Saturday 31 March 2018

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, The Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre, Celebrations and Happy Easter!



In early March, an assessment trip to Athens gave me the great opportunity to realise a wish: to visit The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre, in the sea-side Phaliron area.  This complex, the construction of which began in 2012, was designed by the Italian architect, Renzo Piano, and built on a former horse-racing track. It is a beautiful park area - with planting still on-going – which houses the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Library. This 566 million euro project, completed in 2016, was donated to the Greek state in 2017 by the Niarchos Foundation.
We were lucky enough to have a beautiful sunny day on our visit: below you can see scenes of the harbour area and central Athens from this amazing site.       
              







Inside, the library is impressive – a light, spacious building with thousands of books. While we were there we saw some young users who were more intent ……. on catching up on social media posts!
               

 








This is the opera house whose canopy is intended to represent a floating cloud. Several schools groups were visiting, taking advantage of the fine weather. Below we see some musicians encouraging passing children to have fun with percussion instruments. Here they are getting into the rhythm of things!
                       


 







  Stavros Niarchos was a Greek shipping magnate who died in[U1]  Zurich in 1996, leaving a fortune estimated at around $4 billion. Next to his is the image of Aristotle Onassis, another famed, Greek shipping magnate. Both built vast empires mainly based on post-war oil-trading with what were to become huge fleets of super-tankers. Arch-rivals, they competed with their super-yachts: Niarchos’ Atlantis and Onassis’ Christina, and each had their own island – Spetsopoula and Skorpios, respectively.
They even vied over their trophy wives. When Onassis married Tina Livanos, daughter of the great shipping czar, Stavros Livanos, Niarchos responded by marrying her sister, Evgenia. In 1965, after divorcing her, Niarchos, aged 56, married the 24-year-old Charlotte, daughter of Henry Ford, the American captain of industry founder of the Ford Motor Company. In 1968, Onassis played his trump card in marrying Jacqueline, widow of J.F. Kennedy.
 When Onassis died in 1975, according to the New York Times, Niarchos was left ‘without a rival to fire his ambitions’.  Don’t you just love celebrity gossip?
                              










Right across from the Cultural Centre stands the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre, a state-of-the-art hospital, completed and donated to the state in 1992. For me it seemed a final irony that their foundations built institutions, legacies to the Greek people, vying for attention in constant juxtaposition.  
                                                       
                          






Eating on one’s own on business trips can be a challenge – especially when the waitress brings you what she calls ‘your wee salad’! So it’s always nice to have lunch with excellent company, being driven in a brand new Mercedes-Benz GLA, to a well-known fish restaurant in the beautiful municipality of Vouliagmeni, which means ‘sunken lake’. After lunch we enjoyed a coffee in the sunshine at this lake, which has brackish water at a constant temperature of around 24oC and operates as a year-round spa. Wow, this is a life-style I could really get used to!                                                   

Back home. It’s time to celebrate our birthdays, and the brief return of our beautiful niece, Konstantina, from Sweden.
                    

 







We have to wait another week for the Orthodox one, but in the meantime, for all of you: Have a very Happy Easter!
                                                         





u just love                                         in the meantime, for all of or at a constant temperature of around 24oC