Vassilis Lambropoulos
For a Greek American Polyphony
1 st question: Do you feel that institutions, organizations, the media, and other cultural sectors in the ‘community’ address your concerns?
Thank you for the wonderful invitation and congratulations on this timely initiative.
Elaborating on distinctions made in the invitation, I would argue that, schematically speaking, there are two Greek Americas, the conservative and the innovative one.
The conservative Greek America consists in a social stereotype created in the 1940s that has changed very little: A few wealthy and philanthropic families, children of immigrants and members of a few New York and Boston uniform parishes, are thinking of Greece nostalgically in terms of horio, yiayia, local festival, philotimo, blurry antiquity, and ahistorical heritage. This conservative community is not self-governed but is ruled by the church hierarchy and reports to the Patriarch in Istanbul. It is supported and promoted by Greek American traditional organizations, politicians, media, and of course the church. It is also recognized by the Greek government, politicians, media, and institutions.
The innovative Greek America, on the other hand, ranges from 4 th generation ethnics to recent immigrants, and includes individuals in any profession from all over the country who have an energetic (as opposed to passive) relation to Hellenism in general and not just to Greece. They are people of learning, taste, creativity, and imagination who reimagine and reinvent Greek stories, values, and techniques but remain unknown to the conservative community which fears new ideas. They do not have their own institutions, but they are eminently involved in their professions and participate actively in the American public sphere.
These two groups of Greek Americans live separately and are not interested in each other.
I was born and raised in Athens. Sometime in the mid-1970s, I decided to pursue an American academic career. In 1981 at 28, I became an Assistant Professor of Modern Greek at The Ohio State University. In 1999, I moved to the University of Michigan to establish and inaugurate the C. P. Cavafy Modern Greek Chair. For the last 45 years, I have been part of both Greek American groups and have been always disappointed by the gaps separating them. The conservative community is happy that I have been educating their children and grandchildren and organizing numerous cultural events but is not interested in my Greek research and expects me to compromise and become a different, old-fashioned person when socializing with its people.
2 nd question: What are a couple of Greek American issues that you deeply care about?
Ι care about the lack of visibility, innovation, and civic engagement in the Greek American community.
a) The official community is becoming increasingly introverted and, as a result, isolated. It is neither visible nor influential in the American public sphere. Instead, it is consumed by defensive self-importance, namely, internal issues of no consequence. It hopes to live outside history, never change, and preserve practices and attitudes long extinct in Greece and Cyprus.
b) While it is becoming smaller and marginalized, the official community has no contact with the exciting work of Greek American innovators outside its parishes—inventors, writers, collectors, artists, administrators, professors, attorneys, scientists. These individuals are doing tremendous work at the forefront of their fields, challenging norms and stereotypes. Unless they make a ton of money, the conservative community will not even hear about them.
c) Syncretic Hellenism is a cultural tradition and intellectual formation that has been undergoing, since the late 20 th century, major reconsiderations and revisions. For example, it is no longer acceptable to talk about Greek miracle, exception, virility, or superiority. Today, the terms of history and culture change rapidly and drastically. This is bound to affect the ways today’s Greeks are seen and portrayed. It is therefore particularly important that Greek Americans follow these developments and engage directly with their outcome.
3 rd question: What new directions and policies do you envision?
If, as Yiorgos Anagnostou wrote in a seminal editorial, the Other Greek America is not a national homogeneous group but a “field,” I would like to see this dynamic field organize itself in small, local autonomous cultural groupings. Efforts to establish community-wide cultural associations fail both because their members soon begin to fight for power and because the church fears and undermines them. However, the country has a strong tradition of forming small groups of people who love to read fiction, go to concerts, visit collections, travel to museums, create archives, study history, or debate ideas. Greeks and Philhellenes may establish such local groupings to meet often and discuss works and projects related to Hellenism, seeking to become not big but inspiring. They will probably not emerge as an assemblage in the public sphere, but they will inspire their members to play an agonistic public role in Hellenic matters of any kind. They can thrive thanks to the personal and regular contact of their members, exchange views and works, and build on their own unique strengths.
January 20, 2026
Vassilis Lambropoulos is the C. P. Cavafy Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek in the Departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He was a faculty at the University of Michigan (1999-2018) and The Ohio State University (1981-99) where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Modern Greek language, literature, criticism, and culture, as well as comparative literature and cultural studies.