The art of travel: letter from Athens

Roaming the backstreets on a spring morning, it occurs to me that Athens has always produced culture from catastrophe. The Asia Minor refugees of 1922, of which my father was one, brought rembetika, the haunting urban blues of displacement, along with Eastern foods served in the city’s tavernas to this day. The fall of the military junta in 1974 released a decade’s worth of suppressed creative energy, and the more recent financial collapse of the 2010s has left in its wake a contemporary cultural scene that’s only now becoming fully legible.

Greece was named a top-performing economy in the OECD for two years running by The Economist, a remarkable turnaround for a country that was a byword for fiscal failure not so long ago. But statistics can’t explain the unique texture of what evolved in the city’s artistic community from those years of austerity.

‘The economic crisis brought the real character of Athens to the surface,’ designer Savvas Laz tells me. ‘It took away all the bling, and the core of Athens appeared, edgy but realistic. It’s a city of real people with their own paths.’ Alison Duncan, Australia’s Ambassador to Greece, sees a generational dimension to the transformation. ‘A lot of it comes from poverty, from resistance,’ she says. Younger Athenians looked at the wreckage their parents’ generation had presided over and decided to build something entirely their own.

That energy also proved magnetic to outsiders. As rents in Berlin and London soared, creative workers arrived to find studios available for just 200 euros a month. And since there were fewer public exhibitions during the financial crisis, recalls gallerist Marina Athanasiadou, the artists ‘stayed still and they produced’.

The neighbourhoods of Athens carry their own stories. Koukaki, Keramikos, Metaxourgeio and Psyri were each transformed by cheap rents, creative energy, and – for now, anyway – are free of major urban redevelopment. Exarchia, the city’s anarchist heartland, has absorbed waves of artistic newcomers without losing its character. ‘It hasn’t been gentrified in the way many inner-city neighbourhoods in other parts of the world have,’ observes Duncan. American photographer Byron Smith chose Athens as his base after covering the 2015 refugee crisis. ‘I fell in love with the place, with all its contradictions,’ he says, drawn also by its hub location between Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The institutional infrastructure has caught up too. The National Museum of Contemporary Art, EMΣT, housed in the former FIX brewery, has established itself as a leading European contemporary art museum. The nearby Acropolis Museum – Bernard Tschumi’s glass-floored masterpiece at the foot of the sacred rock – draws over a million visitors a year. Empty gaps in the display await the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum, an unambiguous political statement.

The wealth of Greece’s 20th-century shipping tycoons Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos has found a second life through two foundations that underpin significant cultural institutions. Renzo Piano’s Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, a 600-million-euro architectural gift to the city, houses the Greek National Opera and a vast public park, while the more provocative cultural centre Onassis Stegi is synonymous with avant-garde performances. Pireos 138, located in a former industrial complex, is a contemporary spinoff from the esteemed Benaki Museum.

But it’s the grassroots creative infrastructure – chaotic, quirky, barely mappable – that really sets Athens apart. One study identified nearly 200 independent art spaces operating across the city, although many disappear almost as quickly as they pop up. Mytro Papadopoulos, photographer and New York Times contributor, describes the proliferation with affection: ‘I’m happy to have all these small places, opening like little mushrooms around Athens. Being able to have that space to express yourself, I think it’s very important.’

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Tony Maniaty, Sydney-based photographer, author and lecturer.