The Athenian

The National Gallery of Art, founded ninety years ago, was finally inaugurated on May 17. A section of the gallery has been open for several years, but the new museum provides a home for the gallery’s permanent collection which has long been stored in various warehouses in Athens.

The traditional mosaic technique involves the inlay of a variety of materials: precious or semiprecious stones, tile, glass — or even the ubiquitous pebble. Hoklakia is the modern Greek term for pebble mosaic surfaces.

Fair Prospects is British poet Glyn Hughes’s sagacious and affectionate journal of his first visit to Greece in 1973 during the turbulent period that witnessed the swan song of the dictatorship and its final collapse on July 23, 1974. By September, Hughes and his wife Roya visit Sifnos where they stay with their friend Ariadne Xenakis. This is the last of three excerpts from Fair Prospects which was published in July by Victor Gollancz, London.

Although an immense amount of work has been expended on the theory of ancient music, comparatively little is known about how ancient melody actually sounded. Ancient music was a product of the sharing of all citizens, however, and the poet who wrote the tragedies and composed his own music always had his fellow citizens in mind and articulated their experiences through the universal language of myth. It is this ancient concept of oneness —of poet, composer, and people— that Mikis Theodorakis has sought in his music for classical drama.

On August 2, in the Odeon of Herod Atticus, the Athens State Orchestra will perform Finikos, a rarely-heard, early work by Yanni Christou, who died in 1970 at the age of forty-four. Christou is today considered to be one of Greece’s most original composers, and is slowly winning international recognition.

Although many beautiful and historic houses grace the island of Hydra, the richest and most impressive is that known as the Koundouriotis House.