The Hellenic Society Prometheas
Newsletter # 6
November 2007
Prometheas Elected a
New Executive Board for 2007-09
On Friday, October 26, 2007,
a General Assembly meeting was held at St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Bethesda,
MD,
and a
new Executive Board for the Society was elected for the period 2007-09. Before
the elections, the Old Executive Board reported briefly on achievements during
the last two years including Prometheas' improved financial situation. It was
noted that a wide range of cultural and social events took place, the fact that the
Society continued to work closely with other organizations and that its useful
role in our community is increasingly recognized. Mr. Lefteris Karmires,
president of Prometheas, noted with pride, among the Society's achievements, its
contribution of $ 5,000 for the
recent wild fires in Greece.
In the elections for the period 2007-09 that followed, Mr. Lefteris Karmires
was unanimously re-elected president of the Society. For the Executive
Board, eight current board members (Niki Anderson, Barbara Kakaes, Basil
Economopoulos, Chris Loukaitis, George Ntanas, Spyros Pangalos, Stratos
Tavoulareas and Vicky Wilken) were re-elected; and, seven new members (Tony
Alexis, Akis Calamitsis, Elina Karmokolias, James Loizou, Polivia Parara,
Nikolas Rigopoulos, and George Saviolakis) were elected for the first time.
Mr Karmires briefly outlined some of the challenges of the Society and
promised to work closely with the Board to address them. Everyone in the General
Assembly was encouraged with the composition of the new Board and remained
confident that the Society’s goals will be surpassed. The event, attended
by about 45 people, ended with a reception in a cordial atmosphere.
Mark your Calendar
Upcoming Events Organized by Prometheas
The Hellenic Society Prometheas
Presents:
A
Night Stroll on the Street of Dreams
With
The Works of Manos Hadjidakis for the Theater
An audio-visual
presentation conceived, planned, and arranged by:
Panos
Labropoulos
With the contribution and help of:
Vassilis
Economopoulos
Sound and visual by: Christos Loukaitis
Friday,
November 2, 2007, 8:00 pm.
St.
George Greek Orthodox Church
7701 Bradley Blvd. Bethesda, MD 20817
The event aims to entertain and present the diverse talent of Hadjidakis.
The audience will have the opportunity to listen, with brief comments, to
some of Hadjidakis’ best pieces composed for the theater. The song selection
is from the completed and recorded theatrical music. In almost all cases they
are the original recordings sung by the first performer.
Manos Hadjidakis was born on October 23, 1925 in Xanthi. His father
Yiorgos was from Myrthio, Crete, and his mother Aliki from Andrianopolis.
“From my mother I inherited every puzzle, which I have been trying to solve
all my life. If it weren’t for her puzzles I wouldn’t be a poet…” He
started writing music in 1944 and had a long and well known career with musical
accomplishments in all forms of composition (popular songs, classical,
orchestral, opera, theater, movies. He directed the Athens Experimental
Orchestra (1963-66), Greek Opera (1975-77) and Orchestra of Colors (1989-93). He
was nurtured by artists and intellectuals like Seferis, Sikelianos, Tsarouhis,
Gatsos et.al. He wrote music for 52 plays for the modern theater, 14 for the
ancient drama, 9 musicals, 10 ballets and 3 operas. Hadjidakis published two
books of poems and two volumes of essays and commentaries. On June 15, 1994
Manos Hadjidakis “began his journey to the stars”.
The presentation will be in Greek, but one doesn’t need to speak Greek to enjoy the show!
Light Refreshments will be offered.
Misc News
October
28, 2007
Where Gods Yearn for Long-Lost Treasures
By
NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
NO sane architect, one can assume, would want to invite comparisons
between his building and the Parthenon. So it comes as little surprise that the
New Acropolis Museum, which stands at the foot of one of the great achievements
of human history, is a quiet work, especially by the standards of its flamboyant
Swiss-born architect, Bernard
Tschumi.
But in mastering his ego, Mr. Tschumi pulled off an impressive
accomplishment: a building that is both an enlightening meditation on the
Parthenon and a mesmerizing work in its own right. I can’t remember seeing a
design that is so eloquent about another work of architecture.
When this museum in Athens opens next year, hundreds of marble
sculptures from the old Acropolis museum alongside the Parthenon will finally
reside in a place that can properly care for them. Missing, however, will be
more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, the Elgin Marbles, so
called since they were carted off to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th
century.
Britain’s government maintains that they legally belong to the British
Museum and insists that they will never be returned. The Greeks naturally
argue that they belong in Athens.
Until now my sympathies tended to lie with the British. Most of the
world’s great museum collections have some kind of dubious deals in their
pasts. Why bother untangling thousands of years of imperialist history? Wise men
avert their eyes and move on.
But by fusing sculpture, architecture and the ancient landscape
into a forceful visual narrative, the New Acropolis Museum delivers a revelation
that trumps the tired arguments and incessant flag waving by both sides. It’s
impossible to stand in the top-floor galleries, in full view of the
Parthenon’s ravaged, sun-bleached frame, without craving the marbles’
return.
The museum’s rhetorical power may surprise people who have
followed the project over the last six years. Mr. Tschumi won the competition
with a design that seemed chaste and austere by comparison with the flamboyant
confabulations that are now common in contemporary museum design.
The museum had to respond to more than 100 lawsuits before
construction could begin, including disputes over its location and whether the
sculptures could be moved without putting them at risk. (Local preservationists
are now fighting to block plans to demolish two landmark buildings — an Art
Deco gem and a lesser neo-Classical structure — that block the sightlines from
the museum to an ancient amphitheater at the base of the Acropolis.)
But the end result is a remarkably taut and subtle building. When I
first glimpsed it on the approach from Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, a
pedestrian avenue that leads from the Plaka cafe district, it seemed to fade
into the dense grid of the city. Its facade, heavy bands of glass atop a
concrete base punctured by narrow windows, seemed calm and unobtrusive.
Yet as I drew closer, the forms grew more precarious. To preserve
the ruins of an ancient village that was discovered at the site during
construction, the entire building has been raised on huge columns. A wildly
overscale concrete canopy juts over the main entry plaza. Just above, the
museum’s top floor seems to shift slightly, its corners cantilevering over the
edge of the story below as if it is sliding off the top of the building.
This instability sets in motion a carefully paced narrative,
guiding you through centuries of Greek history and allowing you to see the
Parthenon with fresh eyes. An elliptical cutout in the plaza floor offers a view
of the archaeological ruins below. From there you head into a low, dusky lobby
and turn onto a vast ramp that leads to the main galleries.
Sunlight spills down through a concrete-and-glass grid several
stories above; the floor of the ramp is a grid with fritted glass panels that
allow additional glimpses of the subterranean ruins. As you walk upward, you
pass a series of chiseled figures on gray marble pedestals before arriving at an
Archaic limestone pediment at the top of the ramp.
The procession echoes the climb to the Parthenon, which culminates
when you pause before the stark columns of the Propylaea, or entrance. Yet only
as you turn the corner and enter the main gallery do you begin to grasp the
significance of the journey. This vast space, now empty, will soon be filled
with sculptures of gods and other mythological figures dating from the Mycenaean
period to the early fifth century B.C. A fragment of a marble pediment that
depicts Athena wrestling with giants — an example of the unrestrained,
expressive style that preceded the controlled vigor of the High Classical period
— will anchor the gallery’s far end. From there you loop around to more
escalators and stairs, leading to a mezzanine restaurant and a small gallery
that will house a balustrade from the Temple of Athens depicting the goddess
flanked by winged Nikes.
The sequence brings to mind a 1940 essay by the Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein in which he described the Acropolis as one of the world’s most
ancient films because of the way you experience it as you move through space.
“It is hard to imagine a montage sequence for an architectural ensemble more
subtly composed, shot by shot, than the one that our legs create by walking
among the buildings,” he mused.
Like Eisenstein, Mr. Tschumi aims to create a montage of visual
experiences. The roaming viewer stands in for the camera, collecting and
reassembling these images along the way. Only when you reach your destination do
they fuse into a coherent vision.
The sense of anticipation reaches its full pitch as you enter the
museum’s top-floor galleries. They echo the layout of the Parthenon itself,
with a colonnade set around a sacred inner temple chamber. The temple friezes
will be mounted in an unbroken sequence along a central core so that you will be
able to follow the narrative without interruption. The panels lost to antiquity
will be left blank; those that remain in the British Museum will be reproduced
in plaster yet covered by a diaphanous veil to make clear that they’re fakes.
The entire floor is wrapped in glass so that you can gaze at the surrounding
city.
The genius lies in how the room snaps disparate sculptural and
architectural fragments into their proper context. You first enter the south
side of the gallery, where the museum’s friezes and metopes will be seen
against the chalky backdrop of the rooftops of Athens. As you turn a corner, the
Parthenon comes into full view; the ancient temple hovers through huge windows
to your right. The eastern facade of the Parthenon and the sculptures that once
adorned it unite in your imagination, allowing you to picture the temple as it
was in Periclean Athens. Eventually you descend through a sequence of smaller
galleries, where the glories of the High Classical period gradually give way to
Roman copies of Greek antiquities. The Parthenon fades from view.
It’s a magical experience. Rather than replicating or simply
echoing the Classical past, Mr. Tschumi engages in a dialogue that reaches
across centuries.
I carried these thoughts with me as I boarded an evening flight to
London shortly after touring the museum. The next morning I walked from my hotel
to the British Museum to visit the Elgin Marbles. Inside the long, narrow Duveen
Gallery I felt an immediate twinge of pain. The marbles were stunning, but they
looked homesick.
To give visitors some sense of where they were in the Parthenon,
the curators have hung the friezes along two facing walls, with the pediments
set at each end of the gallery. Even so, you read them as individual works of
art, not as part of a composition.
A panel depicting the receding tail of one horse and the advancing
head of another with an expanse of blank stone in between is breathtaking. But
it’s hard to picture how it originally fit into the Parthenon. The lack of
context is only reinforced by Lord Elgin’s decision two centuries ago to cut
the works out of the huge blocks of stone into which they were originally
carved, a cruel act of vandalism intended to make them easier to ship.
In dismantling the ruins of one of the glories of Western
civilization, Lord Elgin robbed them of their meaning. The profound connection
of the marbles to the civilization that produced them is lost.
Mr. Tschumi’s great accomplishment is to express this truth in
architectural form. Without pomp or histrionics, his building makes the argument
for the marbles’ return.
Copyright
2007 The New York Times Company
Member
of Prometheas runs the Marathon.
One
of the youngest members of Prometheas, Eugene Pangalos, run and finished within
six hours the Marine Corps Marathon on Sunday, October 28, 2007. Following
months of persistent training, Eugene finally fulfilled his goal. His T-shirt
bore the Greek writing “NENIKIKAMEN”, which gave the necessary strength to
finish the race. His father Spyro, also a member of Prometheas, was supporting
him throughout the race by crisscrossing downtown on his bicycle and cheering
him by waving the Galanolefki. The
Greek flag was getting enthusiastic acknowledgement by other Greek and
philhellene marathon runners. Eugene’s mother Zoe Kosmidou greeted him at the
finish.
