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A letter written by Professor. A. M. Celal Şengör*

To the Greek People:

Our brothers and sisters across the Archipelagos!

In your hour of sorrow I am writing to you to remind you and the rest of humanity that if we, those of us who benefit from the bounty of human civilization, live in a decent way worthy of human dignity, we owe that to you. More than two-­‐and-­‐a half millennia ago, you, your great ancestors, showed mankind that we can think for ourselves, we can know without the help of any imaginary supernatural powers.

They showed us that Nature was not run by deities, but can be understood and even harnessed by men for the good of men.
But more important than all, they taught us the value of human freedom. It is with free thinking that men began creating great art and science. And with that step, human civilization was born. Before Greece, there had been cultures; great cultures indeed, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in India, in China.... But none was civilized, because they lacked individual freedom and the ability to argue without killing each other.

Before Greeks showed the world otherwise, art was stifled, two dimensional and compartmentalized to depict rulers and the ruled, masters and slaves. Art had no time and no movement. It depicted a world of beings bound in chains. Your ancestors showed us how to break those chains. With the rise of the Greek individual, human individual and human dignity were invented. A being worthy of
thinking himself one with the gods. When lunacy, thinking itself deity, arrived from the east with the mightiest force the world had until then seen, the tiny Greece raised its head and sai😛

"I shall not surrender, because I am a free human being. I shall not bow before any ruler, because I alone can rule my own world. I shall not be herded, because all my human siblings are each individuals worthy of equal respect. You may kill me, because you are powerful, but you shall not enslave me, because I cannot be beaten into submission. I submit only to my own mind and convictions. These convictions may be changed by intelligent argument, but not by force."

Your noble dead at Marathon, at Thermopylae and at Salamis represent the greatest monuments that mankind can ever erect for itself. It is their spirit that still watches us, protects us and guides us in the entire world. I teach my students in Istanbul that "To be civilized, is to think like a Greek".

You have braved many disasters in history. The only time your spirit was broken was when you forgot your role among mankind and submitted to the dreams and rules of others, lesser ones than yourselves, and began thinking their values higher than what you had invented earlier. Your values are the highest though, because all men learnt their dignity from you. Your language is the language of reason and science.

In these days of misfortune I am writing to beg you all to teach your children that they are noble, whatever happens, because they can read Thales and Anaximandros and their followers in their own sublime language. They speak a language in which freedom was first enunciated, science was first pronounced and human dignity first contemplated. The first word ever spoken to defy tyranny in the name of human worthiness was in Greek.

Greece will recover, the whole world will recover and be a much better place, if we all can continue to learn from the Greeks who taught us about human dignity and with it, inescapably, created the human civilization.

A. M. Celal Şengör
A student in the eternal panepistemion of Greece

* A. M. Celal Şengör is an internationally renowned earth scientist, professor at the Istanbul Technical University. Foreign member of the American Philosophical Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences.