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| THE MONTREAL GREEK TIMES GOPHER NEWS SERVICE |
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July 2026
Socrates-Demosthenes students help write Montreal's Greek heroes
exhibition
(GIF) article photo
By Dominique Speri
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
In the blue half-light of a gallery in Old Montreal, beneath a long
frieze of meander patterns and among marble gods carried across the
Atlantic, a row of small display stands holds something unexpected: the
French handwriting and bright drawings of children, set beside vases and
figurines made nearly 3,000 years ago. The pairing is the heart of a
collaboration between the Pointe-à-
Callière museum and the Socrates-Demosthenes school that turned 21 Grade
4 students into co-authors of one of the largest celebrations of
Hellenic heritage ever mounted in North America. That exhibition, La
Grèce des héros. Au temps de Troie, gathers close to 400 objects from 28
Greek museums and archaeological sites, many of them shown for the first
time on this continent. Produced jointly with the Ministry of Culture of
the Hellenic Republic, it leads visitors through the world of Homer by
way of statues, jewellery, weapons, ceramics and ritual objects, tracing
the line where the passions of mortals meet the gods of Olympus. The
journey moves between two founding ages, the bronze age of palaces and
goldwork and the iron age of the poet, and includes a rare warrior's
helmet made of boar tusks and delicate gold ornaments from the royal
tombs of Mycenae. "In his account, Homer refers to real elements of his
time," the museum's director general, Anne Élisabeth Thibault, has said
of the period the show recreates. "Rarely has Greece granted a heritage
collection of such scale to a museum in North America," she said.
The exhibition also marks the work of a Greek-Canadian archaeological
mission active for more than 30 years at Argilos, in northern Greece,
led by Jacques Y. Perreault of the Université de Montréal, a reminder of
the ties already binding Canada to the Greek world.
For the families of the Greek community, the show carried a second
meaning. The museum invited the Socrates-Demosthenes school, an
institution of the Hellenic Community of Greater Montreal, to take part
directly in an innovative museum-education program, in recognition of
the long bond between the community and the cultural heritage of Greece.
The idea grew out of the strong response the community had shown to the
museum's 2015 exhibition on the Greeks, from Agamemnon to Alexander the
Great. This time the museum wanted the children of the community to
contribute in a lasting way to the telling of the history and mythology
of their ancestors' homeland.
The Grade 4 class at Campus II was a natural fit, since its students had
already studied Greek mythology and ancient history and arrived with the
background the project required. From the first days of the 2025-2026
school year, students, parents and teachers embraced the plan. The
museum chose 21 of its exhibits and matched each one to a child. Working
with their Greek and French teachers, the students were paired with a
hero or a god according to personality, interests and character. Who
would speak for the resourceful Odysseus? Which student best suited the
beautiful Helen? Who would carry the weight of the powerful Agamemnon?
The questions gave the children the sense that they belonged to a
genuine cultural mission.
In October 2025, the Quebec troubadour Thomas Hellman visited the
classroom three times. With his guitar and a gift for storytelling, he
brought the episodes of the *Iliad* and the interventions of the
Olympian gods to life in front of the students. Like a modern
rhapsode, he carried the children into the world of the Trojan War and
stirred both their knowledge and their imagination, setting the stage
for the work that followed.
Then came the research. Each student studied the figure entrusted to
them and gathered information in French, and with the help of the
teachers and the museum team composed an original caption for the
matching exhibit. Those short texts, written with the freshness of a
child's thinking, now stand beside the artifacts and form a
distinctive part of the visitor's path through the galleries. Leanea,
9, took up Cassandra. "This princess was given the gift of seeing the
future in exchange for promising herself to Apollo," she wrote,
before adding her own verdict: "I like that Cassandra can see the
future and is beautiful." Kalliopé, 9, told the story of Menelaus.
"Menelaus was the king of Sparta, Agamemnon's brother, husband of
Helen, and a hero of the Trojan War," she wrote. "His wife was
kidnapped by Paris, so he teamed up with Agamemnon, Odysseus, and
Ajax to wage war on Troy to get his wife back."
The creative work continued on paper. The painter and graphic artist
Marie Joelle Fournier came to the classroom and led the children through
a series of art workshops over three sessions. The students drew and
painted their heroes and gods in strong colour and personal style,
giving Cassandra a crowned profile and a blue diadem and arming Menelaus
with sword and helmet. Their paintings now hang in the exhibition under
their own names, offering visitors a glimpse of Greek mythology through
the eyes of a new generation. In the galleries, students in the white
shirts and crested uniforms of the school can be seen beside their
stands, some next to Apollo and Athena, others by Hector and Priam, with
towering seated statues and cases of Mycenaean gold rising behind them.
The high point arrived on June 5. The Grade 4 class of Socrates II
walked the completed galleries as official guests, among the first to
pass through the exhibition, accompanied by their teachers, Eirini
Tourkomanoli and Andréanne Gauvin-Gagnon. The emotion showed on their
faces. Their eyes lit up at the sight of the authentic vases and
archaeological objects they had known only from books and history class.
Their command of the material impressed the museum's guides, and their
pride reached its peak when they found their own words and artwork
standing as part of an international exhibition of the first rank.
The school described the partnership as an example of education, culture
and community joining forces to create an experience the children would
carry for the rest of their lives, and extended its thanks to the
students and teachers and to the museum team, including Annick Deblois
and Andréane Nadeau, for the collaboration and its result. For
generations, classical Greek, mythology and the great authors of
antiquity formed part of the intellectual training of thousands of
Quebecers, and the project added its youngest contributors yet to that
long thread, giving the children of the diaspora a hand in presenting
the story of their ancestors to the city.
La Grèce des héros. Au temps de Troie runs at the Pointe-à-Callière
museum, in Old Montreal, until March 7, 2027.
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