Hellenic Culture Abroad - History, Literature & Music

Imam Baildi album reviewed at the Guardian (The Guardian, 12.07.09)

Feeling the force of Xenakis at the Barbican (The Sunday Times, 15.03.09)

In an interview for the Guardian, the hot new folk band Rachel Unthank and the Winterset list Savina Yannatou's album "Songs of an other" among their 2008  favorites:

"On tour in America, I saw the captivating Savina Yannatou and her band Primavera en Salonico. They sing traditional songs from Greece and Romania, but half their musicians have a jazz background. Savina's voice is quite unearthly and played live the songs sometimes sounded like magic spells.

Their Songs of an Other (ECM) remind me of that wonderful live experience." Read the entiire article here.

See aslo:

Billboard Review for "Songs of an Other" (09.09.2008)

Daniel Mendelsohn is an accomplished author, reporter, and literary critic whose translations, with commentary, of Constantine Cavafy’s Complete Works and Unfinished Poems will be published in the spring of 2009.

In his article in the New York Review of BooksMendelsohn  writes about the importance of visiting the particulars of Cavafy's life: "the fervid if declining peripheries of the cosmopolitan Greek diaspora (Alexandria: always; never Athens) and the nineteenth century, which -astoundingly, it sometimes seems- he inhabited for more than half his life. "

According to Mendelshon the best of Cavafy's work - which is as good as great poetry gets - is indeed timeless in the way we like to think that great literature can be, but "the reader who, put off by that opacity, seeks out the contemporary poems while skipping over the historical poems is missing the point of Cavafy's work -is, like so many of his characters, tragically mistaking the clouded part for the clear and brilliant whole." Read more...

See also:

The Official Website of the Cavafy Archive

Two recently published books use Herodotus's Histories as a travelling and spiritual compass when exploring old and new territories:

In Travels with Herodotus (2007), Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski does not simply follow the footsteps of Herodotus: “Sometimes he reads him in the relevant places, mostly not; Herodotus functions as a kindred and informing spirit wherever he is.” (Daily Telegraph, “An adventurer and his guardian spirit”, 10.07.2007)

In his latest latest book, The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus (2008), this 'Herodotean voyage of discovery', writer Justin Marozzi “zips around modern Turkey, Egypt, Greece and American-adminstered Iraq, on the trail of often uncanny parallels between the present and the past of his hero-subject.” (Daily Telegraph, “Review: The Man Who Invented History by Justin Marozzi”, 05.10.2008).

Andrew Clements reviews the latest release of works by the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas: "Concerto for Two Violins; Concertino for Two Pianos":

"The Concerto for Two Violins was composed at the end of the second world war, It's an extraordinarily dense and ambitious piece, with distinct neoclassical outlines but binding the two solo instruments into the constantly shifting, close-meshed orchestral textures, and providing just a glimpse of light in the central slow movement, which quotes from a Greek popular song."  Read the entire review here.

Nikos Skalkottas (born in 1904 Khalkis, Greece) is considered to be one of the greatest pioneer composers of the twentieth century. Member of the Second Viennese School, he drew his influences from both the classical repertoire and the Greek tradition, composing prolifically in a personal atonal idiom.

The discography of Nikos Skalkottas
Skalkottas at Wikipedia
Recording Nikos Skalkottas (ekathimerini.com, 21.09.2004)

Julian Evans reviews the Boundless Garden, the first of a new three-volume English edition of Papadiamandis's stories:

Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851- 1911) has rarely been published in English and The Boundless Garden seeks to mend this neglect comprehensively. The Skiathos-born Papadiamandis, wedded to rural island Greece, simultaneously pantheistic and Orthodox, widely versed in the European literary tradition, explored the themes of emigration, displacement and exile, lost innocence, paganism and the power of evil, urban solitude, the hazards of the sea, the shattering of a homogeneous past by the momentum of modernity.

The sixteen stories of the first volume of The Boundless Garden, dating from 1888 to 1893, are representative of his early work: they are stories of village life, and touch on the inevitability of shipwreck and drowning tragedies for island people, the heart-wrenching of emigration and exile and the alienation of civilization, generally in the form of drink and money; Papadiamandis's religious sense infuses the stories with a delicately offered, fully textured spiritual background. Read more...

The Codex Sinaiticus is a complete transcription of Christian scriptures in Greek, written by scribes around 350AD. Together with another work, the Codex Vaticanus, it is considered the oldest known Bible in the world.

From Thursday, 24.07.2008, high definition images of the Codex will be available online to all, as more than 100 pages of the Bible will go online at www.codex-sinaiticus.net. According to the British Library, the Codex is “a treasure beyond price”. “Within its beautifully handwritten Greek text are the earliest surviving copy of the complete New Testament.”

Since it was discovered in Egypt more than 150 years ago by a German scripture expert, pages from the Codex have found their way to London, St Petersburg and Leipzig. In 2005, the Codex Sinaiticus Project, an international collaboration, has launched, in order to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Read more...

Singer Haris Alexiou, one of Greece's greatest stars, returns to Israel fifteen years after her previous performance: in June Haris Alexiou will perform live for two nights at the Roman Amphitheater in Caesarea. Tickets are selling like wildfire and in view of this great interest shown by the Israeli audience, reporter Avirama Golan comes to Athens to interview Alexiou.

The reporter visits the famous Greek singer at her house and discusses her career, her relationship with the audience and her future plans.

Before visiting Israel, Alexiou will also appear in Barcelona and Madrid and perform a concert with the Boston Symphony. Read more…

Haris Alexiou - Homepage

GCSEs in ancient history will be introduced for the first time, following demand from pupils and teachers, it was disclosed.

The courses will include detailed study of aspects of other civilisations, including Ancient Egypt, the Minoans, Mycenae, the Persian Empire, the Hellenistic world and the Celts, said one of England's three main exam boards. The course for 14- to 16-year-olds follows the popularity of an ancient history A-level and growing demand for lessons in Latin and Greek. Read more...

Richard Stoneman is an Oxford trained classicist with a thorough knowledge of ancient Greece, its language and history. He is the author of several books on Greek history and culture and a foremost expert on Alexander the Great.

He has also published many books on modern Greece, and is the author of A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece, A Traveller's History of Athens (pictured left) and A luminous Land: Artists Discover Greece. He is a frequent visitor to Greece.

He is currently with the University of Exeter, Department of Classics and Ancient History, teaching "Alexander the Great: The Legend and Legacy."

Edmund Leroy Keeley (born February 5, 1928 in Damascus, Syria) is an author, translator, and Charles Barnwell Straut Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University. He is a noted expert on Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.

This year Professor Keeley was honoured for his work and devotion to Greek literature, as winner of the "Dido Sotiriou Cultural Prize" of the Hellenic Authors’ Society - a distinction awarded annualy to Greek or non-Greek writer whose work promotes communication between peoples and cultures through cultural diversity.

The son of an American diplomat, Keeley spent many years of his life living and working in Greece and was also married to a Greek, Mary Stathatos-Kyris. In the early 50’s, Keeley began a much promising correspondence with Giorgos Seferis, marking this way his initiation to the authentic Greek literature, which inspired Keeley for a prolific and off- honoured academic and literary career.

Turkish poetry lovers have encountered the works of Nobel laureate Giorgos Seferis, Constantine P. Cavafy and Yannis Ritsos, three of the most distinguished Greek poets of the 20th century, thanks to prominent Turkish poet Φzdemir İnce’s translations.

İnce, a Turkish poet who studied literature at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1965, made his first translation of Ritsos upon a request by poet Kemal Φzer. After this first translation, İnce met with Hercules Millas, professor of International Relations at the University of Athens, and Ioanna Kuηuradi, professor of Philosophy.

Read more...

Greek band Sigmatropic’s latest album, “Dark Outside”  was released in the UK this September with positive reviews from prestigious musical magazines such as Uncut.

Read the all the reviews from the British press here.

Read Rolling Stone’s review of Sigrmatropic’s previous album, ‘Sixteen Haiku and Other Stories’ here

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