Athens & Attica Archieven

Workplace and museum: the Passimenterie Mentis in Athens

Traditional factories and workplaces in Greece are dying. They either scale up their production, replace outdated machinery and modernise their production lines, or they just perish and close their doors. Just very few workplaces still cherish their old machinery, keep on producing like they did for decades. Mostly because their owners can’t afford renewing and replacing, sometimes because they just love their old-fashioned production line. One of the oldest manufacturing venture in the country, Mentis, started in 1867. The factory … Read More

The revival of wines from Greece

“It’s taken 34 centuries, but Greek wine is finally good”, wrote wine writer David Williams in The Guardian a few days ago. Greeks are indeed among the first in the world to have produced wine. But despite the long history of winemaking, the wines themselves were not that great, and couldn’t compete on the international market. A lot changed some twenty years ago. A few young winemakers were trained in the best wine schools abroad, and continued to learn the … Read More

Robert McCabe’s passion for Greece

From June 10 to June 16, 2023, the Embassy of Greece in the Netherlands organized the exhibition Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land in the Atrium in The Hague. The exhibition showed some of the best photos of the American photographer Robert McCabe. I was asked by the Greek ambassador ms. Catherina Ghini to give a short introduction to this exhibition. In May, to prepare for this presentation, I had the pleasure and the privilege of meeting Robert McCabe in … Read More

Anafiotika, an island without sea

The capital of Greece was still a large village two hundred years ago. When Athens was chosen as the capital by King Otto in the 1930s, it was home to about ten thousand people. After that it went fast. In 1879 more than sixty thousand people lived there, in 1896 more than one hundred thousand and now there are almost four million. Many Athenians come from other parts of Greece. As early as the 19th century, people from all over … Read More

Robert McCabe’s Greece

From 10 June to 16 June 2023, the exhibition ‘Greece: Images of an Enchanting Country’ can be seen in The Atrium in The Hague. The event is organized by the Greek Embassy in The Hague. The exhibition contains the beautiful photographs that the American photographer Robert McCabe (1934) took in Greece from the 1950s.Chicago-born McCabe began taking photographs in 1939, at the age of five. Since then he has traveled the world with his camera. In 1954 he visited Greece … Read More