The Richelieu Amphitheater of the historic Sorbonne University was packed on the evening of Tuesday, January 11, for the event organized on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution by the Hellenic Foundation for Culture in Paris, in collaboration with the Department of Greek of the Sorbonne University.
The event was attended by Jean-Luc Martinez, Honorary President-Director of the Louvre Museum and Ambassador of France for International Cooperation in the Field of Cultural Heritage, and George Archimandrite, author, creator of radio documentaries and Ambassador of Culture to the discussed the Greek-French relations in the 19th century, while the famous French actress Fanny Ardant recited Victor Hugo poems about Greece, such as The Greek, To the Canary, as well as extensive excerpts from the Free Besieged by Dionysios Solomos.
The French translations of the texts recited by Fanny Ardant come from publications made in Greece at the initiative of the French Institute: A. Robert Levesque, Solomos, Collection de l’Institut Français d’Athènes, Icaros, 1945 and B. Victor Hugo and Greece / Victor Hugo et la Grèce, Librairie Kauffmann Publications / Institut Français d’Athènes, 2002.
The event was greeted with a recorded message in French by the President of the Republic Mrs. Katerina Sakellaropoulou: Not only because the ideas of the Greek Revolution were hatched, nurtured and strengthened by the same sources of the Enlightenment that gave the French Revolution of 1789, not only for the active mobilization of the philhellenic circles of France, at the instigation of the Greeks of Paris led by Adam Korai but also for the multitude of works, poetic, visual, musical, which were inspired by the just struggle of a small people against a mighty empire and commemorated it with such intense passion and artistic perfection.
France – “sponsor of the peaceful freedom of the peoples”, as Manto Mavrogenous allegedly wrote in the Letter to the French ladies with whom he asked for their help – has been a beacon of freedom and democracy for the Greek fighters and remains a friendly country with which we share common values and visions for the future. “
A written greeting was sent by the President of the Hellenic Foundation for Culture, Mr. Nikos Koukis, to whom he stressed: Holy Alliance. The center of the Philhellenic movement is France, its artists and its active citizens. “Since then, unbreakable ties have united the French and the Greeks, and Philhellenism is constantly being fed back to great intellectuals and scientists, such as Jean-Luc Martinez, and artists such as Fanny Ardant.”
The Director of the National Gallery, Marina Lambraki Plaka, who participated in the evening with a recorded intervention, referred, among other things, to “artistic philhellenism with Delacroix, literary philhellenism, the philhellenism of all those who came to our country to fight.” of the Greek fighters “, emphasizing that” the Greeks never forgot the contribution of France in the liberation of Greece “.
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