Article by the director of the institue
EUSEBI AYENSA
INSTITUTO CERVANTES DE ATENAS
A beehive of culture in
the heart of Athens
Our Institute has two main objectives: the teaching of Spanish
language, which culminates with the obtaining of the DELE certificate
(Diploma de Espan~ol como Lengua Extranjera), and the organization of
cultural activities that bring the Greek public closer to more varied
aspects of the Hispanic and Hispano-American culture. An important
section of the Cervantes Institute of Athens is that of its library,
which with more than 30,000 volumes constitutes the principal library of
the Hispanic field of all Greece.
On April the 16th of 2007, our library was
nominated by Her Majesty Queen Sofi'a with the name of Juan Carlos
Onetti Library, in tribute to this great Uruguayan writer, winner of the
Cervantes Prize 1980.
In the field of the Didactics of Spanish language, our center, with near
1000 enrolled students and more than 5000 registered for the obtaining
of the DELE, is one of most active of the entire network. The increasing
demand of Spanish courses in Greece and the great amount of cultural
activities that we carried out have forced us to move, during the months
to come, to a larger building located in the Mitropo'leos street, n.23,
that will lodge all the present services of our center (library,
offices, secretary and classrooms) and will offer the necessary space,
in addition, for an exhibition hall and an audience, both of which don't
exist at the present time.
Among the more outstanding cultural activities that we have carried out
during the last months, we should emphasize the exhibition on the
foreign press correspondents in the Spanish Civil War - amidst whom
Nicos Casandsakis occupies a very exceptional place-, celebrated at the
end of the last year in Salonica and Athens, and the commemoration of
the centenary of the beginning of the excavations in the Greek colony of
Empu'ries, which we celebrated on November, last year, in collaboration
with the Heleno-american Union.
One of the future projects that we should point out is a photographic
and bibliographical exhibition on Dali' and his relation with books
(Dali' as a reader, writer and illustrator), that will be inaugurated on
coming October in the Photography Museum of Salonica and on December in
our new headquarters in Athens. Another exhibition worth of mentioning
is that of the engravings of the Majorcan painter Joan Miro', that will
be taking place in our headquarters as of February 2010 and that will
complete a great display on this brilliant artist, works of whom will be
showed parallelly in the Benaki Museum and in the cultural complex of
Tecno'polis.
Concluding, I wanted to dedicate some words to a project of which we
feel particularly proud: the collection of books by our institute, which
counts already with 16 published titles, all of them in bilingual
Greek/Spanish version and that approach different aspects of the Spanish
language, literature, history and science. It is our desire that in the
near future this series will be completed with a DVD collection hosting
audiovisual reports that will illustrate the cultural relations, in
their more varied facets, between Spain and Greece.gual Greek/Spanish
version and that approach different aspects of the Spanish language,
literature, history and science. It is our desire that in the near
future this series will be completed with a DVD collection hosting
audiovisual reports that will illustrate the cultural relations, in
their more varied facets, between Spain and Greece.
