At the beginning of December, the Polish Institute of Archaeology in Athens (PAIA) had the honor of hosting the distinguished Hellenist Prof. Maria Kalinowska (Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw), who delivered two lectures: “Konstantinos Kanaris and His Fights in Polish Romantic Poetry” in English (3 December) and “Greek Travels of Professor Zofia Abramowiczówna” in Polish (4 December). The presentations explored the role of Kanaris in the context of European pan-Hellenism and Polish independence traditions, as well as the travels and scholarly legacy of one of Poland’s most prominent Hellenists, Zofia Abramowiczówna (1906–1988), author of a four-volume Ancient Greek dictionary used by generations of Polish scholars.
The events were attended by Abramowiczówna’s descendants and distinguished Polish classical philologists and translators, including Prof. Włodzimierz Appel, Prof. Krystyna Bartol, and Prof. Jerzy Danielewicz. The meetings featured lively discussions on the role of literature in sustaining national identity, possible historical and literary traces of a meeting between Juliusz Słowacki and Kanaris, and the importance of humanistic research in Polish–Greek dialogue. The events were accompanied by extreme weather conditions—a violent storm over Athens, referred to by meteorologists as the “Byron Storm”—which was received with good humor as a romantic accent to the occasion.
