“Greece, faithful to its historic legacy, remains a kind of ‘outlying border’ of the West toward the East – presenting through its free spirit and civilization, a genuine and altruistic defence of peace, freedom and democracy,” stressed President of the Hellenic Republic Prokopios Pavlopoulos on Wednesday, inaugurating the launch of a series of events commemorating the 2,500-year anniversary since the Battle of Thermopylae and the Battle of Salamis, ANA reports.
Through their victory, Pavlopoulos said, the ancient Greeks also defended the civilization they had created, and which erected what today constitutes the first pillar of “our common European civilization.” At the same time, and for the first time in the world’s history, they established the firm boundary between East and West that still exists today.
This boundary was not intended to divide and widen the distances between the West and the East but, through its historic course and its historical perspective, to build bridges of communication with the East, bridges of peace, peaceful co-existence and co-creation. “With chief among them being the bridge of the equal and constructive Dialogue of Civilisations, since for us, the Greeks, a ‘clash’ between real civilizations is something inconceivable,” said Pavlopoulos. It was unfortunate that in our times, for many and different reasons, civilizations chose to entrench and isolate themselves and create an ostensibly unbridgeable gap, the president added.
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