Ministry bins Palamas manuscripts
Thousands of rare manuscripts by Greece’s leading 20th-century writers and composers, along with priceless archival material, have been thrown into the rubbish by Culture Ministry officials involved in renovating a listed central Athens building. Researcher Christina Dounia, who is studying literary clubs of the 1920s and ’30s, told Kathimerini she managed to salvage a tiny fraction of the priceless material last week, by pure chance. The documents were stored in a building on 38 Mitropoleos Street, occupied until recently by nine literary and arts clubs under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture’s House of Letters and Fine Arts. Ministry officials claim the building had to be evacuated for repairs after it suffered damage in the September 1999 earthquake. The clubs say they were not given an alternative storage area. Dounia, who happened to be passing through the area last Friday, noticed workmen throwing bags of papers out of the building onto a truck underneath. Intrigued, she entered the building and found she was walking on letters by poet Costis Palamas, scores by composer Manolis Kalomiris, records, photographs and other memorabilia. Among the documents she managed to save was the correspondence of poet Napoleon Lapathiotis and club membership applications by writers such as Nikos Egonopoulos and Nikos Gavriil Pendzikis. She turned them over to the Greek Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA). According to ELIA President Manos Haritatos, such windfalls are far from unusual. Last year, a manuscript by Alexandros Papadiamandis was saved from an Exarchia trash bin, while manuscripts by C.P. Cavafy have been found in a Psyrri warehouse.
