| | | Press Release | | | | Cork Epiphany 6th January 2005 by Mr Pat Cox, former President of the European Parliment, the first piece of literature written as a specific contribution during Cork 2005. | | (click pictures to view larger images!) | | | | | | Today the 6th of January is the feast of the Epiphany, when following a star and bearing their gifts, the Magi, who travelled from the East, were presented to the Christ child. The symbolic stars of Europe, twelve in number, have brought us to this place today. Their number represents the hours of the day and the months of the year in constant forward momentum. They are circular in form, from heraldry the sign of harmony and unity. The circle is open and not closed, open to those peoples who have chosen freely to associate. The stars invite us to avert our gaze from the daily grind and to dream our dreams.
Our Cork Epiphany takes its designation from these stars. Our Estonian Magi are the avant garde of a year of visitors from our East to the Cork Vision Centre, bearing the gifts of their talents and being presented to the city of Finbarr by the Lee.
Before his death in the early 7th century, St. Columbanus wrote of his Europe and we Irish that we were the ultimi habitatores mundi, that we came from the edge of the world. It is entirely appropriate that our journey of 2005 commences in a small state on the European Union’s eastern edge, host and guest alike peripheral but not isolated, part of a Europe whose integration is not a melting pot but a mosaic, each part with its own unique shape, size and colour, a unity rooted in and founded on diversity
| | | | | In our Irish lore this last day of Christmas, little Christmas, is Nollaig na mban, womens’ Christmas, traditionally the day , when after their seasonal exertions, women took some time out to visit their neighbours and friends. On this Nollaig na mban it is five young women who are our visiting Muses, each on display in national costume in their poster art which speaks volumes. This is not picture postcard, tourism-driven, surface dressing. Estonia’s cultural nationalism runs deep in their national psyche. Their folklore collection in the Estonian Literary Museum contains more than one million pages.
In Gorbachev’s era of glasnost and perestroika when the winds of change were blowing across Central and Eastern Europe tens of thousands of Estonians took to the Song Festival Ground in Tallinn. They sang for their independence. Ukraine recently had its Orange Revolution. In Prague 1989 they had their Velvet Revolution. In Estonia they had a Singing Revolution. Like the walls of Jericho, the old regime came tumbling down before the trumpet-like sound of freedom’s popular expression.
Change enveloped the entire region offering new hope and opportunity but demanding extraordinary transformation. It was embraced by the young. It was feared by the elderly. It was a crisis for many of the middle-aged. Women, with their wonderfully honed coping skills, adapted better than many of their men folk, who tutored for another time and another system buckled under the strain and turned to alcohol for solace. Look at the poster which reads “sprightly gal works like a horse and has a drunkard for a husband”. It is the art of the transformation. Change is not easy.
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When it was our time to choose in Ireland we courted the European bride in the 1970s and consummated the contract by referendum. Many of us came to be seduced more by her dowry than by herself. This Year of Culture invites a new and deeper discovery.
We are a storytelling people. We know and we tell too few stories of our European journey. I have a Lithuanian friend, Vytenis Andriukaitis. He served as the Chairman of the European Affairs Committee of the Seimas [parliament] in Lithuania. I last met him in Greece on April 16th 2003, on the day of signing of the Accession Treaty by the ten new member states of the European Union. We were in the ancient Agora at the foot of the hill of the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon but it was new and not ancient history which touched me on that day.
He was overcome with emotion. I asked “what’s wrong?” I have been just talking with my 95 year old mother on my mobile phone”, he answered ,“about my journey to Athens.”
In 1940 The Soviet Union brutally cast aside the young independence of the three Baltic States under a dirty and self- serving deal between Hitler and Stalin. Mr.Andriukaitis Snr. was a young married man, an engineer and a part-time municipal councillor in his home city of Kaunas. For this he was suspect in the eyes of their new masters and so he and his young bride were sent to the Gulag. They were placed on a god-forsaken island in the Artic circle that alternated between constant nights and constant days but which never altered in terms of its oppressive isolation. My friend, Vytenis, was born on that prison island. Years later they were allowed to return to Kaunas. He was speaking to his mother about his family’s journey from the Gulag to freedom.
On your behalf permit me to thank Cork Civic Trust for their vision, the foreign ministries and diplomatic missions of all of the new member states of the European Union for their willing and full support and John Miller for his tireless dedication to make a success of this challenge.
Let me finish by quoting from Seamus Heaney’s poem, Station Island, set on the pilgrimage island of Lough Derg, modelled on Dante’s Purgatorio, in an imagined encounter with James Joyce:
…there is a moment in Stephen’s diary
for April the thirteenth, a revelation
Set among my stars - that one entry
has been a sort of password in my ears,
The collect of a new epiphany….
| | | Thank you for the invitation to open the New Europe exhibition and to share with you Cork’s Epiphany.
Pat Cox, Cork Vision Centre, 6th January, 2005
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