On March 11th, the UC Berkeley Modern Greek and Hellenic Studies Program welcomed Professor Artemis Leontis, the C.P. Cavafy Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature and Director of the Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan, for a lecture titled “Kazantzakis Visiting Scholar Lecture: Women Talking in a Closet of the Archive of Hellenism.” The lecture took place both in person and via Zoom, and was attended virtually by 6 guests. Leontis illuminated a collection of lesbian love letters compiled by Eva Palmer Sikelianos, a patron of Nobel Prize-nominated Greek writer and journalist Nikos Kazantzakis. Her presentation detailed the social and emotional depth of the letters.
Leontis highlighted her involvement with the collection, including her role as its archivist, and noted the significance of her lecture as the first public unveiling of its contents. She underscored the challenges of archival works, emphasizing the systematic barriers that often hinder the promotion and accessibility of such collections. She also elaborated on the themes present within the letters, stating:
“At the center of the correspondence are Eva Palmer and Natalie Clifford Barney. The correspondence is two-sided, the context of the collection tells us why… it begins in July 1900 when Palmer and Barney resume an adolescent love from the previous decade. From this point on, until the end of their love correspondence on New Year’s Day 1909, they write to each other frequently, even when they are living next door to each other, and keep all the letters they receive. One of the persistent themes is the dissonance between the life they wish for—to express their love freely and openly—and the restrictions that forbid such an existence.”
Following Barney’s death, the letters were housed in the Jacques Doucet Library before being transferred to the Center for Asia Minor Studies. They had been inaccessible to the public initially; Leontis’s own original permission to review two boxes of the letters was revoked, and then reinstated. Since then, she has undertaken the task of organizing, digitizing, and documenting the collection.
Reflecting on her role in curating the archive, Leontis explained that she blended historical record-keeping with narrative storytelling to represent the collection’s complex history. Using letters exchanged between Eva Palmer Sikelianos and Natalie Clifford Barney, as well as correspondence involving Octave Merlier, who transported the collection to Athens, she reconstructed the story of the archive’s journey.