2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture in collaboration with the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, and with its exclusive sponsorship, implemented the bilingual edition They Wrote About Her. An anthology dedicated to Elefsina and printed in a limited run by Menandros Publications with a sixteen-page colour insert, in which iconic foreign and Greek poets, writers and theatre people, historians, orators and philosophers, epigram writers and clerics write across the centuries about the sacred city-palimpsest, carving successive layers of memory on its body. Texts from Greek and Roman antiquity converse with those by Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe and Hegel, but also by modern pilgrims; among them Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Hauptmann, and closer to us in the 20th century, Pound, Sikelianos, Artaud, Camus, Müller, Seferis, Ritsos.
Some 200 texts by 150 authors convey the gaze of Others on Elefsina across time, and are presented, in full or as excerpts, in chronological order. A collector’s anthology-dedication, a gesture of love to the city of Elefsina, a compilation of the recorded human intellect over the centuries. An attempt to attribute to the city the ungraspable, luminous part of mythology that belongs to it.
The presentation of the anthology They Wrote About Her will take place at the Historical Library of the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation (2nd Merarchias 36 & Aktis Moutsopoulou, Piraeus; 5′ from the Dimotiko Theatro metro station) on Wednesday, May 31st at 7:00 p.m. An introduction by Kali Kyparissi, Director of the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, will be followed by an address by Nana Spyropoulou, CEO of 2023 Eleusis. Discussion panel: Dio Kagelari, Assistant Professor at the Theatre Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Michail Marmarinos, Theatre Director, General Artistic Director of 2023 Eleusis. Excerpts from the anthology will be recited by Michail Marmarinos, Martha Frintzila and Menelaos Kyparissis.
Concept – Selection of Texts: Michail Marmarinos
Research – Selection of Texts: Olia Panidou
Editor: Ioanna Romiou
Consulting Editor: Dio Kagelari
Translations: Theodoros K. Stephanopoulos, Angeliki Ghika, Chrysanthi Partsanaki, Sofia Simoni, Anna-Maria Hatzistylianou
Publisher: MENANDROS
