In the presence of the President of the Republic, Constantine Tasoulas, the solemn session of the Academy of Athens was held tonight to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its foundation.
During his address, Mr. Tassoulas, after praising the work and contribution of the Academy of Athens, stressed that “Education and knowledge that builds ethos and self-confidence is the power that conquers, secures and safeguards the future of a society” and added that “the Academy of Athens over these 100 years and certainly nowadays, through the studies and initiatives of leading academics, the Academy has made a decisive contribution to making Greek society even more aware of the scope and timelessness of the Greek spirit – the system of thought that gave substance to Western science, both positive and theoretical”. As he observed, “Our country can only become stronger in the present and future times if this awareness is spread even more everywhere, not just as a cause for self-admiration, but as a motivation for study, for action and for creativity.” In fact, he argued, “We have a responsibility to give our country and the people around us, especially the young, more opportunities than we had when we were young. That is the patriotic attitude and life choice.”
Specifically, during his address, Mr. Tasoulas said:
“I am here today to jointly commemorate the centenary of the founding of the Academy of Athens, the country’s highest intellectual institution, a powerful hub between our past and our future. Past, because the Academy of Athens has a particularity that no other institution of its kind in the world possesses: it operates in a city where the very idea of the Academy was born, in Athens, “the city of Greece’s education” as Thucydides calls it. And a future, because it draws on a tradition of great intellectual splendour, without resting on the historical depth of its title or its symbolic weight, but seeking to transform this heritage into a contemporary intellectual responsibility towards society.
There is a difference between the Greek Academy and all the other Academies of the world. The difference is that here in us an invisible thread connects the Academy of Athens with the Academy of Plato which gave its name to all the Academies of the world. It is the thread of the Greek language and Greek thought. The thought that through science and art enlightens and reveals. We therefore feel the pride, but also the responsibility that this heritage imposes.
We have a responsibility to give our country and the people around us, and especially the young people, more opportunities than we had when we were young. That is the patriotic attitude and life choice. Education and knowledge that builds morality and self-confidence is the power that conquers, secures and safeguards the future of a society. I would like to say, therefore, that the Academy of Athens, over these 100 years and certainly nowadays, through the studies and initiatives of leading academics, has made a decisive contribution to making Greek society even more aware of the scope and timelessness of the Greek spirit – the system of thought that gave substance to Western science, both positive and theoretical. Our country can only become stronger in the present and future times if this awareness spreads even more everywhere, not just as a cause for self-admiration, but as a motivation for study, for action and for creativity.
I therefore believe that this message, a message about the primacy of democracy, critical thinking and reason, is a message that travels through time without fading, starting with the first Academy, Plato’s Academy, which is just two miles from where we are now and which still resonates today in this monumental hall. The hall where the frescoes are dominated by the myth of Prometheus with fire as a symbol and metaphor for the Greek word, that is, language and knowledge.
Ladies and gentlemen,
When, at the inaugural session of the Academy on 25 March 1926 – a symbolic coupling of the intellectual renaissance with the national one – the then Minister of Education, astronomer Dimitrios Aeginitis, delivered his solemn speech, he clearly defined its mission as the “head of the country’s intellectual organization”: “To challenge, collect and disseminate discoveries, inventions and scientific researches at all. To encourage, instruct and bring out the workers. To uncover and use genius. To study and regulate the national language. To prepare, compile and publish the dictionaries of it. To investigate and reveal the nature of the country. To reward virtue and intellectual ability. To instruct and enlighten the public authorities and public opinion on all relevant matters. To enforce intellectual discipline and to direct the national intellectual energy in the stage of the sciences, letters and arts, in harmony with the national character, in accordance with the traditions and spirit of the race.”
These inspiring and dense words of Demetrios Aeginitis became a guide to the course of the Academy of Athens in the years that followed, and the Foundation an institution that, since then, has confirmed daily that knowledge needs community and an audience to be promoted. Housed in the imposing Hansen building, it offered and continues to offer us memorable publications – beyond the translation of Aristotle’s Poetics by Simos Menandros, of Plato’s Symposium by Ioannis Sykutris, and the Characters of Theophrastus by Emmanuel David, which today are digitized and freely accessible to every scholar, I will mention the most recent (2014) Useful Dictionary of Modern Greek Language edited by the linguist and academic Christoforos Charalambakis, and the valuable series (Modern Greek and Theatrical Library) of the Academy-supervised Foundation Kostas and Eleni Ouranis. Its research centres, 17 in number, covering various fields of knowledge in the humanities, social sciences and the sciences, are important; the preparation of numerous research programmes and the establishment of scholarships and prizes to encourage young scientists, researchers and creators are highly formative for the intellectual life of the country; its participation in European research infrastructures and digital applications, through which tools are developed to facilitate Greek researchers in the age of technology, are particularly promising.
There have, of course, been foggy periods, during which the Academy has been rocked by international upheavals, wars and national disasters, internal problems and internal conflicts. Things, however, are changing, and changing dynamically for the better. At the start of a second century, the modernisation of the legal framework that has governed the Foundation’s operation since the 1920s, and useful changes to its statutes, are preparing it for the new era, an era of greater outreach and contact with society. They confirm its mission as a bridge between science and society, as an institution that explains, enlightens, guides, protects against scientific illiteracy; that does not just produce knowledge, but cares about the quality of public discourse and has the capacity and prestige to act as a moral compass in a world without constants. For in this fluid, transitional era, the future of man as a bearer of meaning, responsibility and freedom is essentially at stake. Contemporary challenges are not only technical. They are existential. They invite us to reflect on what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence, what it means to be responsible in the age of the climate crisis, and what it means to be truthful in the age of misinformation. And there is no more appropriate place in which these problems could, if not be answered, at least be posed and discussed than in the space of the Academy, a space of free speech, research, synthesis, questioning and creation.
This is why I consider particularly important the initiatives announced in the speech delivered by Mr. Nikiforos Diamantouros in his inauguration ceremony as the new President of the Foundation. The organisation of conferences on critical issues of concern to Greek society, such as education, demography, climate change, the orientation of the national economy and finally artificial intelligence, where all the above-mentioned areas intersect. The communication of the Academy with the field of active politics, i.e. with the Greek Parliament, through the Memorandum of Cooperation recently signed between the two parties, and the extension of this cooperation to the field of culture. And, of course, the even closer connection between the Academy of Athens and the great modern Academies of the world, through which it seeks – and, as the recent first symposium of the International Community of Academies showed, succeeds – to contribute to a substantial interdisciplinary dialogue at a time when global challenges cross borders and scientific fields.
Today, however, marks not only the centenary of the founding of the Academy, but also thirty years since the passing of Ulysses Elytis. Our Nobel Prize-winning poet, who, in his text ‘The public and the private’, praised the need for ‘the common feeling to coincide with that of excellence’, as if to indicate the importance of the counteraction between society and the Academy towards which our highest intellectual institution is already oriented, that is to say, the only process that would contribute to the diffusion of excellence, not just as an individual excellence but as a public virtue, throughout the whole of society. The priest of language, who, in his speech to the Swedish Academy on receiving the Nobel Prize, reminded us that ‘language is an instrument of magic and a bearer of moral values’. He said at the time that “language has always projected a certain ethos over the centuries”. “And this ethos gives rise to obligations. And so, the words of the poet who honoured his heritage with the glorious phrase “My language gave me Greek” and highlighted with his work its deepest spiritual substance, meet here with the project of the Academy, as proclaimed from its very beginnings by Aeginitis: With the protection of language as a cultural asset, with the preservation of its continuity through time, with the preservation of its expressive adequacy, and with its protection, through interventions, when public use degrades it.
Ladies and Gentlemen
Today we commemorate not just two anniversaries, but two different manifestations of the same Greek spirit. We honour continuity and renewal, institutional responsibility and poetic daring. We honour, in short, the ways in which Greece survives through time: with institutions that protect language, thought and science, and with poets who give language, thought and science the ‘clarity of feeling’ (the phrase belongs to Odysseus Elytis). And as long as there are institutions, such as the Academy of Athens, that defend language and poets who revive it, institutions that study the visible world and poets who transcend it, Greece will continue to speak – and be heard.
And in the next 100 years of the Academy of Athens!”
