For me it is a real honor and pleasure to address Prof Evangelos Livieratos on the occasion on awarding the Honorary fellowship of the International Cartographic Association. Such an award should be given to a cartographer of international reputation who has made special contributions to ICA.
All of those criteria are more than appropriately applicable to Prof Evangelos Livieratos.
He is a cartographer in its core sense, understanding maps and cartography as a fundamental instrument of human mankind, bridging knowledge, skills, methods and knowledge from engineering to humanities.
He has undoubted international reputation. He has shaped our understanding and knowledge of “how we can see the maps of the past with the eyes of today” on an international stage.
And he has made numerous special contributions to ICA, allowing the organization to gain profile, benefit from his enthusiasm and capacities and establishing topics through a commission, publications and networks.
Born 1948 in Greece, he demonstrated his visionary interest beyond close domain borders. He graduated from surveying engineering at the National Technical University Athens, received a doctoral degree there as well as a Dr. phil. from Uppsala University in Sweden. He also did a docent dissertation at NTUA and moved his interests from geodesy to cartography to combine engineering and humanities oriented scientific thinking. Several fellowships followed, including such to the Smithsonian Institute, the Humboldt Foundation or from NSF.
In his professional endeavours he contributed heavily to put the Aristotle University on the “international map of leading cartographic institutions”. He helped to found the Hellenic cartographic society, introducing national cartographic conferences in Greece and to found the national center for maps and cartographic heritage. As a career achievement with reference to the history of Greek cartography and of the Modern Greek Enlightenment he refers to the discovery of the existence of two versions of Rigas Velestinlis monumental Charta of Greece, which was highly recognized. This was very much in line with his core activities in geospatial sciences and engineering, particularly in mapping, as his long- lasting interest for arts and humanities offered the grounds for developing a line of thought converging to cartographic heritage, a field coupling the historic and cultural heritage of maps and mapping with the so far integration into the dominant digital mainstream. The foundation of the open access journal e-perimetron is an important element of these activities as well as his numerous efforts as teacher, mentor, scientist and organisator. He serves not only the domain of cartography and cartographic academic institutions but also in entities on organizing higher education in general as well as serving the society as minister of environment, energy and climate change of the Greek government.
In respect to activities in relation to ICA he was active participant and discussant in several ICA activities, such as ICCs. He was chair of the WG Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage (2005–2007), Chair of the ICA Commission on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage (2007–2015) and ICA Commission on Cartographic Heritage into the Digital (2015–2019). He was an active supporter of the UN-endorsed International Map Year and a long- standing Greek National Delegate to ICA.
In referring to his vision I am pleased to cite him as follows:
“His strong vision for 21st century is a creative rapprochement of engineering with humanities, and vice-versa, designed the rapprochement to be open-minded, tolerant, pluralist, extrovert, fresh and attractive in order to develop composite common areas of thinking, study, research and scientific growth for the benefit of both, humanities and engineering, in a world embedded more and more into the digital manifold.“
To me, this is both, a guideline for many of our activities in cartography as well as a template for scientists in general, that we need to look beyond discipline borders and that we should embed what we do in a bigger picture.
I have found Prof. Evangelos Livieratos as an outstanding scientist, teacher, cartographer, friend.
My sincere congratulations to what I find a more than deserved award for an outstanding person!
