Opening remarks by Her Excellency Alexandra Papadopoulou, Ambassador of Greece to the United States. This lecture focuses on the language, social history, and culture of the Rum Orthodox population that lived in Asia Minor and the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire. Among these were Orthodox Christians who spoke Turkish as their native language. Like...
Opening remarks by Her Excellency Alexandra Papadopoulou, Ambassador of Greece to the United States. For almost three millennia Greek literature has been preserved in a variety of different media, encompassing inscriptions on stone, papyrus rolls, medieval manuscripts, and, most recently, digital formats. It is a checkered history. Natural disasters, accidents, wars, political and religious upheavals...
Celebrated director and actor Yorgos Karamihos pays tribute to General Yannis Makriyannis, the hero of the 1821 Greek Revolution, in a show that tells the story of a nation in revolt and an individual in the process of self-formation. Adapting selected passages of Makriyannis’ Memoirs, a seminal work of Modern Greek letters, Makriyannis Unplugged renders...
A Celebration of National Poetry Month In May 1944, at the height of a new crisis facing the Greek government in exile during World War II, which he served as a high-ranking diplomat, George Seferis confided these thoughts to his Alexandrian Greek friend Timos Malanos: ‘It might surprise you if I tell you that the...
The Byzantines had long dreaded the year 1492. According to their calculations based on the Scriptures, it would bring the end of the world. In an eerie stroke of irony, they were right in their fears. Even though they were slightly off in the timing of the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the...
In this talk, Professor Panayotis League explores the legacy of the “Great Catastrophe”—the death and expulsion from Turkey of 1.5 million Greek Christians following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922—through the music and dance practices of Greek refugees and their descendants over the last one hundred years. Drawing on original ethnographic research conducted in Greece (on the island...
OPENING NIGHT OF THE LOS ANGELES GREEK FILM FESTIVAL!!! To purchase tickets, click here. Filio Baltatzi, an elderly Greek-American woman, goes to the island of Lesvos to help the refugees. She has a secret: almost a century earlier, her family lived on the island when they themselves were refugees, fleeing Smyrna after the destruction of...
From June 25-July 1, the UCLA SNF Hellenic Center staff and UCLA graduate students join colleagues from the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vamvakou, Lakonia, to work together with the team of Vamvakou Revival to organize future summer programs in Modern Greek language studies, bioagriculture, and cultural heritage management. Stay...
Community Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Burning of Smyrna Sunday, September 25, 2022 4 pm reception followed by the film screenings Free admission and mezedes (No RSVP required) Jim Gianopulos Family Theater, St. Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral 1324 S. Normandie Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90006 This moving historical saga, Smyrna, My Beloved, follows...
How does a novella written more than one hundred years ago help to illuminate pressing issues in Greece today? Karkavitsas’ Archeologist, an allegory for the contestation of antiquity’s role in Greek modernity, was published at a time when Greece’s ancient past was emerging as a modern national industry. Major excavations were tied to the establishment...
The Parthenon Marbles, commonly known as the Elgin Marbles, were removed from the ancient Acropolis of Athens in 1801 by Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Carved by the sculptor Phidias, they were eventually sold to the British government in 1817 and are housed in the British Museum. Public debate about repatriating the...
