The Kardamyli Festival
30th September - 4th October 2027
With just 400 attendees, this is an opportunity to join some of the world’s top thinkers within the seaside charm of Kardamyli in the Greek Peloponnese.
Kardamyli Festival was a nonstop glorious experience: brilliant talks; exhilarating company; glorious setting; nothing quite like it."— Sir Simon Schama
The Kardamyli Festival
Thank you all for being a wonderful audience for this year’s festival. And thank you for your brilliant entries for our annual Gala dinner competition – this year the challenge being to write a few sentences using well known Shakespearean phrases in common usage on the theme of the current president of the United States. As we would expect from such an erudite audience you really rose to this challenge.
As we said it was very hard to choose but here is the winner and the two runners up.
Bruce Walker:
My hair my hair
My kingdom for my hair.
To dye or not to dye
That is the question.
Some are born grey
And some have greyness thrust upon them.
All that glitters is not gold
Sometime the eye of heaven shines
And sometimes is my gold complexion dimmed
But my eternal suntan shall not fade
Not lose possession of that tan I boast.
So go and do the work for which you’re paid
Or your careers will all end up as toast.
Runners up:
Geraldine James
All that glisters is not gold,
Though orange faces may be bold;
A tongue that twists, a tale that flies,
With honeyed words and endless lies.
“What’s in a name?” the Bard once said,
But what’s beneath that orange head?
A thousand claims, a thousand cries,
And every day a new disguise.
Something is rotten, so it seems,
Within the kingdom of grand schemes;
The truth stands waiting by the door,
Whilst boasts and bluster fill the floor.
“O, beware the green-eyed beast!”
Yet orange seems to rule the feast;
And though the speeches loudly ring,
Not every word means anything.
So let the trumpets sound and play,
Let grand declarations fill the day;
For Shakespeare knew, as poets do:
All that is said is not always true
Philip Greenacre:
Soliloquy by Donaldo, Duke of Mar-a-Lago:
“Now is the winter of our discontent.
The Autumn mid-terms lost – robbed in Senate by cream-faced loons, and in lower chamber by viperous, turncoat knaves.
A plague on both your houses!
I’ll declare myself an Emperor, and like a Colossus bestride all the Americas and Greenland too.
Full of soundbites and fury, I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!”
[Exit, pursued by a donkey]
The 2027 Kardamyli Festival will run from 30th September to 4th October.
The ancient Greeks invented the word' idea' and this festival, bosomed in the beauty of Hellas, is not only a brilliantly good idea, it is full of ideas and inspiration and joy." — Bettany Hughes
The most appropriate and romantic place for a literary festival that I have ever stayed." — Tom Holland