Comprising a triangle with its base on Rigillis Street and its apex at the juncture of King Constantine and Queen Sofia Avenues in front of the Hilton Hotel, the twenty-eight acre (110 stremmata) site will make it one of the most expansive cultural centres in the world. This area will include the block on which the National Gallery now stands as well as that section of King Constantine Avenue which at present divides it from the Rizarion area. Traffic will be diverted from Queen Sofia Avenue to Michalakopoulou behind the gallery. Although much of the area is vacant today, there are several valuable structures, like Cleanthes’ Ilissia Palace built for the Duchesse de Plaisance and now housing the Byzantine Museum, several churches, and the possible restoration of a building of the now ramshackled and abandoned Rizarion School. These will be incorporated into the new Cultural Centre.
The rest will be demolished, or altered, as in the case of the Conservatory at Truman Square, an undistinguished edifice built hardly ten years ago which manages to be simple and ugly at the same time. The present War Museum, on Queen Sofia, a monument of the Junta years, will have its upper overhanging storey removed and the building will be dedicated to some less polemical art. It has been proposed that the site of the already demolished military apartment block on King Constantine Avenue be made into a lake. Indeed, over two-thirds of the entire area will become a park.
Among the complexes that are rising, there will be a centre of Fine Arts. This will include the present National Picture Gallery, a Museum of , Contemporary Arts, a sculpture gallery and a building to house the valuable Koutlidis Collection of Greek paintings.
A Centre of Dramatic Arts will include two theatres, one of which will be made suitable for operatic performances and both equipped to attract foreign theatre and opera companies which until now have largely played in outdoor theatres only in summer. The Music Centre will house the newly founded Musical Academy, the State Orchestra of Athens and the National School of Dance.
A nation-wide architectural competition was held in 1977 for designs of the Cultural Centre and the final working out of the plans is being based on these. It appears, however, that the government seriously intends that the Centre function as a truly organic whole in the contemporary sense. Not, that is, just as a group of buildings housing exhibitions and performances to be visited on set dates or at set hours, but to function as a total cultural environment, indoors and out-of-doors, at all times of day and evening, for all seasons.
Beneath the cultural centre there will be an underground garage, and even a metro station, though where exactly the metro will lead is a question still under debate. An underground transit system has been discussed for years without any very clear results. In
fact, the subterranean part of the scheme is the only one to have qualms about. Any form of municipal digging arouses the curiosity of archaeologists and if, God forbid, there should turn up under it all, say, a Middle Minoan IIIB Palace, the whole project might come under jeopardy. The Cultural Centre is not only a social necessity but the kind of urban improvement which the city desperately needs. It may also renew a sense of confidence and enthusiasm for a city which, over the last two decades, has been exploited by its developers and abused by its inhabitants. The vitality of a city cannot be maintained when its citizens spend all week looking forward to the weekend when they can get away from it. No city can be sustained if its natives spend all their conversational hours complaining about it. An unloved city, like an unloved individual, is bound to deteriorate or wither away. Perhaps the Cultural Centre will help restore a happier relationship between the Athenian and his home.
La Cigale et la Fourmi
THE announcement by the International Institute of Bank Depositors that Greeks make the smallest bank cash deposits in Europe can come as no surprise. But as a nation that removes cash from banks it must rate very high. One reason, of course, is the inflation rate, which encourages people to invest in areas like real estate which promise a higher rate of return. Although rent rises are governed by law, in reality they are not governed at all. There is also investment in cars, antiques, clothing, flat silver, paintings, postage stamps and even Junta coins as they go out of circulation.
Savings accounts imply thrift. For years economists tried to persuade people to rip open their mattresses and place their savings in the bank. What the people did was to open their mattresses and spend the contents. And inflation contributed to the nation’s losing what little common sense it had about the real
value of money in the first place.
By custom, thrift has always been equated with niggardliness and prodigality has been considered a social virtue. When Greece was poor, marriage and baptismal feasts were always lavish. The traditional village dowry revealed the national passion for collecting material things with such a collection of sheeting and blankets as might stock a hotel and enough pieces of underwear for the groom to clothe himself for a hundred years. Even those fine old traditions, generosity and hospitality, are partly derived from the desire to make a big public splash. Huge displays of food — and the equally huge consumption thereof — may have been a rather literal way to display well-being in times of want. Indeed, the starving condition of Greece during the German occupation is believed by many to govern habits of over-eating today. In any case, affluence has only increased the love of consuming, collecting and spending.
The International Institute of Bank Depositors may look with dismay at a country which despises money while it is enjoying wealth. Perhaps in the moral order of things, however, Greeks have improved on the tight-fisted, Northern European fable of La Fontaine, by combining the accumulative instincts of the ant with the cicada’s heedlessness of winter and its love of summer and song.
Attic Paradise Lost
EVEN today when the most unlikely events fail to surprise the casual reader of newspapers, the idea of giraffes nibbling savannah grass on the slopes of Lycabettus and of hippopotamuses floating in the Ilissus is still unnerving. Knowing now that such things happened about seven million years ago — adding or subtracting one or two — helps keep the thought at a safe distance. But in the more limited scope of pre-Darwinian days when the first Pikermi fossils were found in the 1830s and when the general public and most scientists still clung to the biblical belief that the world was created in 4004 B.C. (at 9 a.m. on October 26, to be precise), the idea — and the physical discovery — of a group of fossilized animals sixteen kilometres east of Athens which resemble in many ways those of East Africa today, was shattering.
It is only this change in our concept of the past that makes the discoveries announced by the geologist and paleontologist Nicholas Symeonidis a month ago less startling, for his finds at Pikermi are among the most spectacular of all.
The petrified bones of an elephant, a rhinoceros, the small ancestors of the present horse, monkeys, tortoises all found together might at first lead the imaginative observer to believe that a still undocumented greater being of the Miocene Period, a sort of late Tertiary Period Herod Atticus, kept a zoo which was suddenly destroyed by some geological ancestor of the Santorini volcano.
If the first Pikermi finds put the final wet blanket on the Deluge theory of the past, the details of the discovery are among the most entertaining in the often comic annals of paleontology.
In 1838 a Bavarian soldier on furlough was going about the beer halls of Munich bragging that he had found a human skull studded with diamonds while on duty in Greece. The police became interested, arrested him and accused him of grave-robbery. Luckily, the scientist, Andreas Wagner, also became interested and, on the discovery that the skull was really that of a Tertiary Period ape and that the so-called diamonds were in fact crystals, the soldier was set free. Mesopithecus pendelicus, or the Pikermi ape, thus became the first proof that anthropoid apes lived millions of years earlier than was believed at the time.
The soldier identified the spot where he found the skull as the Megalorevma ravine near Pikermi and for many decades it became the favourite haunt of fossil collectors. Iraklis Mitsopoulos and Andreas Skoufos, as well as Albert Gaudry, were among the scientists to uncover elephants, ancient giraffes, black apes, antelopes and gazelles of all kinds, sabre tooth tigers, ground hogs and hyenas, but above all the monstrous but extinct dinothere which, standing fifteen feet high, was then the largest “antideluvian” animal yet found. Placing this creature within a few thousand years of Homer, let alone the Garden of Eden, terrified paleontologists, theologians and classicists alike. It was not until Darwinian evolution won acceptance that Attica could logically become a long-lost African paradise.
This extraordinary assortment of animals whose bones have all been found in one place has been ascribed to a drought, although when one thinks of the changing fashions in catastrophe theories in regard to yesterday’s Minoan world, it is perhaps best to be cautious about what may have happened seven million years ago.
In any case, the site of the new discoveries is to the left of the road as it leads out of Pikermi towards Rafina. It lies conveniently near a wine factory, as it might be a good idea to stop there for a quick pick-me-up after visiting this strange site.
The Psychedelic Trip of the Caryatids
THE removal of the Caryatids has not only left a yawning gap on the east side of the Erechtheum. It has left an open wound in the cultural consciousness of all those who believe in the intrinsic value of the Greek heritage. The Caryatids were a curiosity. As a combination of sculpture and architecture, neo-classical art historians at one time or another accused them of being neither this nor that, an eclectic combination verging on bad taste. Ironically, their removal in October dramatized their immensely real and relevant meaning. As human sculptures they exemplified humanity; as architectural forms they personified humanity in an environment to which it was perfectly attuned. And even more ironically, it was an environment man-made that destroyed them. As the Caryatids, one by one, swathed in gypsum bandages, were derricked up like cattle and rattled along the little railings set down for them less than a hundred metres away to the Acropolis Museum, a world-wide cultural disaster was publicly revealed by a pathetically short voyage. The Greek ideal, in simple, represents man, whether in stress or in harmony, in a natural equilibrium with the world he lives in. This equilibrium has been disastrously upset and man has fouled his own nest. The ideal still exists, and there are hopeful signs that consciousness of it is broadening. Nevertheless, the brief voyage of the Caryatids is a terrible and total condemnation of our time.
