Eighty years after his death, C.P. Cavafy has been given a new lease on life – in the streets of Athens.
Celebrating its acquisition of the Cavafy archives, the Onassis Cultural Centre has covered buses, trams, suburban trains and metro stations in Athens with lines of Cavafy poetry and stencilled portraits of the famous Alexandrian.
Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the poet’s birth, the event is symbolic of the Onassis Centre’s decision to make the contents of the Cavafy archives available to wider audiences.
The initiative “marks our stance on Cavafy’s work and on how we want the archive contents to be made public,” said Afroditi Panagiotakou, the executive director of the Centre. “As they circulate in the city on mass transportation, the verses can prove to the public that doesn’t know his work how familiar he really is, and how well he expresses the spirit of our times.”
Source: ekathimerini