In the shadow of Mount Ymittos lies Vorres Museum, part ethnographic museum, part avant-garde gallery, and part secluded retreat from the cacophony of the city. Within its tree-lined walls, the only sounds to be heard are birdsong and church bells. A vivid patchwork of history, where artefacts and ephemera from two-and-a-half millennia of Greek history sit side-by-side, it’s also a monument to one man’s vision.
Photo: Alex King
The seeds of this eclectic museum were sown when Ian Vorres, from a wealthy Greek family, went to Canada to study philosophy, economics and psychology. He became a journalist and unofficial cultural ambassador for his homeland. Vorres returned to Greece in 1964 and was dismayed by what he found.
Following WWII, Greece experienced an extremely rapid urbanisation. Millions left their islands, villages and traditional, agricultural way of life behind and flooded to Athens. In the rush to house this influx, most of Athens’ neoclassical buildings were torn down and replaced with hastily-constructed high-rise apartments - the polikatikies that still dominate the city today.
“The museum was the result of this aesthetic shock [my grandfather] had upon his return,” explains Nektarios Vorres, current director of the Vorres Foundation. “He was aghast at seeing flats full of Swedish furniture and Persian carpets. So, he decided to create an exclusively Greek environment for himself, reminiscent of the country he had left behind years ago.”
Vorres vowed to save as much of the cultural wealth of this disappearing world as he could. He found two run-down 19th Century houses and a stable in the village of Paiania (now an Athenian suburb near the airport) and tasked craftspeople with renovating and connecting them to create one six-acre complex.
Photo: Alex King
“People lined up outside to sell whatever they had languishing in storage to this ‘madman’.”
At a time when everybody was rushing headlong into the future and nobody could care less about the past, Vorres began collecting objects from everyday life: millstones, tools, religious icons, statues, ceramics, skylights and glassware—even an anchorage stone used by Ancient Greek warships during the Battle of Salamis in 480BC, that seaside villagers had been using to tether their donkeys, ignorant of its original purpose.
“People lined up outside to sell whatever they had languishing in storage to this ‘madman’,” Nektarios says. “They were more than happy to part with this ‘old junk’…Apart from the antiquities, everything else was just useful—or useless.”
Photo: Alex King
In all, Vorres collected around 6,000 pieces. He presented these folk objects in new ways, repurposing an old millstone as a coffee table, a stone water trough as a vase and turning a rope-worn well-top on its side to create a sculpture in his Mediterranean garden. By turning these everyday items into works of art, he encouraged people to reassess their value.
Vorres’ home was donated to the state and became a museum in 1983. Even after his death in 2015, it still feels intimate; a space to be lived in and an expression of one man’s personal taste. In the curious juxtapositions, you get a sense of what the man himself might have been like.
Photo: Alex King
Photo: Alex King
Despite Vorres’ commitment to cultural conservation, he was not a backward-looking traditionalist. In the 1970s, he turned his attention to Greek contemporary art and became a prolific collector and benefactor, helping to nourish a market for bold artistic production. At the time, the National Gallery did not include modern work, so Vorres began amassing an unparalleled collection of paintings, installation and sculpture, capturing evolving currents in surrealism, abstract expressionism, minimalism and more.
The new wing, built in the late 1970s by Michael Fotiadis (who went on to design the Acropolis Museum with Bernard Tschumi) contains work by nearly all of the major figures of 20th Century Greek art.
The latest wing of the building, built in 2004, houses the most modern works, as well as functioning as an events space and activity room for the school children who visit the museum every morning.
Vorres wanted to create a place where Greeks could always come to get a sense of who they are. Today, the Vorres Museum is still owned by the Greek people. Yet, the Vorres Foundation, under the stewardship of Nektarios, is no longer focussed on keeping pace with Greek contemporary art. Instead, he is staying true to his grandfather’s vision by fighting to preserve this repository of Greek identity and culture.
The journey to Vorres Museum is a pilgrimage (especially if you use public transport). But your effort is repaid over and over again. When you finally emerge from this serene citadel detached from time, who knows how much you might have missed in the real world outside.
Photo: Alex King