Symposium | Pandemics: An age-old thread, a challenge for the future

“Bicentennial Initiative 1821-2021” is organizing its first international interdisciplinary symposium in Greece, titled “Epidemics: A Threat Through the Ages, A Challenge for the Future”, as part of its events program celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Greek Revolution. A series of leading historians, legal experts, psychiatrists and psychologists, doctors, epidemiologists, and infectious disease specialists from Greece and around the world will be giving talks and presentations at the event.

The symposium is being organized in collaboration with the Hellenic Pasteur Institute, the National Hellenic Research Foundation, and the Kyklos Ideon think tank, with the help of King’s College London.

The Covid-19 pandemic coincided with the final phase in the preparations being made by the “Bicentennial Initiative 1821-2021” for its program of commemorative events. Faced with this challenging situation, the initiative deemed it imperative to organize a symposium that would tackle the issue as part of its programming, with the conviction that these trying times will pass, having forever marked our history.

The rationale of the “Bicentennial Initiative 1821-2021” – founded on the tenet “History as Inspiration for the Future” – always entailed bringing the past into discourse with both present problems and future potentialities. Covid-19 is one more pandemic to have crossed paths with human society throughout history. It is an issue that has touched upon, and continues to affect fundamental concerns across various timeframes – private and public standpoints on sickness and death, solidarity and humanism, the role and limits of science, research and technology, citizens’ rights and obligations, as well as healthcare systems – and, at the same time, highlights the pressing need for politicians to produce action plans to tackle pandemics, both now and in the future.

The Lambrakis Foundation – a “Bicentennial Initiative 1821-2021” partner institution – has taken on the task of adapting the symposium’s scientific findings to be shared with secondary school students. To this end, comprehensive teaching materials, accompanied by instructional guides for teachers, are to be created so that – from the start of the next school year – students can be provided with the information they need to broach the Covid-19 pandemic with a critical and probing eye.