Το παιδικό μουσείο του Μανχάταν πρόκειται να παρουσιάσει μια μοναδική έκθεση. Για τις ανάγκες της έκθεσης αυτής αναπαράγει Θεούς και μύθους της Αρχαίας Ελλάδας. Η έκθεση θα είναι έτοιμη για το κοινό τον Φεβρουάριο του 2007. Πρόκειται για μια μοναδική παρουσίαση βασιζόμενη στις τεχνολογικές εξελίξεις που θα μεταφέρουν με την βοήθεια της τεχνολογίας τον επισκέπτη στον κόσμο της Αρχαίας Ελλάδας μεταδίδοντας μάλιστα όχι μόνο γνώση για την εποχή και τον κόσμο της αλλά και συναισθήματα. Παιδιά της Νέας Υόρκης αλλά και της υπόλοιπης Αμερικής θα έχουν έτσι την δυνατότητα να ταξιδέψουν στην Αρχαία Ελλάδα. Mια επανάληψη του ταξιδιού του Οδυσσέα ο οποίος μετά το επικό του ταξίδι έφθασε στον τόπο του, έτσι και οι νεαροί επισκέπτες θα ταξιδέψουν μέσα από τους Θεούς και τους Μύθους της Αρχαίας Ελλάδας μέσα από τις ρίζες του δυτικού πολιτισμού. Αξίζει να σημειωθεί πως το παιδικό μουσείο του Μανχάταν θεωρεί ότι ο Ελληνισμός και το ελληνικό πνεύμα πρέπει να βρίσκεται στην πρώτη γραμμή της εκπαίδευσης στην Αμερική του σήμερα.

Lost Worlds: Athens - Ancient Supercity

In this instalment of ‘Lost Worlds’, a team of field investigators painstakingly reconstruct the city of Athens as it would have looked in the fifth century BC. Using the latest research, expert analysis and cutting edge graphic technology, our experts take us on a compelling journey through Greek history.

Firstly, we embark upon a comprehensive examination of Pericles’ life, assessing the leader’s role in Athens’ ascent to greatness, as well as in the city’s eventual undoing. Described by the historian Thucydides as the ‘first citizen of Athens’, Pericles ruled from 461BC until 429BC. This elected statesman has been credited with leading Athens towards greatness, consolidating the Athenian Empire, and paving the way for western civilisation.

This programme slowly reassembles the city which Pericles presided over, and examines his considerable architectural legacy. The statesman was responsible for masterminding the most costly and ambitious construction campaign which had ever been undertaken in the western world, as he created a model city of temples, houses, market places, civic buildings and a highly innovative sanitation system.

However, Pericles drew the funds necessary to accomplish these feats directly from the Greek alliance’s treasury. Widely seen as one of the largest embezzlements in human history, the decision to use money which had been earmarked for the defence of the city states eventually lead to the downfall of Athens, and of Pericles himself.

Two and a half thousand years after Athens was bought down by war and disease, we recreate Pericles’ magnificent city. Impregnable fortifications, the first senate house, and one of the most advanced water systems in the world, are all important hallmarks of the ‘Age of Pericles.’ We also gaze in awe at the Parthenon: a building which is often hailed as the most perfect structure ever completed. An examination of the terrifying power of the Greek navy completes our exciting foray into the breathtaking world of fifth century Greece.

Athens-Sparta’ showcase to open at Onassis Center in New York on December 5

Photo: Parian marble bust known as ‘Leonidas,’ dating from 480-470 BC and found at the Acropolis in Sparta, from the Sparta Archaeological Museum.

At a press conference this week on the exhibition “Athens-Sparta: From the 8th to the 5th Centuries BC,” which opens in New York on December 5, the Onassis Foundation’s president Antonis Papadimitriou told the journalists, “Churchill once said that reading the Peloponnesian Wars told one all there was to know about the secrets of warfare.” The Onassis Cultural Center, a subsidiary of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, is to host the exhibition of 289 artifacts from the two ancient cities that are being shown abroad for the first time. Athens and Sparta were often at war, but the exhibition shows that even at times of great rivalry, civilization did not stop developing, according to Nikos Kaltsas, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece. The exhibition, to which admission is free, will last until May 12, 2007. The cover of the 300-page catalog shows a warrior, his head bent in thought, a detail from a piece of Athenian pottery in the Archaeological Museum. One wonders what the New Yorkers will make of the bust titled “Leonidas,” the warrior who fell with his 300 men fighting against the Persians at Thermopylae, exhibited along with arrowheads and spearheads from the legendary battle. “The exhibition is of historic, cultural and artistic interest that closes a cycle of events marking the foundation’s 30th anniversary, the 30th anniversary of the death of Aristotle Onassis and the 100th anniversary of his birth,” Papadimitriou said. The many valuable artifacts have been brought to New York so that visitors can see the differences between the two Greek city-states at the philosophical and sociopolitical level, whose effects on cultural and human behavior have lasted until this the present.

Misc news

“Emilio Estevez's movie, "Bobby," introduces the martyrdom of Robert Kennedy to another generation of Americans, but it was Robert's reaction to his brother's death that is really most instructive to the young.

Robert Kennedy was dining at home on Nov. 22, 1963, when J. Edgar Hoover called. "1 have news for you," Hoover began coldly. "The president's been shot" Kennedy turned away from his lunch companions, his hand to his mouth and his face twisted in pain.

In the ensuing months, he was devoured by grief. One of his biographers, Evan Thomas, writes: "He literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt. His clothes no longer fit, especially his brother's old clothes — an old blue topcoat, a tuxedo, a leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal — which he insisted on wearing and which hung on his narrowing frame."

But during March 1964, he visited Bunny Mellon's estate in Antigua, and spent the vacation in his room, reading a book Jackie Kennedy had given him, "The Greek Way," by Edith Hamilton.

"The Greek Way" contains essays on the great figures of Athenian history and literature, and Kennedy found a worldview that helped him explain and recover from the tragedy that had befallen him. "When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view," Hamilton writes, "then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages."

Classical scholars often .scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless "all the glory that was Greece" mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy's life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences in what Thomas calls "a flat, unrhythmic voice with a mournful edge."

Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own —- heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, bow the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on.

Hamilton is at her best describing the tragic sensibility, the strange mixture of doom and exaltation that marks Greek drama. It was based on the conviction that good grows out of bad, virtue out of hardship, and that wisdom is born in suffering. Kennedy memorized a passage from Aeschylus, which Hamilton quotes twice in her book;

"God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

Kennedy, recovering from his brother's murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it.

Kennedy underlined a passage of Hamilton's book in which she summarizes the rippled nature of Greek optimism: "Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life. And, at the worst, there is that in us which can turn defeat into victory" If they were doctors of the spirit, the Greeks' specialty was to take grief and turn it into resolution.

The story of Kennedy's grief is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic. He developed a bit of that quality, which greater leaders like Churchill possessed in abundance, of seeming to step from another age. Kennedy became a figure in the 1960s, but was never really of the '60s.

And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring hack some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded I the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.”

Επίλεκτο κοινό από τον πολιτικό χώρο της Ουάσιγκτον συγκέντρωσε το περιοδικό Mediterranean Quarterly στο Κόσμος Κλαμπ, την παλαιότερη λέσχη της αμερικανικής πρωτεύουσας, για να γιορτάσει τα 18 χρόνια λειτουργίας του.

Κύριος ομιλητής της εκδήλωσης ήταν ο πρέσβης της Ελλάδας στις ΗΠΑ, Αλέξανδρος Μαλλιάς, ο οποίος αναφέρθηκε στον πολυδιάστατο ρόλο της Ελλάδας στα Βαλκάνια και το διεθνή χώρο.«Η Ελλάδα αποτελεί μία πετυχημένη περίπτωση» είπε ο κ. Μαλλιάς. «Είμαστε η πιο πετυχημένη ήπια δύναμη στη νοτιοανατολική Ευρώπη και την ευρύτερη περιοχή της ανατολικής Μεσογείου».

Ο κ. Μαλλιάς επεσήμανε ότι η Ελλάδα έχει φτάσει σε σημείο εξέλιξης που επιθυμούν να μιμηθούν όλες οι γειτονικές της χώρες και γι’ αυτό αναλαμβάνει ηγετικό ρόλο στη περιοχή. Συγκεκριμένα συνέτεινε στη διαμόρφωση της πολιτικής της ΕΕ για την περιοχή και στην ένταξη και άλλων χωρών της περιοχής στην κοινότητα.

Επίσης με τις επενδύσεις της στα Βαλκάνια, η Ελλάδα προωθεί και διαμορφώνει μία αγορά 120 εκατομμυρίων καταναλωτών ενώ έχει δημιουργήσει πάνω από 200 χιλιάδες νέες θέσεις εργασίας.

Τη θετική και αποφασιστική επιρροή της Ελλάδας στα Βαλκάνια τόνισε και ο υποδιευθυντής του τμήματος άμυνας και εξωτερικής πολιτικής του Ινστιτούτο CATO, Τεντ Γκάλεν Κάρπεντερ. «Η Ελλάδα είναι αξιέπαινη», τόνισε ο κ. Κάρπεντερ, «για τις προσπάθειες που κατέβαλε για τη σταθεροποίηση των Βαλκανίων και για την οικονομική ανάπτυξη της περιοχής».

Η Ελλάδα όμως δεν δραστηριοποιείται μόνο στην περιοχή της Μεσόγειου αλλά και στο διεθνή χώρο μέσω του εμπορικού της στόλου. Ο πρέσβης της Ελλάδας στις ΗΠΑ μας εξηγεί:«Τα ελληνικά πλοία μεταφέρουν το 35% του παγκόσμιου εμπορίου που διακινείται δια θαλάσσης και αυτό που είναι ακόμα πιο εντυπωσιακό είναι ότι το 50% των εμπορευμάτων της Κίνας μεταφέρονται από ελληνικά πλοία».

Ολοκληρώνοντας ο κ. Μαλλιάς επισήμανε ότι η ασφάλεια σε θέματα ενέργειας είναι πολύ σημαντική για τις ΗΠΑ και ότι η Ελλάδα είναι σε θέση να βοηθήσει.Συγκεκριμένα, ο έλληνας πρέσβης τόνισε ότι ο ελληνικός εμπορικός στόλος διαθέτει το μεγαλύτερο αριθμό δεξαμενόπλοιων με τα οποία διακινεί καύσιμα και αργό πετρέλαιο σ’ ολόκληρο τον κόσμο. Το περιοδικό Mediterranean Quarterly εκδίδεται από το Πανεπιστήμιο Ντιούκ και είναι το μόνο περιοδικό στις ΗΠΑ που ασχολείται διεξοδικά με την εξέταση και ανάλυση των εξελίξεων στην Μεσόγειο και τις διεθνείς τους προεκτάσεις.

Greek to Me

A year ago I began to learn a dead language, and it has subtly changed my view of life. Yet no one seems to believe me. When I say I’m studying ancient Greek, people usually respond, with a cocked eyebrow and a heavy diphthong of mistrust, in one of three ways. “Building your vocabulary?” Or: “Why don’t you just read translations?” Or, most damning of all, “A dead language?”

These are all fair questions, and at times, caught in a bruising clinch with Attic grammar, I ask them of myself. By the standards of my native English, Greek is fabulously—some might say perversely—complex. In college Latin I learned the joys of a synthetic language, in which words are modified (“inflected”) to mark their tense, voice, number, gender, and other grammatical attributes, and even proper names have multiple forms. But nothing had prepared me for the Greek notion of dual number, which is neither singular nor plural but applies to eyes, friends, and other pairs that belong together. After almost a year of study I am still grappling with the vagaries of accentuation, the protean use of participles, and the mysteries of the Greek middle voice, which is neither active (“I lead”) nor passive (“I am led”) but an indefinable, reflexive middle ground (“I lead to or for myself”). And then there are the verbs, those fearsome verbs. In English, verbs have a manageable four main forms: yodel, yodels, yodeled, yodeling. Spanish verbs have about 50. Classical Greek? Three hundred and fifty. “They might yodel (in the past) for themselves” (the first aorist middle optative third person plural) and “You are about to be having been yodeled” (the second person singular future perfect passive) are but two of the ways one can yodel in Greek. And just about the time you’ve memorized all the rules of verb formation, you discover that many Greek verbs are irregular anyway and recklessly break them.

Some of the best Greek of all is still denser and stranger. The reason I started learning the language in the first place was to read The Iliad, the most famous and influential poem in Western culture, in the original. In fact “Homer” may well be a collective pseudonym for many generations of wandering bards, whose slowly evolving oral “text” was only written down circa 700 B.C., several centuries after they had begun to sing it. Their Iliad is a linguistic fossil bed, crammed with archaisms and odd dialects that the Greeks of the fifth century B.C. already found tough going. So imagine me. As I do battle with Book I, reaching the end of each line looking through my ear-hole, as my high-school football coach used to say, I begin to see why “Greek to me,” for Shakespeare, meant gibberish.

Yet in the end, these oddments and complexities are precisely what fuel my efforts. They remind me just how different the people must have been who used this language—people who sang their heroes and their myths, creating them anew at each performance instead of reading them, unchanging, from the page. In them I sense a whole new world-view. Which, after all, is among the best reasons going to learn a new language. Or to read. Or to think at all.

So no: To get back to the first of those nagging Whys, I’m not doing this to build my vocabulary or for mental calisthenics. As a word buff I’m naturally delighted by my new X-ray view of English, which reveals the Greek bones under the skin of familiar friends like psychology (psyche, “breath, life, soul” + logos, “word, discourse, reason” = the reason of the soul) and dinosaur (from deinos, “terrible, fearful, great” + sauros, “lizard”) and helps me understand lingo in medicine and natural history that I’d never encountered before. If getting pages of strange runes down by heart improves my memory, or if I feel a certain cryptographic kick in discerning meaning in what at first glance seems an impenetrable waterfall of words, that’s grand. But more than words themselves, what interests me is the Greek thought that underlies them.

So why not just read translations? Bookstores are filled with polished renderings by people whose Greek is far better than mine will ever be. What’s wrong with those? Absolutely nothing, of course. Yet the more Greek I read in the original, the more translations seem a pale two-dimensional shadow of a shapely, muscular, three-dimensional body whose form and content are one. Take the first few words of The Iliad. The superb Robert Fagles translation runs:

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses …

A no less distinguished rendering, by the eminent classicist Richard Lattimore, has it quite differently:

Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians …

Fagles begins in rage, Lattimore in song; for one it is “Achilles” who is “murderous, doomed,” while for the other anger itself is the active force. Which is it? In the original it is both, and a good deal more besides.

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the chorus sings of mankind’s ambivalent greatness: “polla ta deina kouden anthropou deinoteron pelei.” The phrase can be translated in two very different ways, because of the inherent ambiguity of the adjective deinos (as in dinosaur), which may be positive (“great”) or negative (“fearful,” “terrible”). So as the chorus sings “many things are terrible, but nothing is more terrible than mankind,” it is also singing “many things are great (clever, able …), but nothing is greater than mankind.” Compare a line from Pericles’ famous funeral oration to the Athenians killed in the first year of the Peloponnesian War: “philokaloumen te gar met’euteleias kai philosophoumen aneu malakias.” The Penguin translation reads: “Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft.” This is a fine rendering, but it cannot measure up. The music of the line is inevitably lost: the satisfying echo of philokaloumen and philosophoumen, the singular sing-song beauty of the word eleuteleias, meaning “thrift” or “economy,” the rhythmic tension of the whole line that makes the English seem fussy and verbose. Translation has once again compressed original meanings: Philokaloumen means “love of the beautiful,” but it could just as easily be rendered “nobility.” Malakias is “softness,” but also “cowardice.” Each word has a whole series of associations, a vast bubble chart of intersecting meanings shimmering in the mind as one reads.

When the translator makes his fatal choice—one word only, please—all but one of the beautiful bubbles burst. Put another way, the result is a black-and-white photo of an orchid grove: satisfying in its own way, perhaps, but nowhere near as perfumed and animate as the original. Of course this impoverishment happens, in varying degree, every time one language is forced to flow into the conduit of another. Last December, in a German-speaking village in the Swiss Alps, I bought a packet of paper tissues emblazoned, in German, with the proud marketing boast Durchschnupfsicher! As often happens in Switzerland, the package was multilingual, and the term was variously rendered in English, Italian, and French, as “three-ply,” assorbente, and résistent; the English stressed the product’s structure, the Italian its absorbency, the French its toughness. But the German term contained all three: Compounded of three separate words, it literally means “sneeze-through-proof.” A concept of singular power.

Distinguished linguists and cognitive scientists argue convincingly that words themselves do not circumscribe reality—that different languages don’t create different mentalities (the Eskimos, it turns out, actually do not have 20 different words for snow). Still, a concept like Durchschnupfsicher-ness is nothing to sneeze at. Wherever in this chicken-or-egg world they come from, different mentalities do exist in various lands, and local languages do mirror them. Hence the old Italian proverb traduttore traditore is entirely justified: “The translator is a traitor.” Reading texts in the original is the only hope of a direct approach to the people who wrote them.

And here, another chorus of objections. Many people question pointedly whether we have any business getting to know the ancient Greeks better in the first place. Broadly speaking, these critics fall into two camps, which cast the Greeks as either benign or malignant. The former, following the “dead language” line, question whether books written 2,500 years ago can really contain anything that is still relevant today. Surely their thought has long ago been superseded?

It’s true in hard science, where Ptolemy’s astronomy, Aristotle’s physics, and the medicine of Galen and Hippocrates have been bettered by several centuries of scientific method. Yet in a wide range of other fields, including philosophy, architecture, sculpture, religion, and literature, the Greeks remain seminal. They invented democracy, pioneered concepts of the citizen and the state. Some of our most basic social and political concepts—private property, civil liberties, and free speech—and our most frequently capitalized ideals—Justice, Beauty, Morality, Free Will—appear first among the Greeks, who wrote about them with a clarity and insight that richly repays attention to this day. Even where modern science has outstripped them, the Greeks remain sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued in the background. Doctors in many countries still take the oath ascribed to Hippocrates, and with good reason, for in a few pithy lines it considers topics such as euthanasia, abortion, and the delicate nature of the patient-doctor relationship. Here, as in the many spheres of knowledge where science loses its hard edges and grades into the nebulous realms of ethics and law, the Greeks excel. They were remarkably astute students of humanity.

Statements like this draw the loudest hoots and jeers of all, of course, from people who consider the Greeks not just irrelevant but downright dangerous, members of a slave-owning, xenophobic, misogynist society who don’t deserve our attention in the first place. They are, according to this reasoning, the leading figures of that most loathsome group, the Dead White Males, who have twisted the Western cultural canon to serve their none-too-hidden political agendas.

Call me a dupe, but when I read Aristotle’s Physics or Poetics I’m not focusing on the fact that he defended slavery, any more than I reject the U.S. Constitution because the Founding Fathers themselves owned slaves and would have been thunderstruck by women’s suffrage, or allow memories of Mozart’s smutty letters to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla to sully the pleasure of his horn concertos. Maybe I’m an apolitical nincompoop, but I believe in great books and read them for the same reasons that I look at paintings by Picasso and sculpture by Praxiteles, stare long and silent at Notre Dame’s façade in dawn light, and listen to the chaconne from Bach’s violin concerto in D-minor at full, thorax-thrumming volume: to celebrate and heighten my humanity, to drink deep of life, and to partake in mysterious pleasures that I (quite obviously) can’t capture in words, but recognize when they happen … in the immortal words of Hallmark, to Take Joy.

This is not string theory, but common sense: In art as in life, some things are more complex, stimulating, enduring, and ultimately more rewarding than others. Over the ages a few painters, sculptors, architects, and, yes, a few writers too—some of whom were dear, sweet-natured souls, others master manipulators or thoroughgoing bastards—have by talent, elbow grease, or pure luck arrived at a deeper perception of human existence than is vouchsafed to most of us. They have crystallized this perception in their art, an art whose force, elegance, and economy speaks to all people in all times (or more so than most). This, in fact, is how we know an artist’s work is universal: when it passes through the sands of Time, the most effective filter of wheat and chaff there is. Not to belittle contemporary writers—I wouldn’t give up my Banville and Proulx and Hamsun and Heaney for any money. They may even turn out to be among the Greats. Just that it’s too early to say. Only with time will we see whether their works age like a legendary Bordeaux vintage or like cheap plonk. Jane Austen, whose writing has held up marvelously for more than two centuries, we can be a little more confident about. Dante, with another 500 years of fame under his belt, is a safe bet. Virgil is a sure thing. Homer is a lead-pipe cinch.

And the closer I can come to meeting them on their home turf—to conversing with them in their native languages—the more I may be able to learn from them. Or so I believe. Which is why I labor over my flash cards and conjugations, seeking elusive communion with Homer and the Greeks. For 25 centuries now people have turned to their writings, 75 generations of readers with vastly different expectations and outlooks, who have found there something pure and profound, a new way of seeing the world that streams by them. It’s time I saw for myself.

Tom Mueller speaks six languages fluently but wishes ancient Greek were his mother tongue.

Reading List

What are our writer’s top 10 must-reads in the original Greek?
1 / The Iliad Homer
2 / The Odyssey Homer
3 / The Symposium Plato
4 / Fragments of Heraclitus
5 / Fragments of Sappho
6 / The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle
7 / Antigone Sophocles
8 / The Philippics Demosthenes
9 / The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides
10 / On the Sublime Longinus

Greece's culture minister George Voulgarakis called for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece late Monday night, speaking at the UN just after the General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution tabled by Greece last month on the return or restitution of cultural property to their countries of origin. He also welcomed the adoption of the resolution by the plenary session as "exceptionally important".

"The Greek initiative for the Resolution that has been unanimously adopted by the United Nations, which concerns the reunification of antiquities, is an exceptionally important event," Voulgarakis said after the adoption of the resolution, adding that "this result is the outcome of the efforts we have made recently to enable the antiquities to return to their places of origin".

"The adoption of this resolution in itself signals and guides the countries to help so that the antiquities from all over the world will return to their homes. Greece will always seek and strive, in that direction, for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to their rightful place".

Addressing the General Assembly, Voulgarakis explained that "the uniqueness of the Parthenon, as a monument-symbol of the global civilization, is the decisive factor that renders the demand for their return universal, but also more timely than ever, particularly now, when we are in the final stage of completion of the New Acropolis Museum" in Athens.

The draft resolution on "The Return or Restitution of Cultural Property to their Countries of Origin" had been tabled at the UN by Greece's Permanent Representative, Ambassador Adamantios Vasilakis, on November 3.

Addressing himself to the president of the UN's 61st General Assembly and the representatives of the UN member countries, Voulgarakis said:

"I thank you for the opportunity you have given me to address the General Assembly, to express the sincere gratitude and appreciation of the Greek government, for the unanimous adoption of the resolution on the return and restitution of the cultural treasures to their countries of origin. The adoption of the resolution, with a 'consensus', and its endorsement by the majority of the representatives, clearly states its importance for the international community, and the clear intentions of all of us to proceed with bilateral and multilateral collaborations so as to resolve these matters."

Noting that "UNESCO's systematic and hard work is at the core of these efforts for the protection of cultural heritage", Voulgarakis also conveyed the Greek government's appreciation to UNESCO director-general Koichiro Matsuura.

Voulgarakis further noted the immense legal dimensions of antiquities smuggling, stressing that "the illicit trade in antiquities is included in the same category as the illicit trade in weapons, narcotics and people. It constitutes a form of organized crime that is directly linked with the mafia and money laundering. It is a crime against all of us. Not only against the States whose cultural heritage is being decimated, but also against all of humanity, because the monuments are destroyed, information is lost, the artifacts are cut off from their historical and physical environment".

He also spoke of the value of heritage, stressing that "a person without history and a cultural identity becomes poorer as an existence and substance; he is cut off from his natural and cultural environment, and is deprived of his ability to explain the phenomena of his evolution".

"An increasing number of museums are adopting strict ethical codes in the acquisition of cultural property. The international scientific community and the archaeologists, regardless of nationality, are raising their voices for the protection of the world cultural heritage and demanding that an end be put to the looting and smuggling of cultural artifacts. New, more stringent legislation is being adopted in this direction, such as recently in Switzerland and Britain. But the global public opinion, too, and the media, have been sensitized, particularly after the destruction of cultural properties in Afghanistan and Iraq," he explained.

Voulgarakis stressed "we hear this necessity, and we are giving it flesh and blood with today's Resolution".

"Greece took the initiative to introduce this Resolution, which is greatly important to the protection of cultural heritage and signals this new era. It reflects the initiatives that have been taken at international level through international conventions, resolutions and initiatives by UNESCO, and other international initiatives. It advances the cooperation among the countries, in the framework of the UN and UNESCO, in order to protect humanity's cultural heritage and its values. It ensures the advancement of the return and restitution of the cultural properties that have been illegally removed from their countries of origin, and stressed the need for their return to those countries," he said.

"In the age of globalization, the peoples must be able to preserve their historic and cultural identity and, at the same time, communicate and collaborate amongst themselves without the barriers of the past. But this cooperation and movement of cultural properties must abide by ethi

Newsletter 61

January 2007

Mark your Calendar

Lost Worlds: Athens - Ancient Supercity

Misc news

Greek to Me

Reading List