2017 Fulbright Foundation Greece: Steven Tagle HD

Last night, Ambassador and Ms. Pyatt hosted the annual FULBRIGHT FOUNDATION GREECE awards ceremony at their home, Jefferson House. The event honors Greek scholars about to depart for the United States to begin their studies and American scholars who are finishing their time in Greece. Each year, Greek and American participants who have just taken part explain a little bit about what their Fulbright experience has meant to them. This year, Steven Tagle, an instructor of Creative Writing from UMass Amherst who has been teaching at Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης gave a moving speech about how deeply his year in Greece has affected him. You can read his text below and we will post a link to a video of the remarks as soon as it is available. "Κυρίες και κύριοι, καλησπέρα σας. Thank you for joining us this afternoon to honor the Fulbright Foundation’s U.S. and Greek grantees, its friends, donors, scholars, and staff. When I describe my year in Greece, I often feel like I’m describing a place I imagined rather than a place that actually exists. Where golden light strikes marble columns and sparkles over the wine-dark sea; where rowdy, curious, and clever characters drink and dance; where tradition and innovation, creativity, and chaos brew in a social and economic cauldron. As a fiction writer with an admittedly tenuous grip on reality, I’ve inhabited Greece the way a reader inhabits a book. “Reading” Greece this year has reawakening my senses and bound me to Greek and Syrian people whose mythic stories have challenged what I thought I knew about the crises, what I thought I knew about myself. I may be the newest reader of a book that spans millennia, but like Byron, Fermor, and Merrill, I’ve found a home in this country and hope to contribute to its pages. I came to Greece through its mythology, intrigued by a people whose gods were as raucous, petty, and vindictive as they were noble and just. The landscapes of Greece retain the mystery and power of mythology. Thanks to Fulbright, I’ve visited many of these places, where our world still seems to touch the world of the gods. I’ve walked along the Acheron River, the “River of Woe,” whose spectral blue waters seem colored by the spirits of the dead. I’ve listened for prophesy in the rustling oak leaves at Dodona, and felt stalactites drip onto the back of my neck as a silent boatman ferried me through the caves at Diros. I’ve retraced Odysseus’s homeward path through the Ionian Islands and paid tribute to monsters Hercules had slain in the Peloponnese. Some days, traveling alone and outside my comfort zone, I walked on the edge of fear, knowing that beyond fear is awe, or δέος, the proper attitude for approaching the gods. I saw δέος on a Naoussan boy’s face during Carnival when he put on the wax mask of the γενίτσαρος for the very first time. I learned to play Trex in UNHCR hotels and befriended an amorous Iraqi who had lost his legs as a child. My students at Aristotle shared their yiayias’