In 1973, Michalis Setatos was elected a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Modern Greek Studies, as a successor to Nikolaos Andriotis whose foremost pupil and epigone he was. A staunch demoticist, as was only natural, he embraced M. Triandaphyllidis’ visions and served his Foundation in the capacity of President, Vice-president or Member of the Board of Directors for 44 years. Michalis Setatos belongs to the generation that dared launch the compilation of an unabridged modern Dictionary of Standard Modern Greek [Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής], which he supervised through to completion, together with Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou and Dimitris Lypourlis. That was also the first time the Institute ventured to publish books for the teaching of Greek as a foreign language. The initiative and the proposal to translate the Abridged Modern Greek Grammar [Μικρή νεοελληνική γραμματική] by Μ. Triandaphyllidis into (currently 14) foreign languages was also his. He was able to verify the translators’ competence and the quality of the translations himself, thanks to his extraordinary language skills (37 languages, in their ancient, medieval and modern forms).
The Institute for Modern Greek Studies was no doubt M. Setatos’s greatest love. Over and above his long term on the Institute’s Board of Directors, marked by a deep commitment to the personality and the work of its founder, his love was also expressed by endowing the Institute with his real estate and his unique library. He has also passed to the Institute, following his wishes and with the consent of his beloved sister, Eleni, his physical and electronic archive containing some 100 unpublished articles, most of them completed. The publication of such articles is a self-evident and desirable task for the Institute. They will gradually be uploaded on this website, following appropriate editing, and will be freely accessible to all so as to reach as large a public as possible.
The Institute has already organized the “1st International Conference on Koine, koines and the formation of Standard Modern Greek” (Thessaloniki, November 3-4, 2017) in memoriam of Michalis Setatos, not only in recognition of his long-standing contribution to the Institute, but also because he devoted the bulk of his long scholarly work to the study and description of Standard Modern Greek.
