Cultural capital of Europe, Elefsina: The greeting from the President of the Republic

Greeting at the opening ceremony of the institution “2023 Elefsis – Cultural Capital of Europe” addressed the President of the Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou.

In more detail he said:

“Thirty-eight years after the creation of the European Capital of Culture institution by Melina Merkouri, a fourth Greek city, after Athens in 1985, Thessaloniki in 1997 and Patras in 2006, welcomes the institution. A sacred city in antiquity, an industrial one in the twentieth century, brutally abused by the anarchic development imposed by the pressure of necessity but also by the anti-spirituality of the modern age, Eleusis maintains, however, enigmatically fertile and poetic, the experience of a coexistence: of of ancient religion with Christianity, of the idyllic Attic landscape with industrial vandalism, of post-industrial confusion with the search for communication and the return to humanitarian and cultural values. After all, as the American writer and lover of the Greek landscape Henry Miller noted in “The Colossus of Maroussios”, “In reality, Eleusis is intact. The old debris, the scattering, the crumbling, the dust is us. Eleusis lives with an eternal life, among a world that is in the agony of the psycho fighter”.

I am tempted to connect the statutory myth of the city, the abduction of Persephone, with the image of Eleusis as handed down to us by the twentieth century, but also with its perspectives in the century we are passing through: the violence that Hades inflicted on the face of the daughter of the goddess Demeter is equivalent to the rape of the natural landscape; the symbolic core of the myth, death and rebirth, is brought into the present as a literal emergence of new life through the decay and desolation of past decades. Today, Eleusis shapes its modern identity by combining its archaeological and industrial history with the new infrastructure it acquires thanks to its declaration as the cultural capital of Europe for 2023. In its sacred soil, in its rich cultural subsoil, the seed of its of modern artistic creation, reminding us of the famous verse from the Hoiphorus of Aeschylus, the Eleusinian tragedian: “small-born, great-bottomed sperm”. And as this seed is not only small, I firmly believe that the tree of culture that will blossom in the city will bear rich fruit for years to come. Leafy, full of juices, it will spread its branches uniting contemporary European artistic ventures and highlight, throughout the year, the meaning of cultural encounters, the free exchange of ideas, knowledge and creation, the productive interaction between cultures and the feeling of belonging to a wider homeland, Europe.

I wholeheartedly congratulate those who worked with faith and self-sacrifice for the realization of the great cultural event that we are inaugurating today.”

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