Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, PA
June 10 2006
Celebration of nations
By Mike Wereschagin
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, June 10, 2006
As World War II bled into Greece, John Travlos worked desperately to
keep one last promise.
The Greek architect had nearly finished two marble pilasters for a
classroom he designed to showcase Greek culture in the University of
Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, which celebrates the 80th
anniversary of the Nationality Room Program on Sunday.
While workers readied Travlos’ pilasters for shipping, one cracked.
Principles of classic Greek architecture demanded symmetry, but with
the Italian army massing on Greece’s border, Travlos didn’t have time
to cut a replacement. So he ordered his men to etch a matching crack
in the companion pilaster and load them onto the waiting ship,
Excalibur.
The Excalibur would be the last American ship allowed to leave the
Mediterranean Sea before Italian troops invaded Greece on Oct. 28,
1940. The Nazis followed in April 1941, and the Greek resistance,
ferocious but out-gunned, crumbled a few weeks later.
In November 1941, Travlos huddled under a blanket in his apartment
closet listening to banned radio broadcasts from the BBC.
Unexpectedly, Greek ecclesiastical music poured from the speaker, and
Travlos listened to the people of Pittsburgh consecrate his working
monument to Greece.
“We are known the world over,” said Maxine Bruhns, director of the 26
Nationality Rooms in Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning. Sunday’s
celebration runs from 2 to 4 p.m.
The first four rooms — German, Russian, Scottish and Swedish
classrooms — were dedicated July 8, 1938, the year after the
Cathedral opened. Another 15 rooms opened before 1958. Almost 30
years passed before the next room — the Israel Heritage Classroom —
was completed in 1987. Six have opened since then, and eight more are
in the works.
Each room serves as a museum, a working classroom and a way for
people to connect to their ancestral roots. Ethnic communities plan
and pay for a Nationality Room to be constructed inside one of the
Cathedral’s existing classrooms.
The idea, hatched in 1926 by then-Chancellor John Bowman and Ruth
Crawford Mitchell, Bruhns’ predecessor, was to pay tribute to
immigrants and give them a stake in the university by involving them
in the Cathedral’s creation.
“Bowman realized that these people had built the city, and many
planned to go back to Slovakia or the Ukraine,” Bruhns said. “If he
could get through to them that this was their building, then they
would stay and have their children study here.”
Mitchell invited the region’s ethnic communities to design the first
rooms; since then, groups have come to the university to propose
rooms.
To have a Nationality Room in the Cathedral of Learning conveys to
ethnic communities that their heritage merits pride, which is
reflected in the meticulous beauty and uniqueness of each room.
“I have two school-age children,” said Enigul Sonmez-Alpan, director
of fundraising for the committee planning a Turkish room. “I am so
thrilled they will be able to drive by the cathedral and know there
is a Turkish room and know that mom had something to do with it.”
At the dedication ceremony for the Ukrainian room in June 1990,the
year before Ukraine became a sovereign nation, “a woman tugs me on
the sleeve and says, ‘Maxine, now we’re as good as everybody else,'”
Bruhns said.
Creating a room takes years, and each presents its own challenges.
The committee planning the Welsh room, which is slated for completion
before 2008, formed five years ago. Designers have struggled to
reproduce a 17th century Longhouse church inside a modern classroom,
while integrating 21st century technology such as high-definition
projectors.
The Israel Heritage Classroom took 20 years to complete because every
time Israel went to war, donors sent their money to Israel rather
than to fundraising efforts for the room, Bruhns said.
Bruhns, a world traveler and West Virginia native, slides seamlessly
between languages and accents when telling stories of the rooms, such
as the time Nikita Khrushchev complained during his 1959 visit that
the Russian room looked nothing like Russia, or when the Dalai Lama
blissfully blessed the design for the Indian room during her private
audience with him in 1998.
The English room was built in part with rubble from the British House
of Commons, destroyed during World War II. When university carpenters
got the wood panels that now line the front of the room, they had to
clean off an outer layer blackened by the Luftwaffe’s bombs. Today,
the panels shine.
Sealed behind a stone in the Armenian room are the thumbprints of
Armenians who survived their forced exodus during World War I. Beside
their marks is the handprint of an infant.
Sometimes, a room outlasts its nation. Members of ethnic groups from
the former Yugoslavia, which unraveled in the 1990s, alternately
praise and deride Bruhns for continuing to call the room the Yugoslav
room. Chinese tourists often titter at the concrete sun above the
door to the Chinese room. When the room was dedicated in 1939, the
sun was China’s symbol, but after the communist revolution it became
rival Taiwan’s symbol.
That permanence inspires others, though.
“Something that’s going to be on permanent display is very
significant. Culture and history are very permanent,” Sonmez-Alpan
said.
The school is simply keeping a promise to people like John Travlos
who built the Nationality Rooms, Bruhns said.
Travlos died in 1981 without seeing the room he designed, Bruhns
said. Had he visited, however, there would have been no surprises. It
remains unchanged from the night he hunkered in his closet, listening
quietly to its dedication.
Bruhns said, “The rooms will be here as long as the building stands.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
