Warsaw European Special Olympics – Multi-Medal Greek Team

The Greek Special Olympics Team brought home a total of thirty-four medals from the Warsaw European Special Olympics: eleven gold, twelve silver and eleven bronze.
Alexandros Stoupakis was the multi-winner of the event, with a total of four golden medals in weight-lifting. The athletics team performed exceptionally well with a gain of nine medals, including the fastest woman’s in the games, Niki Talamaga’s gold medal in the 100 m. event.
Next big date: the Athens 2011 Special Olympics.
(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)

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El Greco`s masterpiece in Thessaloniki

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA) “The Coronation of the Virgin,” one of the masterpieces painted by Doménicos Theotokópoulos, widely known as El Greco, is currently exhibited at the Teloglion Foundation of Art in Thessaloniki. 
The oil painting on canvas (57 x 79.3 cm), dates back to 1603-1605, the creative period of the artist. El Greco painted this masterpiece for the chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad near Todelo.
The painting was acquired by the Alexandros S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation in 2008 and is temporarily housed in the National Gallery until the completion of the “Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens.”
“The Coronation of the Virgin” will be on display at Teloglion Foundation until May, 2010.

Greece Donor to EU Neighbourhood Investment Facility

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)  The Foreign Ministry’s Special Secretary for the Development of International Programmes, Alexandros Tsiatsiamis, signed an agreement on Greece’s involvement as a donor country in the Neighbourhood Investment Facility (NIF) within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy.  The NIF is aimed at bolstering possibilities for EU funding interventions in neighbouring countries in fields such as transport, energy, the environment, and support for small and medium-sized enterprises.  European Commission: European Neighbourhood Policy – Neighbourhood Investment Facility; Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Special Secretariat for the Development of International Programmes 

The Art Collection of National Bank of Greece on Display

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)   The exhibition “Greek Artists from the National Bank Collection” opened recently at the National Art Gallery-Museum Alexandros Soutzos (www.nationalgallery.gr), and reflects the taste and mentality of a number of National Bank governors over the years. “Immediately after the bank’s founding in 1841, art played a major role: it was institutional, with the governors’ portraits, it was ideological, with the promotion of the war of independence – still recent at that time – and it was also a matter of aesthetics, “said National Gallery director Marina Lambraki-Plaka. Portraits welcome visitors, and some are originals, but there are also digital prints because it was difficult to transfer the originals from the halls of the National Bank. The collection comprises 2,500 works in total, 200 of which are on display at the Gallery. The paintings range from art by Nikiforos Lytras to Constntinos Volonakis and from Alexis Akrithakis to Costas Tsoclis. The exhibition runs until March 22, 2009.  Kathimerini daily: Artistic treasury goes on display; National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (MIET): Collections 

Karamanlis Chair at Fletcher School

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)   Alexandros Yannis, is from September 2008, the new Constantine Karamanlis Associate Professor at the Fletcher School in Boston. Professor Alexandros Yannis has extensive experience in multilateral diplomacy with the European Union and the United Nations; including working with the European Union Special Envoy to Somalia (1994-1997), the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary General in Kosovo (1999-2000) and in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva (2001).  The Constantine Karamanlis Chair in Hellenic and Southeastern European Studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy is committed to promoting Hellenic and Southeast European Studies in the US while honoring a towering figure of Greece’s recent past. The Karamanlis Chair brings academic scholars to The Fletcher School and the Tufts University community, encouraging a renewed focus on modern Greece, Southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean and the European Union and the crucial role these regions play in world politics. The Chair’s endowment provides a basis for scholars to teach the lessons of Greece and Southeastern Europe through history and culture as well as economics and politics. Karamanlis Chair @ Fletcher: Working Papers in Hellenic & European Studies

October 28, Greece commemorates its Entry into World War II

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)    The Athens Municipality’s Melina Mercouri Cultural Centre (in Greek) is hosting an exhibition tribute to the Greek resistance at the Albanian front (winter of 1940-41) during WWII. Having fought at the war front, painter and draughtsman Alexandros Alexandrakis (1913-1968) found time to document the harsh life of soldiers up on the Pindos mountains.
The exhibition comprising 149 works will run until November 16. Melina Mercouri Foundation: www.melinamercourifoundation.org.gr
                                                                 Tributes to WWII
On October 28, Greece commemorates its entry into World War II. On that day in 1940, Italy invaded Greece through Albania. Several exhibitions pay tribute to the Greek resistance, such as the one of the Tribute to the Greek Resistance, 1940-1944 that is on display until November 30 at the Memorial Leclerc – Museum Jean Moulin in Paris. Foundation of the Hellenic World: Greece and the Second World War (1940-1945)

Reading Greece

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)  Julian Evans: An aesthetic of fatality (Times Literary Supplement  25.7.2008)
The Boundless Garden. Selected short stories, Volume One. By Alexandros Papadiamandis. Edited by Denise Harvey & Lambros Kamperidis, Athens: Harvey and Co. 
“The saint of modern Greek storytelling Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851- 1911) has rarely been published in English.  This is not a simple matter for a writer many Greeks believe to be the saint of modern Greek storytelling, its Dickens or its Chekhov.
The Boundless Garden, the first of a new three-volume English edition of Papadiamandis’s stories, was initiated by Philip Sherrard in the early 1990s and was continued by his widow, Denise Harvey. It constitutes a memorial tribute to Sherrard’s lifelong efforts to restore poetry and spirituality to what he felt to be the aridity of modern existence.
The Skiathos-born Papadiamandis, wedded to rural island Greece, simultaneously pantheistic and Orthodox, widely versed in the European literary tradition, explored themes of emigration, displacement and exile, paganism and the power of evil, urban solitude, the shattering of a homogeneous past by the momentum of modernity. These things, Sherrard believed, required the restorative synthesis of poetry to make their hardship and loss bearable…”

Greeks Returning Home from Beijing 2008

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)  The 29^th Olympic Games ended on August 24 after 16 days and 17 nights of sporting celebration. Although not equivalent to the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, the Greek harvest of medals is considered well satisfying. Greek athletes won two silver medals, one in rowing (Lightweight Men’s Double Sculls) with Vassilis Polymeros and Dimitris Mougios and another one in taek won do with Alexandros Nikolaidis winning his second Olympic medal after Athens 2004. Another two bronze medals were won by Sofia Bekatorou, Sofia Papadopoulou and Virginia Kravarioti in sailing (Yngling class), while our 2004 gold medal winner Chrysopigi Devetzi reached the third place in triple jump. With regard to the doping incidents, the International Olympic Committee has commissioned a full investigation over the Greek athletes who were disqualified facing charges of illegal substances use. IOC will recourse to the Greek courts, while measures have been taken in order to enhance already existing legislation concerning doping,this time introducing harsher penalties.  Hellenic Olympic Committee: www.2hoc.gr

Competitive Greece

(GREEK NEWS AGENDA)   In a recent interview with DiplomaticTraffic.com, Greece’s ambassador to Washington, Alexandros P. Mallias, described the transformation of his country. The most fundamental change, he said, was that Greece had become an “extroverted economy.”  Within the new framework of a globalised society, Greece recognizes the importance that competitiveness and entrepreneurship possesses for its growth and the upgrading of its place in the international arena. The Greek economy can achieve even better performances, since structural reforms to further strengthen competitiveness are being pursued. A new portal (www.competitive-greece.gr) launched by the National Council for Competitiveness and Development offers information about Greece’s efforts and achievements.