7 non members; $4 members. For more information call (312) 726-1234.
March 17 * Harrisburg, PA - CONCERT
The Hellenic Heritage Association of Central Pennsylvania will present the Trinity Ensemble, an informative concert of Byzantine chant and Greek Orthodox choral music. The concert will be held free of charge at 7:00 PM, at Ho;y Trinity Cathedral, 1000 Yverdon Dr, Camp Hill. For more information, call (717) 763-7441.
March 20 * New York, NY - LECTURE
The Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic studies at New York University presents "Social Inequality in the Greek Educational System" by Anna Fraqngoudaki, University of Athens. 58 W 10th St, 7:00 PM. For more information call 212-998-3990.
March 21 * Chicago, IL - LECTURE
The Very Rev. Nikitas Lulias, Pastor of St Demetrios Church, Chicago, will speak on "Lenten Folk Traditions" At the Hellenic Museum & Cultural Center; 168 N Michigan Ave, 4th Flr. 7:30 PM. Admission $5 non members; members free. For more information call (312) 726-1234.
March 21 * New York, NY - EXHIBIT
"A Rose and a Hair," paintings by Chrysanne Stathacos, at The Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic studies, 58 W 10th St, 9:00 AM-9:00 PM. For more information call 212-998-3990.
March 30 - August 11 * Atlanta, GA - EXHIBITION
The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University will present the exhibition "Nike: Competition and Victory at the Ancient Greek Festival Games," an exploration of the sacred competitions of the classical world. For further information call (404) 727-4292.
March 31 * Chicago, IL - LECTURE
Thalia Selz, assistant professor English department, Trinity College will speak on "Women to Watch - Five Greek Women Artists." At the Hellenic Museum & Cultural Center; 168 N Michigan Ave, 4th Flr. 3:00 PM. Admission $7 non members; $4 members. For more information call (312) 726-1234.
March 31 * New York, NY - CONCERT
The Little Orchestra Society, The Metropolitan Singers and The Greek Choral Society, under the musical direction of Dino Anagnost, will hold its annual Spring Candlelight Cathedral Concert at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, 319 E 74th St. at 5:00 PM. The show will feature Christine Akre, soprano; Patrician Miller, mezzo soprano; John Tripp, tenor, and Stephen Lusmann, baritones. Tickets for $18, $25, 0r $35 are available from Orpheon, Inc. 220 W 42nd St, 18th floor, or with a credit card by calling (212) 704-2100.
Australia 17 Israel 3
Brazil 1 Italy 3
Canada 24 Japan 2
Cyprus 1 Netherlands 1
Denmark 2 New Zealand 2
Finland 1 Norway 1
France 8 Singapore 1
Germany 3 Slovenija 1
Greece 26 Sweden 2
Hong Kong 1 Switzerland 4
Hungary 3 Turkey 1
Ireland 2 United Kingdom 38
United States 338