No formal social activities have been arranged, but at the end of each day we propose that everyone takes dinner in one of the recommended restaurants on the ‘City of Athens‘ page.

We welcome the organisation of informal social activities (music, dancing, etc.)
as they arise organically over the days of the Symposium.

ΑΧΙΟΝ ΕΣΤΙ (“Worthy it is”) …

THE. LEADING WINDS who officiate
who raise the sea like the Mother of God
who blow and the oranges light up
who whistle to the mountains and they come

Beardless novices of the storm
runners who covered the miles of sky
Hermeses with their pointed sunhats
and with the caduceus of black smoke

Maistros, Levantes, Garbis
Pounentes, Graigos, Sirocco
Tramountana, Ostria

Odysseus Elytis
(also spelled Odysseas Elytēs, Greek poet and winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature)
“Gloria”, The Axion Esti
(Translated by Jeffrey Carson and Nikos Sarris)

ΟΙ ΣΗΜΑΝΤΟΡΕΣ ΑΝΕΜΟΙ που ιερουργούνε
που σηκώνουν το πέλαγος σα Θεοτόκο
που φυσούν και ανάβουνε τα πορτοκάλια
που σφυρίζουν στα όρη κι έρχονται

Οι αγένειοι δόκιμοι της τρικυμίας
οι δρομείς που διάνυσαν τα ουράνια μίλια
οι Ερμήδες με το μυτερό σκιάδι
και του μαύρου καπνού το κηρύκειο

Ο Μαΐστρος, ο Λεβάντες, ο Γαρμπής
ο Πουνέντες, ο Γραίγος, ο Σιρόκος
η Τραμουντάνα, η Όστρια

Οδυσσέας Ελύτης
“Δοξαστικόν”, Άξιον Εστί

The Symposium will take place in the heart of ancient Athens. We will look out from our conference venue and be confronted by the ancient Tower of the Winds, the world’s first meteorological station, once topped by a weather vane that indicated the direction of the winds and decorated with a frieze that depicts the eight wind deities.

How do we understand ‘the Winds’, how might they inspire us in creating our own polyphony?

A gust of wind, a breath of air can speak… A gust of wind, a breath of air, has character, characteristics, a voice… One blast is heavy, cold, robust, impetuous… another is sweet, warm, summer-like or cool, fresh as the spring, regenerating, life-giving… Each breath of wind is born differently, moves in different ways, affects us differently… invites or repels… pleases or angers… embraces with sweetness and gaiety or violently repels, dissolves…

Winds have direction, they have power and authority… they are currents, currents and flows of air, flows directed, moving high or low, heading from somewhere, a place definite or undefined, to somewhere else… they have a destination, they have a starting point… they cover or fill an empty space, a void,  or they overflow, from a full, totally full, overfull space… Winds heat and cool, are heated and cooled… they move, have movement, are movement…

Along with calmness, quietness, moments of no-breathing, they are the breaths and the breath of the world, of the Earth, peaceful or warlike…

There is a whole weather vane (ανεμολόγιο) of voices, of trends and directions, of destinations and starting points. There is a whole polyphony of winds… spread in poly-space and poly-time… They come and they go. They usually dominate in a place, in a time, in a season and rarely, in some places, in some regions, some winds, some tendencies, one or two, may collide, clash, mix, lose each other into one-another, or meet some high mountain range, a stout, massive resistance, and discharge, be forced to surrender, give up, lose their momentum, against stone, in forests, on frozen mountain tops, in snows and rains, or over the hot sand, leaving, giving or giving up, sharing what they carry, scattering it here and there, over the lands of the Earth, obeying the flow, the flow of energy, the qualities and differences of the elements that compose and haunt life: life’s demons…