Category: Arts in Greece

The work of Greek sculptor Frosso Efthymiadi-Menegaki, entitled Iketides (“The Suppliants”) (1958), was presented at a high-level event held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York on February 24, 2025. The event marked the beginning of Greece’s term on the United Nations Security Council for the period 2025–2026, which started on January 1, 2025. The sculpture is on display at the Visitors’ Lobby – Poseidon area of the United Nations Headquarters and is part of the collection of the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum (cover photo). It is being presented for the first time in the United States.

Historians have been slow to recognise the key role of the Greek uprising in 1821, and the international recognition of #Greece as a sovereign, independent state nine years later, in 1830, in this process that did so much to shape the geopolitics of the European continent, and indeed of much of the world.

"The Greek #Revolution of 1821 and its Global Significance" by Roderick Beaton (Αiora Books, 2021) sets out to explain what happened during these nine years to bring about such far-reaching (and surely unanticipated) consequences, and why the full significance of these events is only now coming to be appreciated, two hundred years later.

The true significance of the events taking place around them was perhaps most accurately divined by those British poets who stand out among the philhellenic movement, Shelley and Byron. In a passage deleted by his publisher from the Preface of "Hellas", written in the autumn of 1821, that remained unpublished until 1892, Shelley wrote: “This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors [… . A ] new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants foresee and dread”. Ιndeed, as Byron foresaw, what was being achieved by the Greek revolutionaries was to create an entirely new kind of political state that in the future would be emulated throughout the continent.