ATHENS – Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou attended on Saturday the opening ceremony of the ‘2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture’ congratulating those who worked with faith and self-sacrifice for the realization of this great cultural event.

During her greeting, Sakellaropoulou underlined that “today, Eleusis is shaping its modern identity by combining its archaeological and industrial history with the new infrastructure it is acquiring thanks to its declaration as the cultural capital of Europe for 2023”.

She also pointed out that “thirty-eight years after the establishment of the European Capital of Culture institution by Melina Merkouri, a fourth Greek city, after Athens in 1985, Thessaloniki in 1997 and Patras in 2006, welcomes the institution.”

Referring to the history of Eleusis, she recalled that it was “a holy city in antiquity, an industrial city in the twentieth century, brutally abused by the anarchic development imposed by the pressure of necessity of the modern era, Eleusis, however, maintains mysteriously fertile and poetic, the experience of a coexistence: of ancient religion with Christianity, of the idyllic Attica landscape with industrial vandalism, of post-industrial bewilderement with the search for communication and the return to humanitarian and cultural values.”