It differs uniquely from other cities’ Cultural Centers – it hasn’t been built yet, and who knows, there is still a possibility that it never will be. Urban ideas go in and out of fashion, and maybe Athens, which conceived early and appears to be producing late, may totally avoid this awkward moment in the spiritual development of a modern city.
On May 9, notwithstanding, President Karamanlis laid the cornerstone for the Cultural Center of Athens. Like most local projects it has a long and tortuous past, a controversial present, and nothing absolutely definite can yet be said about its future. The site of the center is a twenty-five acre triangle, mostly park, lying between Queen Sofias and King Constantine I Avenues with Rigillis Street forming its base, and its apex reaching opposite the Athens Hilton. The only structures standing today in this area are the Athens Odeion, the Sarogleion, or Military Officers’ Club, the Byzantine Museum, the War Museum, and two other smaller buildings.
Twenty-seven years ago, long before even the idea of Lincoln Center and Beaubourg had been hatched in the minds of David Rockefeller and Georges Pompidou, some of this area was designated as a center for cultural activities by Royal Decree. Two years later, in 1956, another decree declared the area — now including the Rizarion School property – more specifically as The Cultural Center of Athens.
For the next twenty years the idea lay fallow as the pine trees grew up within the triangle and the hotels and apartment blocks grew up around it, transforming this rather scruffy property into an oasis of greenery. The only cultural contribution of the seven-year Junta to this area was the War Museum, a ponderous structure surrounded by rockets, missiles, and old airplanes. In 1976, however, an open competition under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture was announced by which architects and city planners were asked to submit ideas and plans which would best utilize the area for cultural purposes while preserving as much of the park as possible. A committee was appointed which would discuss the plans submitted and encourage an open dialogue as to the character and function of the center and the best methods for its execution.
Shortly after this, however, the project began to attract the attentions of the Ministry of Public Works and, in particular, the Office of the Prime Minister. While these government agencies consulted with some members originally concerned with the project, the proposals of the former committee were increasingly set aside.
Late in 1979 preparations were begun to clear the site of insignificant or decrepit buildings and debris and then quite suddenly the whole project was placed in the hands of the Land Development Company created for this purpose and headed by the noted architect, Professor George Kandylis. The vision of an Athenian “Beaubourg”, therefore, became entrusted to the hands of Professor Kandylis and the then Prime Minister, Constantine Karamanlis, who had been taking an increasingly personal interest in the project, and as President today has continued to do so.
Shortly before the laying of the cornerstone last month, many details regarding the actual buildings and their functions were revealed. The first phase will see the construction of three buildings which will occupy about one-tenth of the whole area: the Center of Music and Dance, the Opera House, and the Center for Performing Arts. The first two buildings will communicate with one another and with the already existing Odeion on the north side of Rigillis Street. The Opera House will have 700 seats, and there will be parking accommodations for 700 cars. Thus every opera enthusiast can come in his own car. The third building, the Center for Performing Arts, will be the most prominent in the complex. It will include a theater with a capacity of 1500 seats which can accommodate visiting companies from abroad and a festival of performances in winter; an area of six hundred square meters to be used by Greek groups, and two other halls suitable for experimental theater and rehearsal space.
At a later stage, the present War Museum will be architecturally altered – its heavy upper protruding storey removed — and turned into the Administration Headquarters which will also provide information on the cultural activities not only at the Center but throughout the country. There will also be halls for lectures and space for temporary exhibitions. The present contents of the War Museum will be transferred to the central building of the Evelpidon Cadet School.
Finally, the Museum of the Historical Development of Greek Art will rise next to the Administration building of Rizaris Street. It will function as “an informative and didactic center presenting the history of Greece through the evolution of Greek art”.
The project will be complete in five years and will be largely financed by a national cultural lottery (Politistiko Laheio), a phrase which has been unfortunately shortened to the word Polla (a lot). The profits from this weekly or monthly lottery will be divided equally between the Cultural Center of Athens and all the other similar centers around the country.
It must be admitted that this rich and extensive menu of cultural fare and the proposed means for dishing it up have caused a good deal of indigestion to a growing number of individuals and organizations which themselves are concerned with the city’s cultural life. They are bringing up certain basic questions: namely, is it necessary that culture have a center? If there is a center, must it be in this particular spot? If in this spot, what sort of culture is to be cultivated?
The administrative evolution of the whole project has in the first place caused resentment in some quarters. Five years ago when the open competition was announced, open discussion appeared to be favored; today it is felt to be a closed operation in the hands of government agencies which discourage democratic dialogue.
Another concern is that Athens has drastically changed since 1954 when the Center was officially decreed, and even since 1976 when the competition was announced. Population density has greatly increased; open green areas have decreased; and the problem of traffic congestion has become overwhelming. It is now pointedly being remarked that within a fifteen-minute walk of the present site there are empty, misused or unfinished buildings which could be either completed or restored and suitably house many cultural functions. For instance, just up Queen Sofias Avenue there is the hulking Hall of the Friends of Music which is unfinished for lack of funds and, across the way, two adjacent, neoclassical structures, the Aretaieion and the Aigiteion, which have outlived their role as adequate hospitals. Farther away, but in central Athens, the Mavromichalis house, falling apart in Amalias Avenue, could make a fine museum, and for theater there is the recently completed wing of the National Theater.
The argument runs that the cultural activities now designated for the Center can function in already existing buildings which, by being not clustered together but still in the center of the city, can avoid the traffic congestion which traditional performing arts create. The argument concludes that the area be left as it is now, since open green areas have a higher priority for the Athens of today.
The controversy over the Center reaches its most interesting cultural level, however, when the question, “What sort of culture?” is asked. This is where the word “Beaubourg” has been most bandied about. The critics of the present Center suggest that the original concept of the kind of culture to be offered has been altered: that it is not going to be a lively, organic expression of today’s reality, drawing a young, wide and enthusiastic public and functioning like the Pompidou Center, but a more traditional repository of inherited values, set apart, raised lip, appealing to the few, eschewing an exciting, experimental environment which contemporary Greek culture really needs today and substituting for it a safe, institutionalized, moribund approach that is “informative and didactic”.
As one city-planner wrote recently, “Why can’t we put it simply and acknowledge that the vision of a Cultural Center was superseded before it could ever be built? Can’t we accept the idea that the creation of a ‘Karamanlis Park’ may be as noble and hospitable a concept as the creation of a Cultural Center?”
In spite of opposition, the cornerstone was laid but this in no way silenced the critics who grew even noisier during the month of May, pointing to the inflation, the traffic, the ‘cloud’, the economic stagnation and the coming elections as reasons for — if not cancelling the project — at least waiting awhile before letting the bulldozers in. One wonders if Pericles and Phidias, in a much earlier period of Athenian democracy, did not have to face similar criticism from this city’s contentious citizens when the were planning their Cultural Center up on the Acropolis.
Voice and Verse
With the death of Paul Nord on April 23 at the age of eighty-two, the world of Athenian journalism lost one of its most beloved members who was also one of its most liberal defenders. Born in Athens and a graduate of the Faculty of Law at the University of Athens, Nord — whose real name was Nikos Nikolaidis — became widely known in the 1930s as a master of short political verses in a long satirical tradition much admired in Athenian journalism, which had reached its peak towards the end of the nineteenth century. Often set in acrostic form, full of outrageous rhymes, witty puns and topical allusions, they were as technically skillful as they were satirically barbed. A particularly brilliant set of these verses aimed at the dictatorship and the person of General Metaxas forced him to flee the country in 1937.
He went to America where he worked for a number of years in Hollywood and where he married the actress Aliki Theodoridou, the daughter of Kyvelli, herself a legend of the Athenian stage, who at one time had been married to George Papandreou. This family tie led them to befriend the young Andreas Papandreou, present leader of the Opposition party PA.SO.K., when he first came to the US, and they assisted him in the pursuit of his studies in political economy.
In the fifties Nord and his wife returned to Greece where his journalistic career was again interrupted by the emergence of the Junta in 1967. He returned to the States and as a ‘Sam Johnson of Ninth Avenue Cafes’ often regaled both his Greek and American listeners with observations on both cultures which were always humorous, observant and to the point. Feeling, however, that the US was giving support to the Junta, he moved to Sweden. In 1974 he was back in Greece.
In recent years he wrote his political graffiti in ‘Voice and Verse’, a regular column of the English-language Athens News. Although Nord was accomplished in English, he was unable to transmit to that language the gifts which he commanded in Greek. This was partly because English today lacks the tradition of political satire in verse which was his forte. (He would have been more at home with the Grub Street diction of Augustan London.) Most likely his talents for inventing words, his playful dexterity with grammar and his verbal fireworks could only be realized within the matrix of the Greek language. It is for these that he will be chiefly remembered.
