The Hellenic Society Prometheas

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www.Prometheas.org                                                                         Οδυσσέας Ελύτης

Newsletter

February 2008

Prometheas Upcoming Events

 

 

 

 

Prometheas Events

 

On January 25, 2008, Prometheas, once again, hosted the celebration of the Greek Letters Day/The Day of the Three Hierarchs, at St. George Church in Bethesda, MD.  Dr. Eva Prionas Director of Modern Greek Language Literature and Culture Program at Stanford University was the Guest Speaker; she spoke on the “Hellenic ideals and the education of future generations in the US”.  For more information see attachment.

 

Other Upcoming Events

 

1.    Dr. Peter Bien, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Dartmouth College on his lecture: “KAZANTZAKIS’S POLITICAL REWORKING OF HOMER’S ODYSSEY” On Wednesday February 6th , 6:30PM at ICC Auditorium, Georgetown University (see attached announcement)

 

2.    The Hellenic Parliament Foundation in collaboration with the Embassy of Greece, The Hellenic Foundation for Culture and The Italian Cultural Institute in Washington, DC, present a Tribute to Maria Callas, one of the world’s best-known opera singers (see announcement)

 

3.    Wednesday, February 6, 2008, 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. The Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University and the EU Center of Excellence Washington D.C. invites you to a discussion on “2008:  A Critical Year for Cementing Peace and Stability in the Balkans” with His Excellency Alexandros P. Mallias, Ambassador of Greece to the United States and  Dr. Michael Haltzel, Moderator, Senior Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations. Venue: Conference Room 500, 1717 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, D.C.  RSVP to Gretchen Losee at transatlanticRSVP@jhu.edu (Put *February 6* in the subject line) or call 202-663-5880 for questions.

 

4.    Saturday, February 9, 2008 1:00 P.M. Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral Washington, D.C.: The Daughters of Penelope Hermione Chapter NO. 11 cordially invites you to a lecture, book sale and signing by Patty Apostolides of her new novel :The Lion and the Nurse” (see attached announcement).

 

5.    Monday, March 17th, 2008, at 7:00 pm at The Shakespeare Theatre Company, Lansburgh Theatre, 450 7th Street NW, Washington, DC  20004-2207.  Under the Auspices of the Ambassador of Greece to the United States, Mr. Alexandros Mallias and The President of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, Mr. Anthony Papadimitriou cordially invites you to a dramatic reading of selected passages from “THUCYDIDES’ HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR”. Commentary by Dr. Josiah Ober, Professor of Classics and Political Science; Constantinos Mitsotakis Chair, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University, California. Directed by David Muse, Associate Director, Shakespeare Theatre Company.

 

Misc Articles

 

On JANUARY 29 AT 8:00 P.M., PBS showed the Acropolis Restoration Project

For 25 centuries the Parthenon has been shot at, set on fire, rocked by earthquakes, looted for its sculptures, almost destroyed by explosion, and disfigured by well-meaning renovations. It has gone from temple, to church, to mosque, to munitions dump. (See a time line of its checkered history.) What could be next? How about a scientific search for the secrets of its incomparable beauty and astonishingly rapid construction? With unprecedented access, NOVA unravels the architectural and engineering mysteries of this celebrated ancient temple.

 

NOVA was granted access to the Greek government's Acropolis Restoration Project—a multi-decade, multi-million-dollar effort to rescue the Parthenon and other ancient structures on the Athenian Acropolis. The Parthenon, in particular, was in danger of collapse. Over the last 32 years, experts have disassembled, analyzed, and painstakingly repaired thousands of marble blocks, bringing to light the Parthenon's astonishing, unsuspected design features and raising questions about how exactly the ancient Greeks did it. (For more on the current restoration, see Restoring the Ruin.)

 

How did they build this magnificent temple with such incredible precision in a mere eight or nine years? How did they manage to achieve apparent perfection in a building that contains almost no straight lines or right angles? And, most baffling of all, how did they accomplish all this apparently without using the tools that a modern architect would find essential—a building plan or a blueprint?

 

Watch as NOVA takes on these mysteries with the help of some of the foremost experts on ancient Greek architecture, including the chief architect of the Acropolis Restoration Project, Manolis Korres, and scholars Barbara Barletta of the University of Florida, Mark Wilson Jones of the University of Bath, and Lothar Haselberger of the University of Pennsylvania.

 

For historical and cultural context, NOVA calls in Jeffrey Hurwit of the University of Oregon. Hurwit is an expert on the significance of the Acropolis throughout Greek history, particularly during its golden age, when the Parthenon was built. Athens was then a young democracy, victorious in the Persian wars, and enjoying the riches and power of its growing empire.

 

NOVA covers the Parthenon at the largest scale—and the smallest. Manolis Korres tells how his investigation of tool marks on the temple's marble blocks revealed the distinctive workmanship of some 200 different masons. From his study of these marks, Korres has also reconstructed a whole range of ancient stonecutting tools that he believes are superior to most of today's hand tools. Their exceptional sharpness and durability, he thinks, helps explain how the ancient Greeks erected their architectural masterpiece so quickly. (See Korres's stunning drawings detailing the journey of a marble capital from quarry to column.)

 

The Parthenon's design conceals subtleties that at first glance seem impossible given the techniques of the day. For example, the columns have a slightly bulging profile that would require a compass with a radius of nearly a mile to draw at full scale. The curve is apparently an intentional optical refinement that lends the columns a certain muscular grace. But how did the Greeks achieve it?

 

Lothar Haselberger tells NOVA how he literally saw the light while visiting an unfinished Greek temple built a century and a half after the Parthenon. When the sun shone across its walls at a grazing angle, a remarkable series of diagrams suddenly appeared, carved almost invisibly into the stone. This was the modern age's first glimpse of authentic Greek "blueprints"—construction plans for the temple's components, including its subtly curving columns. Haselberger's astonishing discovery reveals ancient Greek building secrets that are as ingenious, concise, and easy to use as anything in today's toolbox of architectural techniques.

 

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:0NAHDQUzMP4J:www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nextup.html+%22Secrets+of+the+Parthenon%22+PBS&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

 

 

 

“The Sleeping Beauty (of Mystra)”

George Leonardos

Livani’s Publications

Historical Novel

            A book full of history, written in a lively style.  A penetrating research of the political, war, spiritual, civil and human events during the last tragic years of the Byzantine Empire, Mystras being the center of it. Rich bibliography.  The last approximately 50 years of Mystras.  The myth uses Kleopa Malatesta, the wife of Theodoros B’ Palaiologos as a means to develop the events.

            Kleopa Malatesta, a young lady of rank from Rimini, Italy, marries the lord of Mystras for diplomatic reasons: The Vatican State intending to extend its power to the Byzantium and the Byzantines in order to establish close relations and hoping for help.

            Kleopa, 16 years old, particularly gifted in character, mind and appearance, contributes to the spiritual and cultural development of Mystras. During those years Plithon Gemistos, the philosopher, taught in this region and gathered the intellectual elite of that period. 

           The author refers to this shattering period of Hellenism using an elegant and distinct narration and brings us closer to the socio-historical happenings of the 1st half of the year 1400.

Source: THE HELLENIC LINK, Inc, No. 63, December 2007

 

 

 

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Article published Jan 20, 2008

 

COMMENTARY


DR. KING AND THE GREEK CLASSICS

 

January 20, 2008


By Alexandros P. Mallias –

 

This year will mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. His death on April 4, 1968, found my country in the midst of one of its darkest hours, as the one year anniversary of an oppressive military dictatorship neared.


With my fellow citizens living under military rule and deprived of the very basic freedoms, I was inspired by the people of Birmingham, Ala., of Memphis and Atlanta, who, in a most dignified way, poured into the streets, standing up for what was rightly theirs.


Across the Atlantic, the civil-rights movement reached us in the clarion voice of Martin Luther King Jr., and hope stirred in the hearts of many Greek people like myself that "We", too, "Shall Overcome."


Upon my arrival in Washington as Greece's ambassador, and influenced by what I call the current "Golden Age for the Classics" in the United States, I have gone back to the staples of my education with new appreciation — Sophocles, Plato, Homer, Heraclitus, Thucydides. And I realized that the Rev. King's speeches and homilies are fraught with references to the Greek classics.


I poured over his writings and speeches and realized his was no simple preaching. I began to sense he had a profound understanding of what we call the "classics." In his Nobel acceptance speech, he spoke of Greek literature, of Homer and the temptresses Sirens, of Orpheus — not in dry academic fashion, but as part and parcel of his understanding of the world.


As the beneficiary of a classical education, as were most young Greeks of my generation, the words of Dr. King brought to mind great orators of ancient Greece — Demosthenes, for one, who had to overcome his own particular limitations.


In his sermon "Loving Your Enemies," delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., Nov. 17, 1957, Dr. King expounded on the power and comprehensiveness of the Greek language, explaining how Greek "comes to our aid beautifully in giving us the real meaning and depth of the whole philosophy of love ... for you see the Greek language has three words for love ... eros ... a sort of aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his dialogues, a sort of yearning of the soul for the realm of the gods. Then the Greek language talks about philia... the intimate affection between personal friends. The Greek language comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape... the understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return."

 

Erudite men and women have researched the education of Dr. King, concluding that he studied the ancient Greek classics at length and drew inspiration not only from the Bible, but also from ancient Greek philosophers, playwrights and political figures.

 

Dr. King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail" of April 16, 1963, was addressed to his fellow clergymen and expounded upon his own theory of civil disobedience: "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment ... is in reality expressing the highest respect for law" brought to mind Antigone, a reluctant but inevitably brave heroine, in Sophocles' namesake play, who said: "I will not obey an unjust law, and if something happens because of it — so be it."

 
This was not wasted on classics professor Lewis Sussman of the University of Florida, who wrote extensively on this connection.


I need no further proof of the inspiration Dr. King imparted from the classics than his own words in the last speech of his life, "I've Been to the Mountaintop," which resounded around the world on April 3, 1968, just one day before his assassination in Memphis: "I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality."


Dr. King's words continue to inspire me. And what I impart from him is similar to what I imparted from the ancient Greek tradition that the "good life" is the one in which the individual partakes in the responsibility and concerns of all society.


Alexandros P. Mallias is Greece's ambassador to the United States and received the Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Award for International Service in January 2007.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20080120/COMMENTARY/931703332

 

 

 

January 19, 2008

Ancient Vase Comes Home to a Hero’s Welcome

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME — As the restless crowd applauded, and flashbulbs popped, the Euphronios krater, at the heart of a three-decade tug of war between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Italian government, received a hero’s welcome here on Friday.

When the krater, a 2,500-year-old vase, first appeared at the Met in 1972, seemingly out of nowhere, it was hailed as the acquisition of a lifetime. But the Italian government, suspecting that it had been plundered from Italian soil, soon began pressing the museum for information on its provenance.

This week the krater was finally packed up and shipped to Rome, one of 21 treasures turned over by the Met under the terms of a pathbreaking 2006 accord.

As workers whipped a white sheet off the bowl in a ceremony at the state attorney’s office, Italy’s culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, began reciting a passage from Homer’s “Iliad” illustrated on the vase’s main panel. The Lycian champion Sarpedon perishes from the wounds he has received in the Trojan war; the twin winged gods Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death) bear him home.

The event was held at the attorney’s office to underscore the persistence of the Italian lawyers who have lobbied for the return of antiquities from American museums, dealers and private collectors over the last three years.

“In these gloomy days, it gives me great pleasure to celebrate something positive,” said Italy’s attorney general, Oscar Fiumara. (The Italian news media has been feasting on grim news this week: the justice minister resigned; protests prompted the pope to cancel an appearance at Rome’s main university; and Naples is submerged in trash.)

In the last two years Italy has also struck deals with museums in Los Angeles, Boston and Princeton, N.J., and with the private collector Shelby White, a New York philanthropist who this week transferred title to 10 antiquities. Negotiations are under way with other institutions in the United States, Europe and the Far East, Mr. Rutelli said on Friday.

But in the minds of Italians, the Euphronios krater holds a special place, symbolizing the war against clandestine tomb-robbing and illicit trafficking of the nation’s cultural patrimony. So the general mood was victorious.

“The Italian state has won,” said Rocco Buttiglione, the former culture minister who initiated the talks with the Met just over two years ago and took part in the ceremony. “This is a success story.”

The vessel is to go on view on Saturday at the Quirinale, or presidential palace, where 68 other artifacts recovered from museums through similar accords are grouped in an exhibition titled “Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces.” (Nostoi is ancient Greek for homecoming.)

Fewer than 30 vases by Euphronios, one of the greatest artists of ancient Greece, are known to have survived. The krater returned by the Met dates from around 515 B.C. and is considered one of his finest achievements.

Italian archaeologists have traced most of the existing Euphronios vases to Cerveteri, known as Caere in Etruscan times, an area of steep slopes and raised tomb chambers.

Caere was also “a privileged market for red-figure production, and Euphronios in particular,” said Maria Antonietta Rizzo, an archaeologist whose research on Euphronios persuaded the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to return a rare kylix, or drinking cup, by that artist in 1999. That piece is signed by Euphronios as the potter, and by his protégé Onesimos as the painter.

Italian court records based on a state investigation say the Met krater was dug up in the Greppe Sant’Angelo area, near Cerveteri, in December 1971 by a gang of tomb robbers. After that, the records say, it passed through the hands of a convicted Italian antiquities dealer and then was sold to the Met by the American dealer Robert Hecht, who is on trial in Rome on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities. He denies the charges.

If a memoir seized by law enforcement officials during a 2001 raid on Mr. Hecht’s Paris apartment is to be believed, the krater arrived in style in New York in 1972, in its own first-class seat on a TWA flight from Zurich. (Mr. Hecht now discounts that memoir as fiction.)

It returned to Italy on Thursday in somewhat more modest circumstances: a blue box in the cargo hold labeled “Handle With Care.” A few hours after Friday’s ceremony, the krater was transported to the state television network, RAI, and paraded on an evening broadcast, with the culture minister and a news anchor sitting proudly nearby.

“Euphronios could never have imagined that one day he’d find himself featured” on the 8 o’clock news, Mr. Rutelli said on live television. “We are proud to be at the forefront of the battle to fight looted antiquities.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company


The Wall Street Journal Home Page

 

 

 

 

The Unorthodox Patriarch

By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
January 25, 2008; Page W11

Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, can be regarded as the "pope," or at least the symbol of unity, of Orthodox Christianity. The denomination's 300 million or so adherents make it the second-largest body of Christians in the world, after Roman Catholicism. The 67-year-old Bartholomew also represents one of Christianity's most ancient branches as the latest in a line of 270 archbishops of his city -- modern Istanbul -- that traces itself back to the apostle St. Andrew, brother of St. Peter, in a part of the world where the Christian faith has existed since New Testament times.

In December 2006, Bartholomew, patriarch since 1991, was thrust under the world-wide media spotlight when he celebrated the Orthodox Divine Liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI. The two met in the tiny Church of St. George in the equally tiny patriarchal compound in Istanbul, all that remains of an Eastern Christian civilization on the Bosporus so glistening and powerful that for more than 1,500 years Constantinople called itself the "new Rome."

Now Bartholomew has a forthcoming book, in English, "Encountering the Mystery: Perennial Values of the Orthodox Church" (Random House). It purports to be a primer to Orthodoxy, with short chapters on ritual, theology, icons and so forth. What it really is, perhaps inadvertently, is a telling glimpse into the mindset of a church that, venerable and spiritually appealing though it may be, is in a state of crisis. And the book reveals the jarringly secular-sounding ideological positions its leader seemingly feels compelled to take in order to cultivate the sympathy of a Western European political order that is at best indifferent to Christianity.

The Orthodox community, rooted mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe, is in "apparently irreversible demographic decline," as religious historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2006, thanks to falling birthrates, cultural secularization, turf battles between the various ethnically focused Orthodox churches, and past communist ravages. The historic Christian communities in the Islamic-dominated world -- some Orthodox -- have fared even worse, their numbers reduced as members frantically immigrate to the West under pressure from terrorism, persecution and religious discrimination. The historic fate of Christianity in Islamic-majority lands has been cultural annihilation, whether gradual over the centuries or, as in recent decades, swift.

Nowhere does the plight of Christians look so pitiful as in Turkey, nominally secular but 99% Muslim. At the turn of the 20th century, some 500,000 Orthodox Christians, mostly ethnic Greeks, lived in Constantinople, where they constituted half the city's residents, and millions more resided elsewhere in what is now Turkey. Today, Bartholomew has only about 4,000 mostly elderly fellow believers (2,000 in Istanbul) left in Turkey's 71 million-plus population. The quasi-militaristic regime of Kemal Ataturk that supplanted the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s forcibly Westernized the country's institutions but also made Islam an essential component of the Turkish national identity that it relentlessly promoted.

"Kemalist ideology regarded Christianity as Greek and thus foreign," says Greek Orthodox writer Joshua Treviño. The result was a series of official and unofficial ethnic cleansings, population transfers, massacres and pogroms in Turkey, such as the wholesale destruction of Orthodox churches in 1955. The murders of a Catholic priest in 2006 and of an Armenian Christian journalist and three evangelicals, two of whom were Turkish converts, in 2007, together with threats and assaults against other Christian clergy by ultra-nationalists and Islamic militants, indicate that such anti-Christian animus is far from dead. Furthermore, the current government refuses to allow the reopening of Turkey's sole Greek Orthodox seminary, closed in 1971, which means that there have been no replacements for Turkey's aging Orthodox priests and -- since Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a Turkish citizen -- no likely replacement for Bartholomew himself, whose death may well mean the extinction of his 2,000-year-old see.

Nonetheless, Bartholomew devotes the bulk of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his own country. High on his list of favorite topics, most with only a tangential relationship to Orthodoxy, is the environment. He has won the nickname "the Green Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the ecological gospel, largely to liberal secular audiences in the West. "Encountering the Mystery" is in large part a collection of eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our ability to live in a sustainable way but our very survival") and globalization, adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing, that today's secular progressives love to read.

Regarding globalization, Bartholomew cannot decide whether global capitalism is bad ("there are losers as well as winners") or good ("We must learn, therefore, both to think and to act in a global manner"). Plus, we must "transcend all racial competition and national rivalry," "promote a peaceful resolution of disagreements about how to live in this world," and yadda, yadda, yadda. Islam comes into play in the book only in terms of another bromide: a call for "interfaith dialogue."

On first reading, this exercise in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic, presenting a picture of a church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot speak up for his dwindling flock even as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's book presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging, culturally exhausted, post-Christian Western Europe, happy to blather on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront its own demographic crisis in the face of youthful, rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East.

On the other hand, Bartholomew's "green" crusade across Western Europe may actually represent a shrewd last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his beleaguered church. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's admission to the European Union, and his hope has been that the EU will condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths.

"The EU are secularists," says the Rev. Alexander Karloutsos, an administrator for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, based in New York. "They won't do anything out of religious reasons, but they will do it out of secular reasons if they can be persuaded that what's best for Europe is to have a Muslim state that's pro-Western in values, such as freedom of religion." The bureaucrats of Brussels may care little about Christianity, but they care deeply about global warming and multiculturalism, and on those issues Bartholomew has carved out common ground.

Orthodox Christianity is not dead yet. Its famous monastery on Mount Athos in Greece has enjoyed new growth recently, and in America some Orthodox churches are drawing converts attracted by the glorious liturgy and ancient traditions. It is unfortunate that Orthodoxy's spiritual leader feels compelled to position the Orthodox with a Western Europe that is, in fact, spiritually dead.

Ms. Allen is the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus."

 

                                                ΠΟΙΗΜΑΤΑ ΠΥΡΚΑΓΙΑΣ

 

            Με τον παραπάνω τίτλο κυκλοφόρησε η καινούρια ποιητική συλλογή του Ντίνου Σιώτη. Γιατί οι φωτιές του περασμένου καλοκαιριού που κατάστρεψαν το ένα τρίτο των δασών της ελληνικής επικράτειας, απετέλεσαν παράλληλα και  “έναυσμα” έμπνευσης για πολλούς ποιητές.

 Κατά τη διάρκεια της παραμονής μου στην πατρίδα, τον Οχτώβρη και το Νοέμβρη, παραυρέθηκα σε μια εκδήλωση απαγγελίας ποιημάτων με θέμα την καταστροφή. Η εκδήλωση έγινε στην πρωτοπορειακή έκθεση έργων τέχνης “Ορίζοντας”, στην οδό Κατεχάκη, στις 30 Οχτωβρίου, στην Αθήνα.   

            Ο εκθεσιακός χώρος, ένα παλιό διαμέρισμα τριών δωματίων απ’ όπου έχουν αφαιρεθεί οι εσωτερικές πόρτες, φιλοξενούσε έκθεση φωτογραφιών από τις πυρκαγιές, και σ’ αυτόν τον περίγυρο διάβασαν ποιήματά τους οχτώ ποιητές, υπό την συνοδεία αυλού, κιθάρας και αφρικανικού κυμβάλου. Ο χώρος είχε κατακλυστεί από κόσμο σε σημείο που δεν χώραε να πέσει βελόνι. Ένας από τους οχτώ ποιητές ήταν και ο Ντίνος Σιώτης, ο μόνος που έγραψε μια ολόκληρη συλλογή εμπνευσμένη από την τραγωδία. Έτσι, ο τίτλος της συλλογής του θα μπορούσε να αποτελέσει και τίτλο ολόκληρου του ποιητικού μέρους της εκδήλωσης όπου, εκτός από τον Σιώτη, διάβασαν ο Μήτρου, o Κερασίδης, o Α. Παγουλάτος, κ.α.

            Τα ποιήματα της συλλογής του Ντίνου αποτελούν μια καταγγελία, μιαν έκφραση οδύνης και αποτροπιασμού, αλλά και ένα ελεγείο για την αποτεφρωμένη ελληνική φύση και για το φρικτό θάνατο δεκάδων ανθρώπων και αναρίθμητων άμοιρων ζώων, κατοικίδιων και άγριων.

 

ΠΥΡΚΑΓΙΑ: “Δεν υπήρχε κανένα σχέδιο για όσα ακολούθησαν / τις λεηλασίες της φύσης τα ζωάκια έτρεχαν μισοκαμένα / οι εμπρησμοί δεν πήγαιναν για ύπνο / οι πυροσβέστες ξυπνούσαν κουρασμένοι (...)

 

Η ανθρώπινη οδύνη γίνεται ταυτόχρονα και κατηγορία και κορυφώνεται στην προσπάθεια των άμοιρων ζώων, που ξαφνικά βρίσκονται πυρπολυμένα και προσπαθούν να αποφύγουν το φρικτό θάνατο του να καούν ζωντανά. Η ποιητική εικόνα είναι τραγικά εντυπωσιακή. Ο αναγνώστης μπορεί να την μεταθέσει στην περίπτωση των πυρπολυμύνων ανθρώπων, που κι αυτοί παγιδεύτηκαν μαι κάηκαν με το ίδιο τρόπο.

            Σε ένα τέτοιο σουρρεαλιστικό σκηνικό καμένης ατμόσφαιρας, πόνου και αβεβαιότητας μπροστά στο κακό εκτυλίσσονται τα ποιήματα της συλλογής του Ντίνου Σιώτη, με αποκορύφωμα την πλήρη ερήμωση του τοπίου από ζωή και από πράσινο στο ποίημα ΠΟΥ ΠΗΓΕ Η ΦΥΣΗ; Σ’ αυτό, με άμεσα ερωτηματικούς στίχους συμβολίζονται οι απώλειες ανθρώπων, πραγμάτων, φυτών και ζώων σ’ ένα μακάβριο προσκλητήριο-ερωτηματολόγιο. Να η πρώτη στροφή:

 

“Πού πήγε ο Γρύλλος, η Περδικούλα, η Παπαδιού / πού πήγε το Καταλέτρι, το Στάσιμο, η Σέτα / πού πήγε το Διαβολίτσι, η Φολόη, η Πέτρα (...) Και το ποίημα τελειώνει με το ερωτηματικό: “Πού κοιμούνται τα φύλλα και οι νεκροί;”

 

Αλλά, όπως είπα και παραπάνω, τα ποιήματα δεν εκφράζουν μόνο τη φρίκη και την οδύνη όσων χάθηκαν μέσα στην πύρινη κόλαση, σε μιαν άλλη διάσταση αποτελούν μια έντονη καταγγελία της κρατικής ολιγωρίας και της πολιτικής ευθύνης για την έκταση του κακού.

Το βιβλίο, που είναι αφιερωμένο: “Στη μνήμη των νεκρών των πυρκαγιών, στα ζώα που χάθηκαν”, αποτελεί έκδοση της “Κοινωνίας των (δε)κάτων” και είναι εκτός εμπορίου. Μια άλλη έδοση ετοιμάζεται να κυκλοφορήσει σύντομα από την εκδοτική εταιρεία GUTENBERG. 

 

                                                                                                Ρήγας Καππάτος

 

 

Finally, we attach the “Bulletin” of the Hellenic Link No. 64, January 2008 (see attachment)