A message from the current President.

You have elected me as President of the historical Association of People from Smyrna. I thank you for the great trust you have placed in me, and in turn I feel an even greater responsibility to be worthy of this honor.

I thank the previous president, Mr. Panayotis Veziryiannis, for all that he attempted and accomplished during his long tenure as President of the Association, and I offer him both my sincere gratitude as well as that of all our members and friends for the tireless effort that he devoted to the association. I also thank the members of the previous council for giving their ‘heart and soul’ to reach toward our goals, a truly selfless effort that came at the considerable expense of their personal time to accomplish all these great results. Their achievements now set the stage for us to set new goals and address big challenges that lie ahead of us.

Our goals are many and they are reasonable. We will seek to bring our members together to rekindle the relationships among us and to continue our literary activities. We will improve our cyberspace presence to achieve faster communication and to explore more deeply the history of our unforgettable homeland, the beautiful and tortured Smyrna. We will identify new members who would like to participate in our Association, and will present and publicize the purpose, goals and our work to a wider audience to approach and attract young people to our cultural and scientific meetings. We will award and express gratitude and honor to distinguished people from Smyrna to promote and achieve the recognition of the significance of our Association by the country as a means of maintenance and remembrance of our history and our national memory. These are only some of our objectives, and we hope to accomplish more.

We can achieve these things to modest extents by ourselves; with your engagement, we will achieve much more. We invite you to become part of this effort and help us bring forth these accomplishments. We know these goals are equally important to you, and we thank you in advance for joining us to work on them together.

Some people say that we can no longer remember Smyrna. But I say differently. I say, Yes we can!
Some people say that even if we remember, we won’t get anyone else to care. I say, Yes we can!
Some people say that even if some people care, we can’t reach young people. I say, Yes we can!
Some people will always say, no you can’t.  To that, I say, Yes, we will continue to persist!

Evangelos Tsirkas