The Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia is collaborating with the Greek American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, the Hellenic Medical Society of Philadelphia, and the Greek American Hertiage Society of Philadelphia to present our 2025 Christmas Party. Celebrate this festive and joyous time of year with new friends and old.

The Christmas Party will occur on December 8, 2024 at The Merion at 1301 Rt 130 S, Cinnaminson, NJ 08077. The venue has plenty of parking and is only 25 minutes from Philadelphia and South Jersey.

Ticket price includes buffet dinner and open bar (beer and wine).

Tickets can be purchased at https://www.hucphiladelphia.org/store/2025-christmas-party

Join us for an enjoyable social event at Ship Bottom Beer Garden at Linvilla Orchards, 137 W. Knowlton Road, Media, PA 19063.

The beer garden is located within Linvilla Orchards, which offers many activities such as hayrides, mazes, pick-your-own crops, pony/train rides, and more!

This is event is free to attend members and non-member guests. Food, drinks, and activities are at each guest’s expense.

Please RSVP by clicking here.

In her U.S. debut, Alkyone presents a musical program with her original compositions and innovative arrangements of Greek traditional and popular songs.

Alkyone is a multifaceted artist hailing from the picturesque mountains of Northern Greece. As a singer, songwriter, and musician, she navigates seamlessly between Greek and English languages, blending indie pop, cinematic, and folk elements into her unique musical tapestry. Drawing from her experience as a former choir member, Alkyone infuses her compositions with haunting choral arrangements, tapping into the primal and potent essence of collective voices.

Free and open to the public; advance registration is required for non-PennCard-holders. Penn faculty, staff, and students must swipe their PennCard for access. Visitors from outside the Penn community must present a current, valid government or school-issued photo I.D. that contains an expiration date. Find more information to plan your visit. 

University of Pennsylvania co-sponsors: Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program, Wolf Humanities Center, Middle East Center, Center for Global Collections, Department of Classical Studies

Community sponsor: Young Leaders of the Federation of Hellenic-American Societies of Philadelphia and Greater Delaware Valley

Registration is required. Please click here to register.

Date: Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Time: 7:00pm - 8:30pm

Location: Kislak Center Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, 6th Floor

Campus: Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center

Click above to sign up.

The Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia is excited to announce our 2024 Opening Reception on Sunday, September 29, 2024 from 2-5 PM. This year’s reception will take place at the rooftop of The Griffin Center City in Philadelphia (1338 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19107). With stunning views of Philadelphia's skyline and City Hall, this will be an event you don't want to miss!

You can RSVP one of two ways:

1. By clicking above and paying through our website, or

2. By mailing a check to HUC of Philadelphia, P.O. Box 42199, Philadelphia, PA 19101. 

Delectable hors d’oeuvres, small plates, and crisp beverages are included in the price of admission. Prospective new members who attend this event and apply to join the Club by November 1, 2024 will receive complimentary dues for one year. Additional details about the event can be found on Eventbrite and on the attached flyer. 

Parking is available just steps away from the venue at the Wanamaker Building parking facility at 100 Penn Square East, Philadelphia, PA, 19107 and at several other convenient parking facilities.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact hucphiladelphia@gmail.com. We are grateful for your support and look forward to hosting you soon.

Sincerely,

Joseph C. Antonakakis, Esq., President, and the HUC Philadelphia Board

Click here to buy tickets.

Our OPENING RECEPTION takes place THIS SUNDAY AFTERNOON (Oct. 15th) at ARONIMINK GOLF CLUB in Newtown Square (PA) . . . and my Board  members and I enthusiastically invite you to join us there and then! Aronimink is a fine old country club (nearly 100 years old) with lots of charm inside its Victorian-style clubhouse — and stunning views of its 300-acre platinum golf course outside. 

We’ve reserved a lovely room in the Aronimink Clubhouse from 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm, so you can come early and spend a long, leisurely afternoon eating and drinking with us. Or come later if you have an early Sunday event to attend.

Let us know by THIS FRIDAY (the 13th!) if you can join us on Sunday. Reserve on EVENTBRITE — or contact Georgia Chletcos (See attached flyer for details). You may pay at the door if you reserve by Friday . . . but please do NOT show up at the Reception without making your reservation by Friday. (Something frightening might happen to you! Just kidding ;-) 

For questions, please call or text Georgia Chletcos at 610-547-0072.

We look forward to welcoming you on Sunday and beginning the 87th season of the Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia!

Click here for the Zoom URL.

Starting in 1914 the Young Turks began a systematic campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing of the Greeks of Eastern Thrace and western Asia Minor. This campaign continued until 1922 with deportations and massacres of the Greeks in other areas of Asia Minor. The defeat of the Greek Army and the destruction of Smyrna in 1922 ended the 2,700-year presence of Greeks in Anatolia.

The lecture will be based on the book of the same title which is a collection of previously unpublished documents of the US Navy.

Savvas “Sam” Koktzoglou is a retired Mechanical Engineer. He received his engineering degrees from Villanova University and the University of Pennsylvania. During his career he worked in senior level engineering positions in both the private and public sectors in Greece and the United States. Prior to his engineering career he served as a second lieutenant in the Greek Army Reserve special forces. Sam is on the Board of Directors of a number of nonprofit organizations in the Chicago area. He is an avid reader of Greek history with special interest in the history of Asia Minor. Sam is the co-author of The Greek Genocide in American Naval War Diaries. Sam’s parents were refugees from Asia Minor who settled in Greece in 1922.

Click here for a recording of the talk!

A talk from former HUC scholarship recipient Dr. Artemis Zavaliangos-Petropulu on her neurological research into the effects of ketamine in the treatment of depression. She is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California Los Angeles. Artemis is a past recipient of HUC’s Kathleen and Nicholas Fisfis Graduate Scholarship. This talk is part of our Young Scholars Spotlight series.

Click for the Zoom link

Panayotis League is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University. He specializes in the traditional music of the Greek islands, northeastern Brazil, and Ireland. He has published extensively in ethnomusicology and his new book explores the musical heritage of Asia Minor in the United States, Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora (2021). Dr. League is an accomplished musician and recording artist. In 2018 he was awarded a Traditional Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and in 2019 was named a Master Artist by the Florida Folklife Program for performing and teaching the traditional music and oral poetry of Kalymnos in the Greek immigrant community of Tarpon Springs.

Click for a Zoom link

On Saturday, April 16, 2022, at 11 a.m. from opposite ends of the globe, scholars Katerina Lagos & Othon Anastasakis will join HUC for The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974. Their academic expertise – they possess deep knowledge and understanding of European political volatility during the modern era – makes this a must-attend event in light of the war in Ukraine, the rise of authoritarianism, and the increasingly turbulent politics of the past few years, both in the United States and overseas. Anastasakis and Lagos have just co-edited The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past (2021).

From 1967 to 1974, the military junta ruling Greece attempted a dramatic reshaping of the nation, implementing ideas and policies that left a lasting mark on both domestic affairs and international relations. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of disciplines, The Greek Military Dictatorship explores the junta’s attempts to impose authoritarian rule upon a rapidly modernizing country while navigating a complex international landscape. Focusing both on foreign relations as well as domestic matters such as economics, ideology, religion, culture and education, this book offers a fresh and well-researched study of a key period in modern Greek history.

Othon Anastasakis is Director of South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX), Senior Research Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the Prague School of Economics and Business. He is the author and editor of many books and articles including Diaspora Engagement in Times of Severe Economic Crisis: Greece and Beyond (2022), The Legacy of Yugoslavia: Politics, Economy and Society (2020), and Balkan Legacies of the Great War: The Past is Never Dead (2016). His research interests include populism, illiberalism and the far right, comparative European politics, migration and Greek diaspora, Balkan party politics, South East European geopolitics, Greek and Turkish foreign policies, Greek political economy, Russia, and the Balkans.

Katerina Lagos is Professor of History and Director of the Hellenic Studies Program at California State University, Sacramento. She is a modern Greek historian with expertise in the interwar period, minorities, education, fascism, dictatorship, World War II, and Jewish history. Her publications include "Interwar Greece: Its Generals, a Republic, and the Monarchy" (2020), and "Forced Assimilation or Emigration: Sephardic Jewry in Thessaloniki, 1917–1941" (2015). Dr. Lagos is currently working on a book on Jewish minorities in Greece and the Metaxas dictatorship.

This event occurred on Zoom, and you can find the recording here: https://www.hucphiladelphia.org/event-recordings

Eleni Angelomatis-Tsougarakis is Professor Emerita of the Department of History at Ionian University in Corfu in Greece. She is the author of several books and articles on foreign travelers in Greece, Greek men of letters during the Ottoman era, the history of education, the history of women, and local history (Crete, Corfu). They include The Eve of the Greek Revival: British Travellers' Perceptions of Early Nineteenth Century Greece (1990) and Greece before the War of Greek Independence: 1821 the Birth of a National State (2011).

This is part of the HUC Young Scholars Spotlight Series. It occurred on Zoom, and you can find the recording here: https://www.hucphiladelphia.org/event-recordings

Myrto Grigoroglou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Toronto. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at the University of Toronto. Myrto did undergraduate studies in Communication and Linguistics at the University of Athens and postgraduate studies in Communication in Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research focuses on how children acquire the meaning of words and grammatical constructions in their native language, and how children and adults use language in communication.

Author Joanna Eleftheriou joins HUC members for a lecture about her memoir, a collection of essays titled, This Way Back: From New York to Cyprus and Back, on Thursday, February 10, at 7 p.m. Joanna moved from New York City to a Greek-Cypriot village, a journey dramatically captured as a comingof-age experience for a professional, feminist woman seeking a way to remain part of the Greek Orthodox Church both in the United States and Cyprus. Joanna will read from the essay “Ithacas” and discuss the process of sharing her Greek-Cypriot-American experience with a broad readership and fielding questions such as: What does it mean to go “back home” when you are Greek-American? Are we on a journey back to our Greek and Cypriot homelands, or searching for any place that will make us feel like we belong? How do we keep alive the traditions of our homelands as we emerge as modern Greek-Americans of the twenty-first century?

Joanna is an assistant professor of English at Christopher Newport University, a contributing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and a faculty member at the Writing Workshops in Greece. Her essays, short stories, and translations appear regularly in journals including Apalachee Review, Chautauqua, CutBank, Arts and Letters, and The Common. She serves in the Executive Board of the Modern Greek Studies Association and was book review editor for the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.

The Zoom link is here.

Please join us as we celebrate the Day of Greek Letters and honor our Patron Saints, The Three Hierarchs – Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory the Theologian, and Saint John Chrysostom – at our Annual Artoklasia Service on Sunday, January 30, 2022, at Annunciation/ Evangelismos Church, 7921 Old York Road, Elkins Park, PA 19027. Orthros will begin at 8:30 a.m., and Divine Liturgy at 9:30 a.m. With the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic in mind, members may attend the service either in person or virtually via Facebook Livestream here. Whichever method you choose, let us all join together in prayer for this special and meaningful service.

Join the HUC for the first of our 2022 educational events: Paul Apostolidis, Associate Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science, will speak to HUC via Zoom on Saturday, January 22 at 2:00 p.m., on the topic, “Seeing Through the Prism of a Century: Latino Immigration Today from a Greek-American Perspective.” Dr. Apostolidis is grandson of HUC cofounders Dr. Nicholas and Kively Padis, and he recently joined our Club as a member from England.

The Zoom link for the event is here.

Join the HUC for a wonderful day at Longwood Gardens on Saturday, December 11, 2021

Click here for tickets!

The Hellenic University Club of Philadelphia and AHEPA Camden Chapter 69 are excited to be once again hosting their virtual college and career panel.

Register via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/.../tZAtcequqjIqH9OVvgaJX_1gb...

The intended audience for this event is high school and college students.

Members interested in being a panelist can sign up here: https://docs.google.com/.../1FAIpQLSf4sFZ2VKXJKN.../viewform

This is a great opportunity for students in high school or college to learn more about specific college majors, careers, and available scholarship opportunities while networking with local professionals. Please spread the word to those in your friend and family networks.

The event will be held on Saturday, October 23rd from 9:30am-3:30 pm over zoom. Young professionals interested in being a panelist are encouraged to let us know using the signup link below (spots may be limited). We look forward to hosting this event!

Thursday, May 6 at 7:30pm EST, Sakis Gekas will discuss his forthcoming book “The Relics of the Struggle: Veterans, Widows, and Orphans of the 1821 Greek Revolution”. This talk offers new perspectives on the history of the veterans of the Greek revolution and will discuss their participation in the war, their condition as disabled or suffering from serious illness, and their families’ condition after the war.

Zoom link to join is here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88335823864pwd=RExvak5yQlhaRlIrYSttckpSUldLUT09

Click here for photos for all of our wonderful past events!

Click here for a Zoom link to access the virtual lecture.

With the 2500th anniversaries of Thermopylae and Salamis looming this year, it is fitting to stop and reevaluate these crucial battles in world history.

President Pavlopoulos has recently claimed: “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 defense of peace, freedom and democracy.” But the events of 480 BC have left a complex legacy, both inspirational and more troubling. This lecture presents an account of the events of 480 BC and attempts to evaluate the legacy of the Persian Wars for the Greeks and for the West.

This event is free and open to the general public!

Join the HUC for our opening reception for the 2019-2020 season! Tickets are $35 in advance and $50 at the door, and include a buffet and a cash bar.

Buy Tickets Here

Members, non-member guests, and prospective members are all invited to attend!

Any new members who attend the event and join the club by November 1st will receive complimentary dues for the year.

In partnership with the Hellenic Film Society of New York City, the HUC presents Greek Film Night at the Ritz Five! The program includes two films: the short film “Genocide” and our feature film presentation “Jamaica.” Both films will be shown with English subtitles. Get your tickets here.