Iconic Zappeion Hall in central Athens revives benefactor’s will

For nearly 130 years since its completion in 1888, the elegant Zappeion Hall has stood at the center of Athens’s turbulent history, through peace and war, development and depression. It has been an integral link with the Olympic Movement, from the 1850s and the first efforts to revive the games up to 2004, when Athens last hosted the Summer Games. Now, the organization that operates the building and its splendid grounds is working to revive the wishes of the great benefactor Evangelos Zappas, who had dreamed of reviving the Olympic Games and paid for the first modern Olympics in 1859, long before the first official games were staged in Athens in 1896, when the Zappeion Hall hosted the fencing event.

Last year, the new head of the Olympia and Bequests Committee’s board, which administers the site, Giorgos Christou, announced an initiative aimed at placing the Zappeion Hall back where Zappas had imagined it when he bequeathed the money for the construction of the building, for the revival of the games and for the showcasing of Greece’s art and industry. The “Cultural Autumn-Winter 2016-2017” was marked by the granting of an award last September to Ark of the World (Kivotos), a nonprofit organization that Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest, formed in 1998 to take care of poor Greek and immigrant street children, mostly from single-parent families.

The ceremony was held on September 30, a day commemorating Greece’s national benefactors. More awards will be granted this coming October. According to the Olympia and Bequests Committee board, “golden wreaths will be awarded, in accordance with the wish of Evangelos Zappas, to Greeks who have excelled and made Greece proud, as well as to organizations and agencies, institutions and foundations for their long-term contribution to Greek society.” Winners will be selected in the categories of politics and social contribution, economy and business, science and letters, culture and the arts and, of course, sports. The winners have not yet been decided.

The Zappeion Hall and its landscaped grounds (which include gardens consisting of 8.3 hectares of flower beds and parkland and 240 square meters of inner courtyards) will host celebrations based on the ancient idea of the Panathenaic Festival, the board said. All of the activities “constitute the revival and continuation of the ‘Olympics’ (1859, 1870, 1875, 1889) and the ‘Zappeion Games’ (1859, 1870, 1875) according to Evangelos Zappas’s will.” Their aim was “encouraging the fine arts and exhibition of Greek products,” the board noted, quoting the benefactor’s wish.

Zappas was born in Epirus in 1800, and, after fighting in the war of liberation against the Ottoman Empire that commenced in 1821, made his fortune in Romania. In the 1850s, when the issue of reviving ancient ceremonies and contests was debated in the newly independent Greece, the poet Panagiotis Soutsos inspired Zappas, who, as the Zappeion website says, “essentially introduced the concept of establishing parallel cultural activities and exhibitions modeled on the first world fair in London in 1851.”