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Newsletter
22
June 2003
Mark
Your Calendars
Our Hellenic Heritage and its Meaning for us young and not so young, Wilmington, Delaware, October 11, 2003 (see at the end of this document for more details) New
chair on modern Greece at Georgetown University
WASHINGTON 14/05/2003 (ANA - T. Ellis) Greece and the administration of
Georgetown University signed an agreement for the establishment of a Greek
studies chair, which will be funded by the Greek Culture Ministry to the tune of
500,000 dollars. The signing ceremony took place
at the Greek embassy here and the Greek Ambassador to Washington Mr. George
Savvaidis handed Dean Jane Dammen McAuliffe a check for 100,000 dollars, as the
first installment of the grant. The full amount of funding
necessary for the maintenance of the seat is 1.5 million dollars, thus the
outstanding one million will be collected from other sources. The chair will have the responsibility of developing a program oriented and relevant to modern Greece. Young
Michopoulos excels
We are always proud to report accomplishments of fellow
Greeks from around the world. We are even more proud when it comes to one of our
friends and fellow Prometheas’ members. George
Michopoulos, the 11-year old son of Yianni and Athina Michopoulos, is
representing the State of Virginia at a national competition of the National
History Day June 15 to 20 with his thesis on “Rights and Responsibilities of
the U.S. Involvement in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1828)”, not a
light subject at this age! [see
below the complete article from the School Press Release] George: we are very proud of you
and wish you best of luck. Το
μηλο κατω απο
τη μηλια θα
πεσει!! George Michopoulos will be representing the state of VA at
the national competition of the National History Day (NHD) (see http://www.nationalhistoryday.org
) at the University of MD College Park MD, on June 15 to 20 2003. George is an
11-year-old sixth grader at the Springfield Estates Elementary School, which is
one of Fairfax County’s gifted and talented centers at Springfield. This year’s theme was “Rights and Responsibilities”.
George participated in the “individual exhibit” category he had to conduct
research on a subject of his preference that required utilizing primary and
secondary sources and come up with a an analysis supporting his thesis. His
subject was “Rights and Responsibilities of the U.S. Involvement in the Greek
War of Independence (1821-1828)”. To
arrive at the national level competition George’s project placed first on his
own school’s competition, then at the regional competition and placed second
at the statewide competition. George’s
description of his project in his own words: “My project
focuses on the main characters, the motivation and the means of the U.S.
involvement in the Greek war of independence and tries to identify the
associated rights and responsibilities of the participants. My research showed
that private individuals (i.e. E. Everett and S. Howe) and government related
individuals (i.e. T. Jefferson, D. Webster) greatly contributed to the Greek
independence war. They believed that it was their personal and moral
responsibility to help the Greek cause because they recognized the value of what
the Greeks had offered to the western word and they exercised their rights of
free speech and assembly to talk, write and pursue fundraisers for the Greek
cause. However, the U.S. government never adopted an official policy to aid the
Greeks thus recognizing the rights of nations (in this case the Ottoman empire)
for sovereignty and self-determination and the de facto state of the political
and ethnic status in Europe. This was officially expressed through the Monroe
doctrine. An additional reason could have been a trade agreement that the U.S.
was seeking to sign with the Ottomans, and finally succeeded in 1830.” George’s “most interesting experiences” description in his own
words: “I was so excited to go to the manuscripts division of the Library of
Congress hoping to see T. Jefferson’s letters to A. Coray with my own eyes. In
one of these letters T. Jefferson established the political and cultural context
for the right of the Greeks to be independent; he also described the
nation-building experiences of the U.S.A. as a lesson of what to repeat and
avoid for the case of the new Greek nation that was about to emerge. When I went
there with my parents, I sadly discovered that I had to be 18 years old to enter
in the library! This was a great disappointment, despite the fact that my father
finally made copies of the letters I needed. Also, I would have never expected
how useful knowing Greek would turn out to be! I discovered this the hard way
when I had to translate some of my bibliographic sources that were originally
printed in Greek, into English.”
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