CELEBRATION AND IRONY: CAVAFY AND WORLD GREEK LANGUAGE DAY

The proclamation of World Greek Language Day by UNESCO in 2025 reached Australia bearing more than ceremonial significance. It arrived as an occasion freighted with self-examination. Publicly, it constituted a long overdue international recognition of the Greek language as a civilisational medium through which philosophy, science, theology, literature, and political thought have been articulated for millennia. Privately, it exposed a moment of national dissonance. Australia had initially failed to support the adoption of the Day. This omission did not pass quietly. Through sustained, lucid, and principled advocacy, Professor Anastasios Tamis brought this absence into the open. Only after considerable community publicity and activism did Australia amend its stance. The projected celebrations of World Greek Language Day this February in Melbourne, may therefore be read against this background, as a deliberate act of correction rather than an unthinking reflex of affirmation. Regardless, the Day is now ours.

The choice of 9 February as the date of commemoration lends the Day an added layer of poignancy. It marks the death of Dionysios Solomos, the national poet of Greece, a figure whose life and work complicate any simple narrative of linguistic purity or cultural rootedness. Solomos lived outside the borders of the modern Greek state, was more fluent in Italian than in Greek, signed his name in Italian, and composed Greece’s national anthem under conditions of linguistic struggle and self-translation. The Greek anthem remains singular among national anthems in being prefaced by an Italian quotation from Dante. Such symbolic implications are difficult to ignore. The Greek language is commemorated on a day associated with a poet whose relationship to that language was fractured, diasporic, and hard-won. From the outset, World Greek Language Day gestures toward complexity rather than certainty and toward inheritance shaped by displacement rather than seamless continuity.

This background matters, for it coincides in Australia with a moment of undeniable contraction. The Greek language has been retreating from daily use. Intergenerational transmission has thinned. Greek language programmes labour under dwindling enrolments. The sound of Greek has faded from streets and shopping strips once defined by its cadence. In such a climate, the invitation to celebrate the Greek language provokes unease. Celebration appears discordant when the object of celebration is visibly receding. It raises the suspicion that ritual affirmation risks standing in place of sustained practice, that commemoration might soften rather than confront decline.

Such unease is neither novel nor confined to our own circumstances. It finds a resonant articulation in the poetry of Cavafy, whose work persistently interrogates the tension between cultural memory and cultural erosion. In The Poseidonians, Cavafy evokes a Greek community of Magna Graecia that has lost its language through centuries of assimilation. All that remains is a festival: music, contests, wreaths. Toward its conclusion, fragments of Greek names are uttered, recognised by only a few, and the mood darkens as the participants recall that they were once Greeks and now inhabit another linguistic and cultural world altogether. They remember, “that they too were Greeks once, citizens of Magna Graecia,” and the recollection renders the celebration heavy with ennui.

This ennui deepens when the poem is read alongside In the Year 200 BC. Here, diasporan Greeks speak with expansive confidence bordering on hubris. They enumerate cities and territories, celebrate their adaptive governance, and exalt the Common Greek Language carried as far as Bactria and the Indians. “We the Alexandrians, the Antiochians, the Seleucians,” they proclaim, assured of “our Common Greek Language which we carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.” The tone is exultant yet the irony is severe. The speakers remain blind to the fragility of their moment, unaware that contraction, dispersal, and marginalisation lie ahead.

Read together, these poems trace a familiar arc: expansion yielding to attenuation, confidence giving way to ritualised remembrance. The parallel with Greek Australia is difficult to evade. Within living memory, Greek was transplanted across oceans and woven into the fabric of Australian urban life. Melbourne was spoken of, without hesitation, as a New Alexandria, the fate of the original city’s Greek population seldom troubling the analogy. Today, as Greek recedes from the streetscape, does the turn toward celebration risks recalling the Poseidonian festival, a gesture of memory shadowed by loss?

From this vantage, World Greek Language Day may appear less a sign of resilience than an index of vulnerability. It may seem to console without confronting the deeper currents shaping linguistic retreat: the marginalisation of language education, the pressures of monolingual public life, and the quiet internalisation of the belief that Greek belongs more securely to the past than to the present. Celebration, under such conditions, can feel untimely. Γλεντάτε γιατί χανόμαστε.

Yet with Cavafy, nothing is what it first appears. Even as he laments, the lament itself takes on an ironic inflection, edging toward the melodramatic. It is as though Cavafy is gently mocking our propensity to absolutise loss, to take our fear, our sorrow, our pride, and our nostalgia with excessive seriousness. His poetry warns against confusing anxiety with historical law. History, in Cavafy, moves in tides rather than straight lines. Languages vanish from particular places and reappear elsewhere. Greek receded from regions where it once flourished, Egypt among them, and endured improbably in others, Italy for example. This elasticity unsettles any reading of decline as extinction and invites a more measured consideration of what celebration might yet signify.

Greek has persisted less through institutional authority than through density of meaning. Across centuries, it has served as a language of philosophical inquiry, theological reflection, civic deliberation, and narrative subtlety. Terms such as logos, polis, ethos, and a host of others, carry within them entire traditions of ethical and conceptual thought that resist reduction to instrumental speech. The erosion of Greek entails more than a numerical diminution of speakers. It signals a thinning of the conceptual registers through which much of the the world has been apprehended and contested. In this sense, the celebration of World Greek Language Day may be understood as an act of intellectual guardianship rather than ethnic sentimentality.

The Australian context further complicates linear narratives of decline. Greek historically functioned as a bridge language among migrant communities of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Assyrians, Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, and others traditionally employed Greek as a lingua franca of labour, commerce, and urban coexistence prior to migration. Their linguistic relationship to Greek rarely features in communal self-description, yet it constitutes an integral strand of Australia’s migrant history.

That history persists in modest and often overlooked forms. Migrants from Iraq, Syria, and the Balkans often arrive in Australia with Greek already embedded in their linguistic repertoire, having sojourned there prior to migrating here. My local Indian fruit shop owner addresses elderly Greek customers in fluent Greek acquired prior to migration. Such speakers seldom transmit the language to their children, yet they occupy a neglected position within the Greek linguistic ecology. Their presence reveals Greek as a language of contact and exchange rather than enclosure, and they are worth acknowledging and celebrating on World Greek Language Day.

The same is true of Australians of non-Greek background who engage deeply with Greek language and culture. Musicians Wayne Simmons and Paddy Montgomery play a formative role in Melbourne’s Greek music scene and converse in fluent Modern Greek. Carol Fraser composes poetry and rebetika lyrics in Greek. These engagements are eminently generative rather than commemorative. They treat Greek as a living expressive medium shaped by practice, affinity, and imagination.

Such instances expose the limits of utilitarian arguments for language preservation, arguments that assume value must justify itself in measurable terms. Appeals to cognitive benefit or economic advantage seldom cultivate enduring attachment. Languages endure when they are experienced as irreplaceable, when their absence would leave a conceptual and emotional void of the kind Cavafy understood all too well. World Greek Language Day creates a space in which Greek may be affirmed in Australia as culturally and intellectually indispensable rather than merely advantageous.

Forms of diasporan Greek also demand reconsideration. They are frequently measured against imagined metropolitan norms and judged deficient on account of accent, borrowing, or code switching. Linguistic history suggests a different lesson. Greek has never been static. Its vitality has always depended upon adaptation. The Greek of Alexandria diverged from that of Athens, only to give rise to Koine Greek which spread throughout the Middle East. Diasporan Greek, reshaped through migration, generational shift, and even attrition, as well as the fact that we retain here dialects of Greek that are dying out in their original home, continues this long tradition of transformation and merits recognition and celebration on World Greek Language Day rather than apology, even as it recedes in the face of Satellite television from Greece.

What renders contemporary discussions of Greek language decline most disabling is the quiet conversion of description into destiny. Loss is framed as natural, organic, and therefore immune to intervention, until explanation hardens into alibi and resignation masquerades as realism. World Greek Language Day interrupts this abdication of agency. It offers no assurance of recovery, yet it refuses the foreclosure of possibility. By naming the Greek language publicly and globally, it reintroduces contingency into a discourse numbed by inevitability. Decline may be acknowledged without being treated as destiny, and trajectories may be recognised without being accepted as immutable.

In In the Year 200 BC, hubristic voices speak as though history were settled in their favour. In The Poseidonians, the later voices remember too late. Between these two poems lies the narrow space in which cultures actually abide. World Greek Language Day occupies that liminal space between boastfulness and lament, confidence and elegy. It affirms, regardless as to whether we will speak Greek merely to remember that it was once spoken, or whether we will continue to speak it while knowing, with Cavafy and Solomos, that language survives not because history guarantees it, but because people persist in using it even when certainty has vanished. Celebration, in this light, is neither denial nor consolation. It is an imperative.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 10 January 2026