Kolonaki
Benaki Museum - Ghika Gallery.
Where the Greek intelligentsia came to think.
The former home and studio of Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, Greece's most significant 20th-century painter. A 1932 interwar apartment block in Kolonaki — preserved exactly as Ghika left it, studio on the sixth floor, four floors of Greek modernist culture below.
3 Kriezotou Street. The building Ghika's father built in 1932 and the building Ghika never really left.
Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika is the most important Greek painter of the 20th century. His work is in the Tate, in the Musée d'Art Moderne, in the Met. His apartment is here, in Kolonaki, preserved exactly as he left it when he died in 1994. The sixth floor was his studio and library — unusually high ceilings, north light, bookshelves that tell you more about the man than any catalogue raisonné.
The studio where Ghikas worked is on the sixth floor. The view hasn’t changed since 1932.
The building was a meeting point. Cavafy came. Seferis came. Ghika illustrated their poems. The '1930s Generation' — the Greek painters, poets and architects who absorbed modernism between the wars and made it theirs — used this address. Four of the six floors are now a museum of that moment: manuscripts, photographs, personal artefacts, works by two hundred and one artists and intellectuals.
This is not a blockbuster museum. It is a house that became a collection. Open Thursday to Sunday.
1932
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