The love of the former Minister of Culture was well known Mirsini Zorba for the book, contemporary culture and its dissemination among children and young people, as well as showing special concern for the region. Perhaps that is why one of the first signatures she signed during her short tenure at the Ministry of Culture (2018-2019) under SYRIZA-ANEL was the creation of the Capital Organization of Fine Arts Museums of Thessaloniki, our famous MoMUS. “The region is underestimated, discredited. And we are constitutionally obliged to her,” she told us in an interview she gave to Yulis Yeptakoilis and a signatory shortly before the 2019 elections. She then welcomed us to her home in Exarchia, a beautiful mansion, and – as always with us – he was honest and polite even with our most annoying questions. Mirsini Zorba died Thursday night at the age of 74 after battling cancer. And he was honest to the end. Her death came to light from a heartbreaking text published by her historian and life partner Antonis Liakos. “The word that fits this short horizon of mine is nothingness,” she says, describing the “hard tome of fear” she lived with in her final days. “Nothing can be realistic unless you see it from the side, and now I see it very close.”

Born in Athens in 1949, Mirsini Zorba studied at the Faculty of Law of the University of Athens and received her Master of Philosophy of Law from the Sapienza University of Rome. In 2022, the Historical University named the Department of Modern Greek Studies after her. He was a member of the PAM in the fight against dictatorship, the Greek European Youth Movement and the first edition of the magazine “Anti”.

She was the first director of the National Book Center (1995–1999) and, as a minister, tried to create a new book organization, but was unsuccessful. She also co-founded the publishing house Odysseus (1973–1992) and was associated with the translation of Mario Viti’s Symbolic History of Modern Greek Literature. In 2000, he was elected MEP for PASOK. He has taught at the University of Athens and founded the Children’s Rights Network in 2004. She worked closely with former prime minister Kostas Simitis as director of his political office. In 2018, he received the Ministry of Culture at the invitation of Alexis Tsipras. She said in that interview: “I have always lived in an environment where bridges were an opportunity to solve new problems that came up. In this sense, I do not see how a person, unless he is dogmatic and fanatical, and therefore unchanging, will not develop through political and social, world and local events.