Michael Moschos's introductory remarks for the 2024 award ceremony

Your Excellency, Honourable Ministers and Public Servants, Eminent professors, honoured guests, dear Friends, 

We are very happy indeed to welcome you to this year’s award and particularly happy to welcome professor Edith Hall, winner of the International Hellenic Prize in its 28th consecutive year of grace.

In this introductory note it would be remiss of me not to mention that Edith Hall has been shortlisted no fewer than 7 times for our IHP, first in 2008 and last in 2022. It is true of course that this prize is never awarded to the same person for a second time – the list of winners on the last page of your brochure readily confirms this. But no other author, historian, scientist has ever been shortlisted more than twice in the prize’s 30-year history. Edith’s books are a joy to read, a joy and an education for the general reader, a thought-provoking commentary on modern history and particularly on contemporary events. The history of ancient Athens, pre-classical, classical and especially post-classical including the sacks of Mytilene, Miletus and Milos, as well as the disastrous expeditions to Sicily, can serve as an indispensable manual to the intimate relationship between history and politics. As we all know, ladies & gentlemen, human nature does not change.

Edith Hall will speak to you in a few minutes and I must make haste. Let me bring to your attention, then, that as you may have noticed this is the first year that the London Hellenic Prize has changed it name to the INTERNATIONAL  Hellenic Prize as it has intended to do for the past few years and as its Committee has recommended for a long time. Why so? We receive anywhere between 150 and 200 submissions every year from authors and publishers in the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, even China and Hong-Kong. Our audience is the English-speaking world throughout the planet. And we are very happy that our winners and their books on Hellenic history and culture enjoy universal appeal [ and sales!] for many years after their first publication. We read this as an indicator of the validity and scope of Hellenism world-wide – with a courteous bow to the international medium of the English language (yes, your Excellency!).

If an accolade should be addressed for this 30-year consistent progress, it must be addressed to our adjudicating committee, with eminent Hellenists Robin Lane Fox and Paul Cartledge as its two most senior members and Dr Nick Lowe its current chairman. The full committee is listed on page 3 of your brochure and I suggest we kindly give them a show of thanks since most of them have been unable to travel and join us this evening.

The International HP welcomes its cooperation and partnership with CYA, now completing its first year and looking forward to many years to come. The established goals of both institutions have always been to promote Hellenic history, culture, literature and art to a worldwide audience and to foster cross-cultural understanding and creative achievement. These are the goals of international Hellenism, a cultural presence of universal appeal for the past 5,000 years: whether the civilized world of Minoan Crete exchanged its language, ethics and trade with Egypt or the Levant; whether the Cyclades and later Argos, Athens and Sparta gave their way to the Macedonians and they in turn to the Hellenism of Alexandria, its scholars, inventors and authors – I certainly will not go on to the Byzantines, the early Renaissance of Padua and Florence, to the French Enlightenment and the Athenian democratic principles that shaped modern European nations. It is indeed a very long story… But a very real one and a very Hellenic story. It is what you might call the universal “soft-power” that Greece is entitled to -- and which its Ministry of Culture has employed sparingly and quite unimaginatively to date.

Let me offer here just two prominent examples: almost every archaeologist and many historians in Turkey feel utterly frustrated by the fact that their digging and researching unearths Hellenic art, artifacts and language everywhere, every time --  and yet being unable to proclaim its Hellenism within their Ottoman traditional framework and to freely join world science in their fields. We must find a way to speak truth to their indigenous power, to stop just calling them “friends” [for friends and neighbours they are and will always remain!]  and find a way to work together in history and culture toward a mutual goal! Whether we like it or not, we share time and space, we share the aesthetics and the language of beauty.   

Second example: the Parthenon marbles are a long, complicated and very political story. They have been standing over our city for 2500 years. When Melina came to London in 1983 she let out a cry of overwhelming emotion -- which cry vastly overshadowed her debate at the time with the Director of the British Museum and later at the Oxford Union. Melina did not quarrel, she did not negotiate. She spoke from the heart and expressed her nation’s heartache. That is all you need, dear Ministry of Culture:  the true sentiment of undeniable historical facts. Stop measuring the consequences, stop shielding yourselves with sophisticated arguments. Perhaps Stephen Fry is your best spokesman. Cry out – and let the reverberations echo world-wide.  No one anywhere in the world doubts that the Parthenon marbles belong to the Acropolis.

We are the International Hellenic Prize, we are part and parcel of Hellenic “soft power”. 

Michael Moschos