They now have teamed up with internationally award-winning writer N.J. Slabbert to produce a multimedia project, THE SWORD OF ZEUS: THE HIDDEN STORY OF HOW GREECE SHAPED WORLD WAR II.

Em Saks, Project Director for Slabbert’s publisher, Montagu House, has invited Hellenes worldwide to share family WWII memories for possible use in a ZEUS film, books, educational web site and interactive DVD. Details can be found at http://www.theswordofzeus.info.

Slabbert’s advisory team, chaired by Melissaratos, includes former Walt Disney Imagineering Executive Vice President Gilbert F. Decker, who has also served as Chairman of the U.S. Army Science Board; former NATO liaison expert and Greek Army Brigadier General Stergios Smirlis; and industrialist Dr. Peter Yiannos, a well-known leader in Hellenic cultural organizations.

The first ZEUS book, due out in summer, is a prose narrative that will illuminate Greece’s WWII role in what Slabbert believes will be unexpected ways. A graphic novel will follow, “using illustrations to tell the tale of Greece’s role in a way that will appeal to a wide band of age groups.” The related film will be shot in Greece and elsewhere in Europe.

Melissaratos, senior advisor to the president of Johns Hopkins University, is a key champion of the project, which he sees as “a major Hellenic event.” He was Maryland’s Business and Economic Development Secretary from 2003 to 2007. He worked for Westinghouse Electric Corporation 32 years, retiring as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President for Science and Technology. Earlier he was Chief Operations Officer for the company's Defense Electronics Group, responsible for $3.2 billion dollars in sales.

Stavrakis is CEO and founder of Adcor, a manufacturing concern serving the aerospace, telecommunications, defense and other industries. He credits his entrepreneurial skills to the inspiration of his immigrant father, Kosta Stavrakis, who built a machine shop business in the 1960s. He also co-owns Baltimore’s elegant Blue Hill Tavern restaurant, having previously co-owned Finn Maccool’s, a successful pub on Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill.

Stavrakis decided to become a funder of ZEUS after learning about the project from Melissaratos. “I was excited,” he explains, “by the very title of the project and by the concept of honoring my parents’ generation of Greeks who went through WWII and the challenges that followed it.”