Eirene - Baris - Peace

A collection of 25 short poems constituting an appeal for peace and understanding between Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus, with facing translations into Turkish and English. There are biographical notes on the author and the two translators, "In place of a prologue" before the poems, and "In place of an epilogue" and "Plus an essay" at the end; all these items are, like, the poems, in all three languages. The essay develops the theme of the poems in a more direct and explicit manner.

This is such a beautiful piece of work! As before I was very moved by Iakovos Menelaou's poetry. It is both sincere, and painful -very sad, but not without hope. He is inspired by Cyprus, but his theme extends far beyond that and is so relevant now, with the Ukraine war; if only those who were staging it had an ounce of humanity, it would end. And Menelaou absolutely nails it on the head with his essay at the end - humanity should be at the forefront of everything. (VICTORIA HISLOP, honorary Greek citizen and author of The Sunrise, set in Cyprus at the time of the tragic events of 1974, and also The Island and several other novels set in Greece.)

IAKOVOS MENELAOU studied Medieval and Modern Greek Philology at the University of Ioannina and undertook masters courses in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queen's University Belfast, and in Theology at the University of Wales Trinity St David, and holds a PhD in Modern Greek Studies from King's College London. He worked for around ten years in secondary education in the UK and was Head of Classics in various schools there. He has also taught in the Institute of History at the University of Hradec Kralove in the Czech Republic, and was Programme Leader of postgraduate courses in education at UNICAF in Larnaka, Cyprus. He has written a significant number of articles which have been published in peer-reviewed journals and in the daily press. His research interests revolve around Greek poetry and literature, the history of Cyprus and the Cyprus Problem and aspects of education. He is the author of The Rhetoric of the Cyprus Problem: idealism, nationalism, realism (Trivent Publishing, Budapest, 2021) and Illness, Disease and Death in the Poems of Constantine Cavafy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2022). He is a member of the Balkan History Association. This is his sixth collection of poetry, though he has disowned the first two. The third, fourth and fifth were also published by Colenso Books.

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