A Cycladic Enigma
Μουσείο Κυκλαδικής Τέχνης / Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art
This lovely museum was founded in 1986 to house the Cycladic and Ancient Greek Art collection belonging to Nikolaos and Aikaterini (Dolly) Goulandris, art collectors. The museum is split into two buildings: the Stathatos Mansion, work of the Bavarian architect Ernst Ziller, and the main building, which was designed by Ioannis Vikelas and built in 1985.
This area of the museum focused, as suggested by its name, on the daily lives of people during antiquity, particularly in Athens, including objects used in everyday tasks.
The museum holds one of the most important Cypriot art collections outside of Cyprus. This tradition received influence from Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, resulting in a new style representing this interaction seen nowhere else.
It contains 550 objects, dating from the Chalcolithic (the era before the Bronze Age), as well as the Byzantine, Medieval, and Modern periods. The items include pottery for different uses, including religious, cosmetic, and funerary, as well as coins, seal stones, and metalwork.
The collection of Ancient Greek Art includes painted vases, terracotta figurines, bronze vessels, stone sculptures, coins, jewelry, and glass objects. It covers a time span from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 4th century CE, holding 400 artifacts and focusing on Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece.
When creating their art collection, Dolly and Nikolaos Goulandris paid particular attention to prehistoric art from the Cyclades islands of the Aegean. These Cycladic figurines are usually referred to as idols, though this term often comes into question.
Scattered through the Aegean, the suggestion is that these figurines were rather popular as far as Crete and mainland Greece, and depict everything from supine figures to musicians performing with their instruments.
Their geometric style gives them a touch of the modern, especially as they are made of white marble, but there is strong suggestion that they were originally brightly painted. There is very little actual consensus on the purpose and intention behind their creation, much less their use, and they have been interpreted as religious idols, children’s toys, representations of death, among other things. They all have, however, been found in graves.
Examples of these sculptures are found in various museums in Greece, including the National Archeological Museum of Athens, and the Archaeological Museum of Chania and the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete, as well as museums around the world, such as the British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.
When we visited, the exhibition “Homecoming. Cycladic treasures on their return journey” was on show, which presented 15 antiquities for the first time internationally. It is part of an agreement to return 161 Early Cycladic sculptures originally collected by Leonard Stern. After this exhibition is done (October 13th, 2023), the collection will be exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for 25 years before they are formally, and permanently, returned to Greece.
Before leaving the museum we stopped at the Cycladic Café, which is one of the most beautiful museum cafés I’ve ever been to, and which was designed by Stelios Kois. I can’t remember the name of my cake, but it was some variation of a flan (though a lot, a lot thicker), and it was delicious.
Πλατεία Μοναστηράκι / Monastiraki Square
We finished off the day by climbing to the rooftop bar at A is for Athens for this view over Monastiraki Square. The square is located in the neighborhood of the same name, which translates to “little monastery.”
The square is named for the Church of the Pantanassa, or of the Dormition of the Theotokos, which you can see in the lower left corner of this picture. It is surrounded by hotels and rooftop bars that allow a view similar to this, though I recommend arriving early, as they fill up fast!
Gold Colored Fox 