Ioanna Romiou (ed.), They Wrote About Her, Concept – Selection of Texts: Michail Marmarinos, Research- Selection of Texts: Olia Panidou, Consulting Editor: Dio Kagelari, Translations: Theodoros K. Stephanopoulos, Angeliki Ghika, Chrysanthi Partsanaki, Sofia Simoni, Anna-Maria Hatzistylianou, Menandros, Athens 2023.
2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture in collaboration with the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, and with its exclusive sponsorship, implemented the bilingual edition They Wrote About Her. An anthology dedicated to Elefsina and printed in a limited run by Menandros Publications with a sixteen-page colour insert, in which iconic foreign and Greek poets, writers and theatre people, historians, orators and philosophers, epigram writers and clerics write across the centuries about the sacred city-palimpsest, carving successive layers of memoryon its body. Texts from Greek and Roman antiquity converse with thoseby Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe and Hegel, but also by modern pilgrims; among them Flaubert, Virginia Woolf, Hauptmann, and closer to us in the 20th century, Pound, Sikelianos, Artaud, Camus, Müller, Seferis, Ritsos.
Some 200 texts by 150 authors convey the gaze of Others on Elefsina across time, and are presented, in full or as excerpts, in chronological order. A collector’s anthology-dedication, a gesture of love to the city of Elefsina, a compilationof the recorded human intellect over the centuries. An attempt to attribute to the city the ungraspable, luminouspartof mythology that belongs to it.