Vardinoyiannis attends Alexandria Library meeting
Chaired by Suzanne Mubarak, the Alexandria Library’s board of directors had its annual meeting late Saturday, attended by its sole Greek member, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Marianna Vardinoyiannis, who had the opportunity to talk to Egypt’s Culture Minister Farouk Hosni and other officials. The agenda included the restoration of the Antoniadis villa and the activities of the Peace Research Institute. Mubarak made special mention of Vardinoyiannis’s initiative in setting up a Center of Hellenistic Studies at the library, sponsored by the Vardinoyiannis Foundation and the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. The library’s director Ismail Serageldin took the board members on a tour of the foundation’s new facilities, including a library for the visually impaired. They were also shown the first Egyptian film made especially for the Planetarium, titled «The Sky of Alexandria,» a hymn to ancient Greek scientists, astronomers and philosophers and their theories about space. This was followed by the Biovision 2008 conference on «New Sciences for Life,» held at the library from April 11-16, with the participation of the Nobel Prize winners for chemistry, Richard Ernst (1991), Frank Sherwood Rowland (1995) and John B. Fenn (2002), and for medicine, Torsten N. Wiesel (1981).
