Monde rêvé, monde collectionné : La Méditerranée orientale d’Antonis Benakis (1900-1931)

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Welcome address

Presentation of the book project by Angelos Dalachanis & Mercedes Volait

Interventions by Efi Gazi University of the Peloponnese & Anastasia Drandaki National and Capodistrian University of Athens

Discussion with the authors Angelos Dalachanis, Mina Moraïtou & Mercedes Volait

Moderated by Guillaume Biard École française d’Athènes

On this occasion, the book will be sold at a special price

About the book:
This book revisits, based on previously unpublished documentation scattered across Athens, Paris, London, and Geneva, the history of the art collections assembled by a prominent member of the Greek expatriate community in Alexandria, Antonis Benakis (1873-1954), from his early acquisitions around 1900 to the opening, in 1931, of the museum that bears his name in Athens. The study situates his acquisitions of Greek, Coptic, Byzantine, Arab, Turkish, and Persian objects within the social, cultural, economic, and political context of his life, first in Alexandria, where his francophone and, even more so, anglophile family ran a significant cotton export business, and later in Athens, where the Alexandrian collector became an active participant in a vibrant cultural and associative life from 1927 onward. The study challenges conventional wisdom that views Benakis’ acquisitions of Islamic and Greek art as separate and successive, demonstrating instead that these collections were part of a unified and distinctive project: to showcase the Eastern Mediterranean, a world envisioned by the Greek irredentist project of the “Great Idea,” in both its unity and the multiplicity of connections and entanglements linking many facets of its material culture over a very long period.