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February 9 marks International Greek Language Day—On November 12, 2025, UNESCO’s 43rd General Conference, meeting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, unanimously ratified February 9 as World Greek Language Day, giving international recognition to Greek’s unparalleled continuity and impact on world culture, science, philosophy, and the written word.
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The rationale behind the designation, drawn from the UNESCO Explanatory Note, speaks for itself: “Language is a carrier of culture, an ark of values, concepts, identity, an instrument of expression and creation, and a bridge of communication, understanding and consensus.” Among thousands of languages, the Note observes, Greek possesses “an unbroken continuity of 40 centuries of oral tradition and 35 centuries of written tradition,” making it “the longest continuously spoken and written language in Europe.”
As the Nobel laureate Giorgos Seferis declared during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1963: “The Greek language has never ceased to be spoken. It has undergone the changes that all living things experience, but there has never been a gap.”
For the Orthodox world, this observance resonates on a still deeper register. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has called the Greek language the key to entering “what is perhaps the greatest intellectual paradise of the world,” where lie “unique works that have left their mark on the course of world civilization: the Homeric epics, the Tragedies, the Platonic dialogues, the Aristotelian corpus, the New Testament, the writings of the Greek Fathers, and all the flourishing fruits of these roots.”
As His All-Holiness has emphasized, “The union of Christianity and Hellenism was a decisive turning point not only in the course of the Church and theology but also in the history of thought and civilization.”
Here in the United States, Archbishop Elpidophoros of America has emphasized “the significance of the Greek language as a cornerstone of our identity and an essential link to the roots of Greek culture,” reaffirming his unwavering commitment to education.
At the recent 35th Annual Archbishop Iakovos Leadership 100 Conference in Phoenix, the Archbishop unveiled his vision to transform Hellenic College Holy Cross into “the first Greek university in the United States,” ensuring that future generations can engage with their heritage through rigorous academic study of the language, history, and thought that have defined Hellenism for millennia.
The date itself carries a poet’s blessing. February 9 marks the anniversary of the death of Dionysios Solomos, Greece’s national poet, who passed away in 1857. The author of the Hymn to Liberty, which became the Greek national anthem, Solomos wrote in his celebrated prose work Dialogos (1824) the words that have since become a rallying cry for the Greek spirit: “Μήγαρις έχω άλλο στο νου μου πάρεξ ελευθερία και γλώσσα;” — “Have I anything else in mind but freedom and language?”
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