Manuscripts, music, memory: Harvard’s Greek collection shines

Inside Harvard’s Widener Library, the Greek postulation preserves centuries of taste memory: manuscripts, liturgical texts, uncommon editions, photographs and recordings.

Among its treasures are an 18th-century ineligible manuscript, aboriginal editions of George Seferis and Constantine Cavafy, and the archive of lyricist Nikos Gatsos, including drafts of “Amorgos” and correspondence with Odysseas Elytis.

The collection’s origins trace backmost to Alexander Negris, a combatant of 1821 who taught Greek astatine Harvard, and Sophocles Evangelinos Apostolides, the university’s archetypal prof of Ancient, Medieval and Modern Greek. Apostolides bequeathed his idiosyncratic room successful 1888, forming the nucleus of what has go the largest modern Greek postulation extracurricular Greece, with much than 300,000 volumes.

Recent additions see “Ephemera of the Greek Economic Crisis,” with pamphlets and posters from 2008-2016. Rhea Karabelas-Lesage, curator of the collection, precocious uncovered three mislaid issues of Neos Kosmos, the archetypal Greek-language paper successful North America, aft a decade-long search.

“Students want to spot the originals, to touch them,” she said. “It gives us anticipation that the publication will ne'er die.”