Inside Harvard’s Widener Library, the Greek collection preserves centuries of cultural memory: manuscripts, liturgical texts, rare editions, photographs and recordings.
Among its treasures are an 18th-century legal manuscript, early 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 back to Alexander Negris, a fighter of 1821 who taught Greek at Harvard, and Sophocles Evangelinos Apostolides, the university’s first professor of Ancient, Medieval and Modern Greek. Apostolides bequeathed his personal library in 1888, forming the nucleus of what has become the largest modern Greek collection outside Greece, with more than 300,000 volumes.
Recent additions include “Ephemera of the Greek Economic Crisis,” with pamphlets and posters from 2008-2016. Rhea Karabelas-Lesage, curator of the collection, recently uncovered three lost issues of Neos Kosmos, the first Greek-language newspaper in North America, after a decade-long search.
“Students want to see the originals, to touch them,” she said. “It gives us hope that the book will never die.”
