Costa Carras

Costa Carras, a co-founder both of the Center and of the Association for Democracy in the Balkans, has had long and varied experience in a variety of fields, having at various times been active in business, politics, conservation, cultural matters, and religion.

His political activity dates from the years of the opposition to the Greek dictatorship and continued with the founding of ''Friends of Cyprus'' in London in 1974. He has attended Wilton Park and Ditchley Park conferences of Turkey, Greek-Turkish relations and the Cyprus problem, and was for 18 years a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Meetings. An initiator of contacts between the Greek and Turkish business communities in 1985, he is currently the Greek Coordinator of the Greek-Turkish Forum.

Since 1997, Co-Chairman of the Business Advisory Council of the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI), he had earlier been a Board member of the Union of Greek Shipowners (1975-1984) and Vice-Chairman of the Greek Shipping Cooperation committee in London, where he lived until 1995, and where he also served a s first Chairman of the Hellenic Foundation.

His involvement in conservation and the ecology movement began in 1972 when he co-founded Greece's leading environmental organization, Elliniki Etairia, yia tin Prostasia tou Perivallontos kai tis Politistikis Klironomias (Hellenic Society for the Protection of the Environment and the Cultural Heritage). He served as its first chairman and is today again a Board Member, also representing the Society in Europa Nostra, the Federation of European Conservation Organizations, where he is a Vice-Chairman. Mr. Carras also founded and remains Vice-Chairman of the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage, USA.

The organizer of the ground-breaking 1998 meeting on Religion and the Environment in Patmos, Mr. Carras served as the Co-Chairman of the British Council of Churches' Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine. His paper on The Doctrine of the Trinity in Relation to Political Action and Thought is published in the volume of papers presented to the Commission. He co-edited Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World (SPGU, 1996), which includes his article, ''The Holy Trinity, the Church and Politics in a Secular World.'' He is an Archon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. He served since its inception in 1978 on the Assembly of the Diocese of Sourozh, Britain, whose Chairmanship he left in 1999.

His published works include 3,000 Years of Greek Identity - Myth or Reality (1984) and contributions to Democracy and Civil Society in the Balkans (1996). Mr. Carras holds a Double First in Ancient Greek and Latin Literature; and in Philosophy and Ancient History from Trinity College, Oxford. He also studied economics for a year at the Littauer School of Public Administration, Harvard. He is married with two children.