Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has invited children from all over the world who are learning the Greek language to visit the country in the Summer of 2021.
At a special teleconferencing held on Monday, Mitsotakis conversed with students and teachers from sixteen schools worldwide to discuss the successes of the Greek language platform “staellinika.com,” and to extend the invitation.
Kids at schools from every corner of the globe including cities like Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Kinshasa, Congo, and Australia are invited to further their lessons in Greek language, Greek mythology, and the culture of the country. The prime minister was quoted as saying:
“We have a digital tool for learning the Greek language that makes use of the richness of Greek history and Greek mythology to keep our language alive.”
StaEllinika, which is an initiative of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University, is a collaboration with the General Secretariat for Greeks Abroad at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).
An online platform that leverages a suite of apps, was developed by the SNF New Media Lab in the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies to be part of a project called “Rebooting the Greek Language,” a two-year program supported by the SNF to bring new technologies and advances in pedagogy into play in order to preserve Greek language in the diaspora.
According to the news from Greek Reporter, Mr. Mitsotakis spoke to 7-year-old Lazaros Panagopoulos, who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Greek, as well as two other boys from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Greek leader also contacted Christina Bartzi, a student at the Greek School of Kinshasa, who is preparing to take national exams to study computer engineering in Greece.
Prime Minister Mitsotakis invited all the children who participated in the teleconference to visit Greece for two weeks in the summer of 2021, to give them an immersive experience into Greek language and culture.
Here is the report on the prime minister’s teleconference in Greek.