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Train exhibition: a journey from Ancient Greece to modern Athens by Hatto Fischer


Athens 1966

This exhibition is dedicated to a unique combination of things. It starts with having come to Greece for the first time in 1966. It was not easy to understand the political history of this country. It stretches all the way back to Ancient Greece, but after the Byzantine time fell under Turkish rule and stayed silent for 400 years until 1821. After emancipation with the romantic spirit of Lord Byron one of the leading factors Greece entered a turbulent twentieth century. The country suffered after Second World War an even harsher civil war in which brothers killed each other and already back then in 1966 there could be felt something was brewing. Driving on the national road back from Evia to Athens whenever we passed an army truck, the Greeks in the VW bus shouted ‘opa, opa’. Then came the Junta in the following year and which lasted until 1974. Illuminating a bit on this part of history there is the book by Andreas Papandreou with the title ‘Democracy at gunpoint’. But at that time in 1966, there was still light and upon arrival in Athens the Acropolis stood high above the roof-tops of the many ordinary houses in Athens as if everything had been constructed in a rush. When I returned home to where we lived in Ottawa, Canada, I discovered that my mother, already very ill so that her death was pending, that she was reading Robert Payne's book on 'Ancient Greece'. She admired especially Pericles, as if she sensed that the human pride was still there, audible in his voice connecting forever the past and ongoing present of Greece. Melina Mercouri would echo that insofar her famous slogan was ‘now as then’. So many years later, that is after the death of my mother in 1970 and studies in Berlin, I returned to Athens in 1988 to found a family. It is true that I came back to Greece due to the recognition of the importance of light for my sense of life. To live here, outside, in the streets of Athens, near the Acropolis, is like having a daily dialogue with this ancient past. So I am grateful for this opportunity to exhibit my thoughts as to how it would be conceivable to travel from the past of Ancient Greece to the present for which the crowded streets of Athens with the loud voices at the fish and meat market but a constant reminder there is this magical connection between the past and the present. The opportunity to do this exhibition was given thanks to Jula Gavala and Spyros Mercouris. They wanted  an outsider, a stranger, to tell how he sees this most important part of man's history. Hence in utmost thanks to this very inspiring book by Robert Payne about 'Ancient Greece', I would like to dedicate this exhibiton to my mother who loved this book so much and through it the free spirit of man’s thoughts based on so much wisdom which is unmatched in history. May the texts of this exhibition be worthwhile this effort. They  try to explain many things in words, even though at the risk of leaving many other things worthwhile to be mentioned, really unsaid. That then is the focus of such an exhibition in a train: an inspiring metaphor for man going on a voyage to find himself, or rather to discover the measure of things. And just to make sure one metaphor would stick out as poetry and philosophy intertwined between nomos and physis, there hung from the middle of the wagon a suitcase on a chain and on it were written in chalk the words ‘Socrates going on a voyage’.


Hatto Fischer

Athens 15.5.1997

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