Major Cultural Foundations

EU – Creative Europe, Nat'l Endow Arts (US)British CouncilInstitut françaisGoethe instituteOnassis Foundation


 The White House Retweeted

What a line-up tonight @WhiteHouse to celebrate the arts! Tune in at 7:20pm ET:  #arts4US #PBSipwh #arts4us



13/10 @IFAgr Atelier théâtre en français (séance gratuite) - Εργαστήριο γαλλικού θεάτρου Δωρεάν δοκιμαστικό μάθημα …




Being Cosmopolitan and the "global soul"


Excerpt from Onassis Foundation US page

Why “World Citizens”


By Paul Holdengraber

"As a teenager I was fascinated by the Vienna of my parents’s childhood, a city in which art, music, and literature mattered and where, as Stefan Zweig wrote, “every citizen became supranational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world”. "


"Although that Vienna was swept away, it leaves on as an ideal or aspiration in cities across the world, where different cultures intersect and are thereby enriched. Where does cosmopolitanism stand today? How has the concept of world citizenship changed since its early elaboration in ancient Greece?"

(Related Tweet)

I am not an Athenian or a Greek but a citizen of the world:Diogenes 4th c. BC.What has changed since? #WorldCitizens 



"I can think of no better group to unpack these questions than Antony Appiah, Liz Diller, Pico Iyer, Yorgos Loukos, Susan Meiselas, and Orhan Pamuk, who have explored in their medium what is means to be grounded, or not, in a specific place."


"Their encounter is sure to yield enlightening results and to leave the audience with a deepened sense of the global soul and what it means to proclaim, in 2015, “I am a citizen of the world”.  "


Artwork by Konstantin Kakanias


Symposium: Note the preposition "syn"(latin "cum" becoming con-, com-, co-) and the relevancy of "potion"="drink"


From Ancient Greek συμπόσιον ‎(sumpósion, “drinking party”) from συμπίνω ‎(sumpínō, “drink together”) συν- ‎(sun-, “together-”) + πίνω ‎(pínō, “drink”).


(note that wine diluted with water was offered at symposia - cf container shown in picture)




By Antony Appiah

"That’s why a modern cosmopolitan is likely to display an interest in literature and arts from many places, to be keen on visiting the Great Wall, the Pyramids, Pompeii, and Machu Picchu and to be in the audience for world music and a great variety of global cinema. A unified world with a uniform culture wouldn’t produce the range of cultural artifacts that a cosmopolitan aesthetics admires.


So too, in politics, the cosmopolitan favors a world of alliances among societies, operating at many  levels, not the accumulation of political authority into a single state. Or, at any rate, those are the ideals of the cosmopolitan."



Some notes by


Metro is derived from Metropolitan Railway

Wikipedia |Metropolitan Railway, the first underground railway to be built in London

Wiktionary | Metropolis. From the Ancient Greek roots μήτηρ ‎(mḗtēr, “mother”) + πόλις ‎(pólis, “city”).

Wiktionary | Cosmopolitan. From Ancient Greek κοσμοπολίτης ‎(kosmopolítēs, “citizen of the world”) (κόσμος ‎(kósmos, “world”) + πολίτης ‎(polítēs,“citizen”))