Dear Mélanie, you will allow me to start in Greek.
It is a great pleasure and a great honour for me to be here among you today, and I have to say that I am particularly moved by this. Because you will allow me to feel that I am among my compatriots who have crossed the Atlantic and succeeded in a young and dynamic country. And they did so by bringing the spirit of our country to this new and vibrant country.
I’ d also like to tell you that I am deeply touched to see here the school and the community emblem. The Ionic column, our ancient tradition, the double-headed eagle, the over-millennial medieval Byzantine empire, the star of Vergina, and both the Quebec and Canadian flags are all set against a blue background that best represents, as a color, who we are and how we feel.
I’d like to thank you from the bottom of my heart, on behalf of the Greek government, for preserving one of the things that binds us all together, and that is our language. Because our language is not just the way we communicate. It is this essence that carries a 3,000-year-old tradition with it, with its words, with the nuances of its words, with the vast difference in meaning that words have, depending on how we use them.
The language is like a great river, like the many great rivers across Canada, bearing feelings, disasters, successes, victories, defeats, triumphs, births, deaths, memories of thousands of years. Therefore, it represents us, it unites us. Your Eminence, if we lose our language and communication with our Church and with what it represents for us, we lose our cohesion.
Therefore, Mr. President I’ d like to thank you from the bottom of my heart, because the Community and the Greek school preserve and pass on this enormous proud tradition to the younger generations.
Your Eminence,
Honourable Foreign Minister of Canada, my dear Mélanie,
Dear Mr. President,
Honourable Members of Parliament,
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am so proud to be here today and, if you’ll allow me to say, so touched, I may even become emotional. Because seeing you here, beyond the ocean, being so successful but at the same time saving and passing down to the younger generation the Greek tradition, the Greek language, staying connected with the Greek Orthodox Church and our tradition, is so important.
Also, I would like to pay my respect and express my gratitude to Mélanie. Mélanie is an excellent Foreign Minister for Canada. But she is something far beyond that; she is an excellent Minister of the values, of the principles that Greece expresses in today’s world. And we thank her so much for that. Because these values and principles are the same values and principles Canada stands for.
So, I would like to ask you to continue, in this proud country, to support those values and those principles.
Thank you so much for being here today.