KONSTANTINOS ARGYROS, GARGOYLES AND OUR FUTURE

 

Every year when I would deliver the Pontian Genocide Memorial Lecture, a boy and a girl, invariably chosen for their poise and docility, would be stationed at either side of the podium, dressed in full Pontian costume, to stand motionless throughout my address. For over an hour they would endure my droning in funereal silence, their faces fixed in expressions of exquisite suffering. I used to gauge the length of my lecture by their torment: when their eyes began to glaze and their knees to tremble, I knew it was time to close my mouth. No clock could have kept better time than the quiet desperation of those children.

The scene never failed to remind me of my own initiation into communal life. My childhood memories of Greek functions are a catalogue of pathos and heatstroke: standing in stifling halls while elders intoned patriotic platitudes; lined up in national dress at doxologies; clutching bouquets for visiting dignitaries from Greece who rarely met our gaze, but brushed past us in search of the buffet table. Afterwards, the same organisers would complain bitterly about the apathy of the νεολαία. Given the early damage done to their tarsal and phalangeal bones, it is a wonder that they had any feet left to vote with.

From these small rituals of discomfort, a peculiar pedagogy is born. The first lesson: to be a Greek youth in Australia is to suffer beatifically and in silence. The second: pride is something declared by others while you stand beside them holding a flag, preferably while clad in a foustanella. What we call participation is in fact choreography. The children, if they could give it a name, would call it captivity, and they would be right. We array them like mannequins, exquisite in form and utterly immobile, beautiful but enslaved. They become Caryatids of our self-regard, carved into the architecture of our communal vanity. Their smiles are rehearsed, their presence ornamental. They are our gargoyles, visible, still, and soulless, warding off the evil of indifference even as we manufacture it. Culture, in our hands, has become a test of endurance masquerading as belonging, a silent liturgy in praise of ourselves.

Pierre Bourdieu observed that culture lives through habit, through gestures and rhythms absorbed in the intimacy of life rather than the glare of ceremony. Where such habit fades, culture becomes theatre. Our functions have mastered this art of display: every year the same speeches, the same applause, the same photographs, all confirming that the body of Hellenism still moves, even if the soul has quietly departed. We confuse visibility with vitality. What was once lived has become something performed, and our children, cast as its silent extras, learn early that their heritage exists only for the camera, never for them.

In this theatre of heritage, power also performs. Michel Foucault would recognise in our ceremonies a machinery of discipline: bodies arranged, gestures prescribed, voices contained, all in the service of order. The child becomes the subject of what Jacques Lacan called the paternal law, spoken for and spoken over, yet never permitted to speak. Even the language of tradition is guarded, its meanings circumscribed by those who claim authority over it. Jacques Derrida might say that our proclamations of continuity conceal an unease about control. We repeat ourselves to prove that we exist. In isolating the young, we seek to affirm mastery. In defining their role, we deny their authorship. Preservation becomes possession, and the lineage we claim to defend becomes the cage in which we keep it.

Identity, however, resists preservation. Stuart Hall described it as a process of becoming, a conversation between inheritance and invention. Yet our institutions cling to the fantasy of fixity. They treat Greekness as a finished monument, polished and untouchable. The young approach it reverently, but find no door through which to enter, forced instead to linger in its portico, assuming neo-classical attitudes dictated by others. Reverence soon turns to detachment. When the living are forbidden to add their fingerprints to the marble, they will simply walk away.

Between past and present lies what Homi Bhabha called the third space, a fertile ground where cultures meet and new meanings arise. Our children inhabit this space effortlessly, moving between languages and worlds, forging a Greekness that is supple and creative. Yet our events rarely venture there. We organise them as spectacles for ourselves, not as laboratories for our children’s imagination. We deny them an essential role, as if we deliberately wish to keep them at a distance, fearful that their spontaneity might disturb our polished order. We distrust the in-between. We equate mixture with dilution, experimentation with betrayal. We forget that all culture, at its beginning, was an act of hybridity. Until our gatherings make room for play, art, and creation, we will go on mistaking performance for continuity. In defending purity we deny growth, and in denying growth we prepare extinction.

If Bhabha reveals the space our children could inhabit, Vygotsky shows how they might learn within it. The classroom of culture begins in play. Lev Vygotsky saw in the child’s imagination the seed of learning, the way the world becomes intelligible through movement, touch, and creation. Through play, meaning enters the body. When our communal life forbids play, it forbids comprehension. A child who stands for an hour at a doxology will learn endurance; a child who transforms paper and ink into the image of a saint will learn devotion. Through play, inheritance becomes experience.

Memory, too, requires imagination to survive. Marianne Hirsch’s idea of postmemory describes how descendants inherit the emotional texture of events they never lived, through images re-created in the mind. Our children cannot recall the exodus from Asia Minor or the killing fields of Pontos, yet they can feel their pulse if we invite them to imagine. Instead, we rehearse mourning in tones so formal and stifling (literally: children have fainted at interminable wreath-laying events) that empathy suffocates. The children see sorrow displayed without knowing its cause. Memory becomes performance, and emotion drains away, leaving behind the wax mask of remembrance: flawless, cold, lifeless and completely unrelatable.

Into this malaise comes singer Konstantinos Argyros. With a breathtaking act of vision and sensitivity, he donates $150,000 to the Hellenic Museum for the creation of a Children’s Gallery. In a community awash with self-congratulation, his gesture possesses the quiet audacity of insight. He sees what our committees, with their decades of meetings, fail to see: that the future of Hellenism depends upon restoring the imagination of its children. His philanthropy is a supreme act of pedagogy. Through generosity, he articulates a truth that policy has never managed to formulate; that the child’s curiosity is our only guarantee of continuity.

A Children’s Gallery may appear a modest enterprise, yet its implications are quietly revolutionary. It confirms that the Hellenic Museum is not a mausoleum where the relics of Hellenism are embalmed for occasional inspection, but a living workshop of wonder. The exhibits will cease to be mute witnesses behind glass and will instead become companions in discovery: instruments of play, objects to be touched, stories to be inhabited, riddles to be solved. History will no longer whisper from a distance; it will breathe through the senses. In that space, Hellenism will reveal itself not as an exclusive inheritance to be guarded against parvenus, but as a living language of creation, enacting what Vygotsky understood and Bourdieu only hinted at: that to learn is to participate, and that culture survives only when it is re-experienced anew.

Argyros’ munificence also exposes a wound. Why did it take a visiting artist to discern what was missing from our institutions? Why, among many of our federations and associations, is there no real space dedicated to the active participation of the young? We boast of preserving language and culture, yet where are the plans, the measurements, the evaluations? Who leads, who dreams, who is accountable? We have energy without direction, sentiment without strategy. Our committees meet; our minutes lengthen; our purpose diminishes. The most common phrase in our discourse is “keeping the culture alive,” though few seem willing to define what that life consists of.

If we listen closely, the theorists who mapped the nature of culture whisper warnings directly to us. Bourdieu would remind us that living traditions require the renewal of everyday practice. Hall would insist that identity cannot be embalmed without dying. Bhabha would point to the creative potential of our hybridity. Hirsch would plead for imagination in remembrance. Danforth would urge ritual to evolve or lose meaning. Vygotsky would call for play as the foundation of understanding. Argyros, without citing any of them, has embodied all of their insights in one luminous act. His gallery is their theory made visible.

The implications reach far beyond the museum walls. Argyros’ gesture calls for the transformation of every institution into a place where creation is valued above display. Festivals, schools, and parishes must give children room to build, to question, to interpret for themselves. Numbers and speeches no longer suffice; the true measure of success is the spark of agency in a young mind that dares to shape meaning. Continuity begins when children are trusted with the tools of making, when heritage becomes something they handle rather than admire.

Renewal demands humility. It asks us to confront how often our ceremonies serve pride instead of purpose. The time has come to trade the safety of repetition for the risk of invention. Only through that risk can our heritage regain its dignity. The Greeks of the diaspora have mastered survival; it is time they learned creation.

Every civilisation is revealed by how it treats its children. They are its conscience, its proof of sincerity. For too long we have placed them before us as decorative witnesses to our nostalgia. Argyros’ generosity restores them to their rightful place as collaborators, entrusted with the work of shaping what will follow. If we take his cue, the weary choreography of our communal life may at last move again with purpose and grace.

The next time a boy and a girl stand beside a podium, perhaps they will do so to speak. Perhaps their faces will shine with understanding, not endurance. And when that day comes, we shall have Konstantinos Argyros to thank, for reminding us that the surest way to preserve culture is to give our children the power to recreate it.

For this, Konstantine, our gratitude is profound.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

dean@tooraklaw.com.au

First published in NKEE on Saturday 8 November 2025