Pedro Olalla

Pedro Olalla Gonzalez de la Vega was born in the city of Oviedo, Spain, in 1966, where he studied Philology, Art History, and Philosophy, earning his degree in Romance Philology. In 1994, he moved to Athens to pursue research, creation, and teaching in a country with which he had maintained a close relationship for ten years prior. He has served as a professor of Modern Greek at the University of Oviedo and as a lecturer of Spanish at Syracuse University in New York. In Greece, he spent three years as the director of the Cultural Bulletin of the Spanish Embassy and as the editor-in-chief of the bilingual monthly magazine "El Sol de Atenas." Currently, he is a professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Interdepartmental Postgraduate Program in Translation-Translation Studies), the Hellenic Parliament, and the Cervantes Institute. As a photographer, he has held more than thirty solo exhibitions in Spain and other countries. As an author, he has published literary and cultural works and over a hundred articles and studies on Greek culture and Spain. As a lexicographer, he works with a scholarship from the A. G. Leventis Foundation. As a researcher and photographer, he has collaborated with specialized publishers such as National Geographic, Thames & Hudson, Altair, Road Editions, among others. Moreover, thanks to his multifaceted spirit, he has undertaken a long series of projects in recent years that connect the two cultures: a book-exhibition inspired by the Cyclades, various Modern Greek courses for Spaniards in Spain and Greece, lectures and seminars on the Spanish language and culture, cultural tours in Greece and Spain, dubbing a TV series on Alexander the Great into Spanish, translating books, essays, and lectures into Spanish, translating the biography of Queen Sofia into Greek, and more. In 1999, he received a scholarship from the A. S. Onassis Foundation to conduct research for the creation of the Mythological Atlas of Greece (mapping, photographing, and philological documentation, awarded the Academy of Athens Prize in 2002), a project for which, since 1995, he has traveled over one hundred thousand kilometers in Greece following the traces of ancient myths. For his work in the field of Greek mythology, he has been an invited speaker at the Universities of Thrace, the Aegean, Athens, College Year in Athens, Onassis Foundation New York, National Hellenic Research Foundation, Philekpaideutiki Etaireia, National Book Centre, and other institutions and media in Greece and abroad. For his entire body of work and his contribution to promoting Greek culture, he has received, among other significant honors, the honorary title of Ambassador of Hellenism.