Myrsini Zorba, defeated by cancer, left last night.

She has consistently served her ideas and the field of culture from many positions: as a policy of science, as a cultural policy researcher, as a university professor, as a publisher, as director of the National Book Center but also as an MEP and Minister of Culture.

The news of her death became known through an emotional post on her Facebook page, while her husband, Antonis Liakos, also confirmed it with his post.

Her last text was shocking:

“The word that fits this short horizon of mine is non-existence. It cannot be described, because it is a place, a time.

Last week in the discussion with the doctor I understood that we are stopping the chemotherapies, they did not work, and that there are no alternatives. Therefore non-existence is that which best expresses, that most accurately articulates what is to come.

Of course, all the time, for a year, through the compression, which is constantly growing, the time when its hourglass is empty, the fear swells, which at the beginning had some cracks, some hopes, some maybe possible, and slowly the fear it occupies all existing time and is so absolute that you are no longer afraid, because there is nothing in it that moves, has a flow.

There is only what you live and which on the one hand is dark and ominous, a dystopia, on the other is real life, this every day, which you tend to, take care of.

The food, the reading, the weather outside the window, the beautiful flowers, the friends, the communications, the conversations, the interests above all, the power of ideas that never ceases to exist and that manages to radiate beyond time.

So there are two sides and life is the one that wins everyday, so this solid mass of fear stays there, frozen and solidified and allows you to live what you live. Further, looking up, non-existence is the most realistic…

It’s a bit funny, of course, no non-existence is realistic, unless you see it from the outside and I see it from very close now.”

The biography of Myrsini Zorba

Myrsini Zorba performed Minister of Culture in the SYRIZA-ANEL government (August 2018-July 2019), MEP (2000-2004) and first director of the National Book Center (1995-1999).

He was also the chairman of the board of the voluntary organization “Children’s Rights Network» from 2004 to 2016.

Born in Athens in 1949, she studied law and political science at the University of Athens (1968-1972), completed her master’s degree in Philosophy of Law at the University of Rome La Sapienza (scholarship of the Italian Government). Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “The State Policy for the Book” (Pantheon University, 1992). She taught theory and politics of culture at the University of Athens (1992-1995 and 2005-2007) and at the Hellenic Open University (2006-2012) and was director of the Syros Industrial Museum (2008-2009).

During the dictatorship he was a member of PAM, the Hellenic European Youth Movement (1970-1973). Member of the internal KKE after the Post-colonization, member of the Central Committee of the Greek Left (EAP 1987) and of the citizens’ movement “Politeia”.

In 2000-2004 he was elected member of the European Parliament and participated in the European Socialist Group. Between 2009-2015 she was Director of the political office of former Prime Minister Kostas Simitis.

She was co-editor of the publishing house Odysseus (1973), managing the Marxist and university book series and then the literary and children’s book series. In the 1970-80s he translated a large number of works by Western Marxist theorists into Greek (among them A. Gramsci, P. Togliatti, etc.) as well as the monumental History of Modern Greek Literature by Mario Vitti (Odysseus 1978).