by Hellenic_Museum | Jul 11, 2022
Join Us
for an evening of fine dining, music, dancing and a spectacular auction to benefit the National Hellenic Museum
Saturday, September 10, 2022
Hilton Chicago
720 South Michigan Ave | Chicago, IL 60605
6:00 pm cocktails
7:00 pm dinner, auction, music, dancing
Special Performance by Thanos Petrelis
Black Tie Optional
We look forward to seeing you at our most important fundraising event of the year, as we celebrate the lasting and enriching Hellenic legacy.
RSVP for Tickets & Sponsorships at:
NationalHellenicMuseum.org/Gala2022
For question email [email protected]
LEARN MORE
by Hellenic_Museum | Jun 29, 2022
Join the National Hellenic Museum’s Virtual Book Club!
In October, we will be discussing The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Book Club is free to join and meets on the third Thursday of each month at 7 PM CDT via Zoom.
More about The Island of Missing Trees:
“A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times.” ―David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue
A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.
Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he’s searching for lost love.
Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited— her only connection to her family’s troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world.
A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak’s best work yet.
On the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks * A New York Times Notable Book * A Barack Obama Favorite * A National Book Award Finalist * Named a Best Book of the Year by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more.
by Hellenic_Museum | Jun 29, 2022
Join the National Hellenic Museum’s Virtual Book Club!
In September, we will be discussing Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of All the Light We Cannot See.
Book Club is free to join and meets on the third Thursday of each month at 7 PM CDT via Zoom
More about Cloud Cuckoo Land:
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, comes the instant New York Times bestseller that is a “wildly inventive, a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences” (The New York Times Book Review).
Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of recent times, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope, and a book.
In the 15th century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople. She learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds what might be the last copy of a centuries-old book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the army that will lay siege to the city. His path and Anna’s will cross.
In the present day, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno rehearses children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege.
And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.
Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders whose lives are gloriously intertwined. Doerr’s dazzling imagination transports us to worlds so dramatic and immersive that we forget, for a time, our own.
On the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks * A New York Times Notable Book * A Barack Obama Favorite * A National Book Award Finalist * Named a Best Book of the Year by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more
by Hellenic_Museum | Jun 29, 2022
Join the National Hellenic Museum’s Virtual Book Club!
In December, we will be discussing The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherril.
Book Club is free to join and meets on the third Thursday of each month at 7 PM CST via Zoom.
More about The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break:
Five thousand years out of the labyrinth, the Minotaur finds himself in the American South, living in a trailer park and working as a line cook at a steakhouse. No longer a devourer of human flesh, the Minotaur is a socially inept, lonely creature with very human needs. But over a two-week period, as his life dissolves into chaos, this broken and alienated immortal awakens to the possibility for happiness and to the capacity for love.
Steven Sherrill is a graduate of UNC Charlotte and holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The recipient of a NEA Fellowship for Fiction, he has published four novels and one book of poetry. His debut novel, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, was published in the UK and translated into eight languages. Neil Gaiman selected it as one of six audiobooks to launch “Neil Gaiman Presents” for Audible.com. A prolific painter and nascent musician, Sherrill is now a professor of English & Integrative Arts at Penn State Altoona.
by Hellenic_Museum | Jun 29, 2022
Join the National Hellenic Museum’s Virtual Book Club!
In November, we will be discussing The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton, a sweeping history of the Greeks, from the Bronze Age to today. This title was selected by members of NHM Virtual Book Club
Book Club is free to join and meets on the third Thursday of each month at 7 PM CST
More about The Greeks: A Global History:
More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek city-states, led by Athens and Sparta, laid the foundation for much of modern science, the arts, politics, and law. But the influence of the Greeks did not end with the rise and fall of this classical civilization. As historian Roderick Beaton illustrates, over three millennia Greek speakers produced a series of civilizations that were rooted in southeastern Europe but again and again ranged widely across the globe.
In The Greeks, Beaton traces this history from the Bronze Age Mycenaeans who built powerful fortresses at home and strong trade routes abroad, to the dramatic Eurasian conquests of Alexander the Great, to the pious Byzantines who sought to export Christianity worldwide, to today’s Greek diaspora, which flourishes on five continents. The product of decades of research, this is the story of the Greeks and their global impact told as never before.
