Greece opens museum in Athens to honor its poet Odysseas Elytis

The museum is located in the Plaka district in central Athens, and displays the poet’s personal items, photos, books, as well as his plastic works.

Greece inaugurated a museum in central Athens on Friday evening to honor Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996), one of its most important modern poets, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1979.

Among the objects on display in “Elytis’s House”, a two-story building located in Plaka in the historic center of the Greek capital, are his desk, his typewriter, his armchair, his photos and his books in various languages as well as numerous paintings and collages that he had created, noted AFP.

The museum was inaugurated by Culture Minister Lina Mendoni, in the presence of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

Belonging to the so-called “generation of the 1930s”, a Greek movement of intellectuals having marked literature and the arts in Greece in the 20th century, Odysseas Elytis knew “depict, against a backdrop of Greek tradition, with sensual force and clairvoyance, the struggle of modern man for freedom and creativity”the Swedish Academy said at the time.

His poems praise nature and the light that permeates the Greek islands and the Aegean Sea. Among his best-known works, theAxion you are : a hymn to “justice” and combat, set to music by the famous Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis and sung by all his compatriots.

Odysseas Elytis is the country’s second Nobel Prize after that of the poet George Seferis in 1963.