TRIMINIAIO
President
Q U A R T E R L Y
Official Publication of the Hellenic Cultural Society of San Diego
Spring – 2014
THEIR GREATEST GIFT
VOL # 1 ISSUE 3
BY GEORGE D. KOULAXES
Dear Members,
It was great to see so many of you
in attendance at our General
Membership meeting this past
February 7, 2014.
I am pleased to announce our
official affliation with the
University of California San Diego.
Our society will now be hosted in
the Department of History at the
University and together with the
University we will continue to work
towards making UCSD one of the
leaders for the study of the Greek
world outside of Greece! This is a
very exciting time for our Society.
If you require updated information
between mailings or want to
become a member please go to our
website at www.HellenicCulture.org or to our Face Book
page at “Hellenic Cultural Society
of San Diego.”
Thank you for your continued
support,
Alexia Koulaxes Anas,
President
For more than 20,000 generations (5,000 years) our brilliantly
logical and immensely innovative Greek predecessors created so much of the
western world’s culture that in the 19th Century, Sir Henry James Sumner
Maine, an English legal historian and historical anthropologist was moved to
state, “Except for the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves on this earth
that is not Greek in its origin.”
While his statement was a personal declaration of his appreciation
for “things Greek”, Maine ’s words inspired vigorous scholarly discussion of
the subject of Greece ’s greatest gift to humankind. We realize that no
commentary of ours can be purely objective since our mission is to examine
the accomplishments and extraordinary history of the Hellenic peoples that
pointed our species toward the path of civilized behavior. So what is the
greatest Greek gift to humanity? Language! More specifically, a written
language!
Some of you just jumped up to point out that the Greeks were not
the first to develop a written language. Chronologically, that is correct, in the
same way that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but Motorola
developed the first cellular phone and Steve Jobs created the smart phones
we can’t seem to live without today. So, why is the invention of the Greek’s
visual written language any more important or exceptional than those other
written “languages” that preceded it?
The answer will quickly reveal itself and become apparent. Let’s
consider a couple of “alphabets” that preceded the groundbreaking Greek
“tweak,” if you will. The first is Egyptian hieroglyphics that surfaced in the
4th millennium B.C. Hieroglyphics were based on impressions in clay tablets
known as cuneiform which is a system of pictographs that was used in
ancient Mésopotamia. There were other glyph-oriented languages that
survived into modern times, notably Chinese, Japanese, et al. Because glyphtype languages consist of a series of pictures that represent an act or object,
anyone speaking such a language must use tonal emphasis and breathing to
connote a more precise meaning for a listener’s understanding of the
speaker’s meaning.
The second alphabet that preceded the Greek was the Phoenician
alphabet that appeared after Egyptian hieroglyphics, around the time of the
building of the great pyramids at Giza . The marked difference of the
Phoenician alphabet was that it was made up of letters, as opposed to pictoglyphs to record trade transactions their merchant’s made while dealing with
other cultures. But the Phoenician alphabet died out as a result of something
much better. That much better something was the Greek “tweak” to the
Phoenician alphabet.
The studious Greeks discovered that the Phoenician alphabet was
missing some important elements related to the spoken word. Pronouncing a
simple word properly, using the Phoenician alphabet alone was almost
impossible because the Phoenician alphabet consisted only of consonants. It
contained NO vowels! Pick any English word today, remove all the vowels
and try to pronounce that word. So the Greeks invented vowels and
diphthongs and inserted them into the Phoenician alphabet and up popped the
Greek alphabet! (continued on Page 3)
MEET UCSD GRADUATE STUDENT
LYONIDAS MYLONAKIS
My first exposure to stories of Greek piracy began when I was eight years old. I went with my family to my dad’s hometown
of Kissamos, Crete. While at the coast, he pointed to a nearby island – Gramvousa. He told me of how there was a castle built there by
the Venetians, conquered and abandoned by the Ottomans, and inhabited by Greek rebels-turned-pirates. These pirates grew so
wealthy that they burned cinnamon as firewood. Their fortune ended when the British attacked, dyeing the sea red with blood. Much
of my life I was incredulous towards this tale, accepting it, but not in full. I was pleasantly surprised when last year while researching I
stumbled across British correspondence fretting over how to deal with these same pirates.
Next year I will travel to Greece to research the impact of nineteenth-century Aegean piracy on the emerging Greek state, the
Ottoman Empire, and local national identities. My research has two main goals: to draw the stage lights of Mediterranean piracy away
from Malta and the Barbary Coast, where corsair-states met their end by British and French colonization, and to refocus that attention
to the more anarchic form of piracy that carried on after 1830. I explore what social conditions continued to produce pirates and what
impact piracy had on both the states and the local communities of the region. In my research on the early nineteenth century Aegean, I
found evidence suggesting that in the decades leading up to the Greek Revolution of 1821, the various religious communities in the
Ottoman Empire ceased closely coordinating efforts to ransom captives and instead took a sectarian approach, breaking with the
tradition of interfaith cooperation. This proto-national division of communal resources was a harbinger of future nationalist-sectarian
struggle in the diverse coastal communities of the Aegean.
I pride myself in bridging the Europe and Middle East field groups in UCSD’s department. Having spent much time in both
Greece and Turkey, I realize the importance of achieving literacy in both languages to mend the tear in their historical narratives.
Combined with the Arabic I have studied, my knowledge of Turkish enables me to understand documents written in Ottoman Turkish,
the main language of non-ecclesiastic administration in the Ottoman Empire, the Greek provinces of which mostly remained Ottoman
until the 1912 Balkan Wars, well past Greece’s 1832 independence. This is an important linguistic skill which most Modern Greek
historians lack both because there is a tendency to disconnect Modern Greek history from its Ottoman past and because of the
difficulty of the language. This means that in local Greek archives there is a treasure trove of unread historical documents written in
Ottoman Turkish. My literacy in both Greek and Turkish means that I will be able to make the most of these archives.
EVENTS
SAVE THE DATE!
UCSD Modern Greek Chair
Presents
Greek Independence Day
5th Annual Celebration
March 25th
at the
Faculty Club at UCSD
SPECIAL CONCERT!
Evening with “Pavlo”
Special Event limited tickets only!
(In conjunction with the Grossmont Community
Concert Association)
TUESDAY, APRIL 15, 2014
7:30 PM
AT THE
JOAN B. KROC THEATER
6611 UNIVERSITY AVE.,
SAN DIEGO
(Time to be announced)
The UCSD Byzantine Chair
Presents
A Burke Lecture by Peter Brown
of Princeton University
on
Thursday, April 24, 2014,
at 7:30 p.m.
in the MultiPurpose Room
at the
Student Services Center, UCSD
and
The Second Annual
Vassiliadis
Byzantine History Lecture
“The Gospel of Judas: Gnostic Truth and
Apostolic Error in Early Christianity.”
Presented by
David Brakke, The Joe Engle Chair
at Ohio State University.
on
,
May 8 2014 at 4:00 p.m.
(location to be announced)
Important information!
** Please Note - the Greek Independence
Day Celebration has been CANCELLED
by the organizers in San Francisco for the
weekend of April 25-27, 2014.
Dubbed “Greek God of the Guitar,” Pavlo is a well known
composer, guitarist and singer with a unique style and
Mediterranean flavor. He has six acclaimed albums and a Juno
Award for 2004 World Artist of the Year.
Joined by a trio of musicians on Greek bouzouki, bass and
percussion, Pavlo will capture the audience and is truly a world
artist, audiences everywhere will be on their feet cheering for an
encore.
Ticket prices- $20.00 for Society Members
$25.00 for non-members
For Reservations contact Christine Cremidan at
(619) 588-7844.
Article continued from cover page…THEIR GREATEST GIFT
All a result of the Greek “tweak”! Okay, it was clearly a smart tweak. But does
that make it the most important contribution to the civilized world?
Yes, it does! Because by virtue of their tweak the Greeks were able to see the
spoken word in writing, just as it had been spoken, and for the first time, turning it into the
written (visual) word. Suddenly, anyone who knew Greek could read exactly what
someone else had said or done. The world was now able to RECORD HISTORY! Is it
any wonder the Greek language became the prime tongue of the educated world? The
scholars of the Christian era wrote and spoke Greek in their Psalms, Gospels and Epistles
to be best understood. Greek would become the basis of all western languages that
followed it. It also became the basis of most of the words in all European languages. If
you speak any western language today, you have knowledge of the Greek language.
Thereafter were created the great literary works of Homer, Aesop, Herodotus,
Euripides, Sappho and Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and all recorded myths, stories, and
the Judaic Old Testament and Christian New Testament; plus every book play, movie and
email, twitter, facebook page, etc. written/composed from that time to the present day,
including everything we read, hear or see today.(including what we get from TV and the
Internet)!
British scholars with knowledge of Greek will openly admit that English is a
very poor substitute for Greek, a language that can more precisely and most eloquently
describe what a person is trying to convey or communicate. So, there it is! The greatest
discovery of the human race came from some old Greeks who believed what they had to
say was important enough to be written down.
We are disappointed but please know we are
working on other trips for our Society Members
to enjoy.
Copyright 2013 – All Rights Reserved
SPRING, 2014
VOL 1 ISSUE 3
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TRIMINIAIO
Q U A R T E R L Y
Official Publication of the Hellenic Cultural Society of San Diego
At our General Meeting on February 7, 2014 the members enjoyed
an interesting presentation given by author A.K. Patch about his
travels and latest book “Passage At Delphi.” We thank Mr. Patch
for his enlightening presentation!
SAVE THE DATE
EVENING CONCERT WITH
“PAVLO”
TUESDAY, APRIL 15, 2014
7:30 PM
JOAN B. KROC THEATER
6611 UNIVERSITY AVE. SAN DIEGO
(See inside newsletter for details)
Photos courtesy of Angie Georggin, Board Member