To the cast and creative team of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey,
We write to you as Greeks, not as fragments of antiquity, not as echoes from museum displays, and not as characters sealed in marble, but as a living people whose story has never stopped being written.
First, we wish you well.
Cinema has always carried the power to reimagine ancient texts, to cross borders of language and time, and to reintroduce old stories to new generations. Homer’s Odyssey belongs, in many ways, to the shared cultural imagination of humanity. We understand the ambition behind bringing it to the screen on a global scale, and we recognise the artistic tradition of reinterpretation that has surrounded these epics for centuries.
But we also ask you to consider something that is often overlooked in modern retellings of Greek stories.
We did not vanish.
Greek people did not disappear after the age of myth. Greek culture was not frozen in classical marble. Greek language was not extinguished in antiquity.
We are still here.
For more than 3,000 continuous years, Greek identity has persisted through transformation rather than disappearance. From the Mycenaean world that gave rise to the Homeric epics, through the Classical city-states of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes, into the Hellenistic period that spread Greek language and thought across the Mediterranean under Alexander’s successors, through the Roman and Byzantine eras where Greek remained a dominant language of administration, philosophy, and theology, into the Ottoman centuries where identity was preserved through language, faith, and community, and finally into the modern Greek state that emerged through revolution and continues today within Europe and the wider world.
At every stage, something essential remained unbroken: language, memory, and cultural continuity.
Greek is still spoken today, the oldest continuously surviving language in Europe. Not reconstructed. Not revived. But lived.
That continuity matters when stories like The Odyssey are retold.
Odysseus is not only a universal symbol of endurance, struggle, and homecoming. He is also part of a cultural inheritance that has been carried through every one of those historical layers — retold by Byzantine scholars, preserved in manuscripts copied through the medieval world, studied during the Renaissance, and still taught, spoken, and reinterpreted in Greece today.
This is why conversations about representation matter deeply to us.
We are not asking for exclusion or limitation. We are not arguing against diversity, nor against reinterpretation. Greek culture itself has always been shaped by exchange, migration, and encounter across centuries.
What we are asking is something simpler and more human.
That when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them.
In recent years, the film industry has rightly placed increasing emphasis on representation; ensuring that cultures are acknowledged, voices are included, and lived experience is not erased in the process of storytelling. Indigenous stories increasingly involve Indigenous voices. Cultural consultation is becoming more standard practice. Identity is treated as part of artistic responsibility.
We ask only that this awareness extend to Greek heritage as well.
Not because Greek identity is fragile, but because it is continuous.
In discussions around The Odyssey, some have argued that mythology belongs to the world and should not be bound by cultural origin. Others see casting diversity as a reflection of the modern global audience rather than historical specificity.
We understand those perspectives. But universality does not require disconnection from origin.
A story can belong to humanity while still recognising the people and language from which it first emerged.
We say this not in anger, but in recognition.
Because too often, Greek history is treated as something that ended rather than something that continued. As if Greece exists only in a classical past, rather than through Byzantine continuity, through Ottoman endurance, through revolutionary rebirth, and into the present day; in cities, villages, islands, and diaspora communities across the world.
So as you step into Homer’s world - into seas, wanderings, gods, and returning kings - we ask that you carry this awareness with you:
That Greece is not only a setting in antiquity.
It is a living country.
Greek people are not historical figures.
We are contemporaries.
And when future opportunities arise to tell stories from any period of Greek history - ancient, medieval, or modern - we hope you will remember that Greek heritage is not absent from those stories. It is present, living, and still speaking for itself.
We wish you success with the film, and respect for the craft that brings such an epic to life. And we hope it contributes to cinema that continues to expand imagination without erasing origin.
We did not vanish.
We are still here.
Through Mycenaean echoes, through Classical philosophy, through Hellenistic expansion, through Byzantine continuity, through Ottoman endurance, through modern nationhood - we remain.
Always have been.
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Addendum: Given Hollywood's and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' rules and insistence for minority representation, authenticity and diversity, where are the Greeks, or the Greek Americans in this Greek story?
The Odyssey Cast: Matt Damon (American – English, Finnish and Scottish ancestry), Tom Holland (English), Anne Hathaway (American – Irish, French and English ancestry), Zendaya (African-American, German and Scottish ancestry), Lupita Nyong'o (Kenyan-Mexican), Charlize Theron (South African – Afrikaner heritage), Robert Pattinson (English), Jon Bernthal (American – Jewish ancestry), John Leguizamo (Colombian-American), Benny Safdie (American – Syrian-Jewish ancestry), Himesh Patel (British – Indian Gujarati heritage), Jovan Adepo (Nigerian-American/British), Mia Goth (Brazilian-English heritage)
