The first activities, 2013

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of the poet and the 80th anniversary of his death, the Cavafy Archive organized a series of events in Greece and abroad

From the exhibition of works by Greek and foreign artists at Plato’s Academy to the international conference “Cavafy in Oxford,” which took place at Oxford University, the Archive aimed to offer events of interest to a broad audience as well as to specialists, using contemporary media and in collaboration with artists.

Thodoris Prodromidis

Towards the Bank of the Future, Theo Prodromidis, 2013

2013 saw the 150th anniversary of Constantine Cavafy’s birth, and the 80th anniversary of his death. The Onassis Foundation, which had obtained the Cavafy Archive the previous year, organized a series of events that aimed to present Cavafy’s work using the media and style of our contemporary moment. For “Artistic Dialogues,” Greek and foreign artists created works inspired by Cavafy that were placed at Plato’s Academy, while Medea Electronique presented an audiovisual installation at the Onassis Cultural Centre inspired by the poem “Monotony.” A Syrian student at the Intercultural School of Athens starred in the short film “As Much as You Can” by Grigoris Rentis and Sophia Vgenopoulou, reciting Cavafy’s poem of that name. In collaboration with the Center for Education and Rehabilitation for the Blind, the Archive also published a Braille edition of poems by C. P. Cavafy.

Events from Athens and Oxford to New York, Mexico, and Chile

The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Oxford University hosted the international, interdisciplinary seminar “Cavafy in Oxford,” which brought together foreign scholars, primarily from the fields of comparative literature, classical studies, and cultural studies. The PEN American Center in collaboration with the Onassis Cultural Centre in New York also organized a theatrical event at City Hall in New York, where Orhan Pamuk, Daniel Mendelsohn, André Aciman, Edmund Keeley, Olympia Dukakis, Kathleen Turner, and others “conversed” with Cavafy’s work. In the context of the Onassis Cultural Centre’s Educational Programme, poems put to music by the professor Vassilis Lambropoulos were performed by soprano Alexandra Grava and pianist Despina Apostolou-Hölscher in Mexico City, Santiago, Chile, and at major American universities.

The series “Words and Thoughts” offered discussions of issues including the place of art in our everyday lives (using the quotations of lines by Cavafy on mass transit as its starting point), the teaching of Cavafy’s work both in and out of the classroom, and its presence on the Internet and in performance art. On one particularly special evening, in January 2014, Daniel Mendelsohn, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and translator of Cavafy’s work into English, spoke about the great Alexandrian at the Onassis Cultural Centre.