VORRES MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY GREEK ART & FOLK ART 

The Vorres Museum consists of a complex of ten acres of buildings, courtyards and gardens.  Its collections of over 6,000 items cover 4,000 years of Greek history.  The museum has been bequeathed to the Greek nation by the Vorres family in the form of an artistic and cultural foundation.  Mr. Ian Vorres is the creator and president of the foundation.

The museum is divided into 2 main sections:

The first section constitutes a museum of contemporary Greek art, in which paintings and sculptures by leading Greek artists from World War II to today are displayed.  The works are of the highest quality and represent many  international trends.

What is of special interest is that nearly all artists represented retain a Greek identity, despite the fact that all of them have studied and worked abroad.

A general survey of the exhibits reveals the dominant influence of Greece’s classical, Byzantine and folklore traditions.  The strong pigmentations of the works convey the translucency and brilliance of Greece’s light.

The design of the modern museum is inspired by Greek island architecture and highlights a series of white washed walls rising around the central courtyard that features works by leading Greek sculptors.  The courtyard, built into the mountainside like an ancient Greek theatre, enjoys excellent acoustics and is often used for concerts, lectures, conferences and other cultural events.  The modern museum section is being extended with a new 2,000 sq.m. wing now being completed and to be ready for the coming Olympics in Athens in August 2004.  This wing includes a 1,000 sq.m. exhibition/functions hall.

The great entrance gates are composed by hundreds of hand-wrought pieces from iron doors and balconies of old demolished buildings and feature the beauty of neoclassic Greek design. 

The second section of the Vorres Museum comprises a complex of two traditional village houses, the remnants of a stable and an old wine press that date back to the early 19^th century.  This section is named “Pyrgi”, meaning “Towers”, because of two tower-like buildings that constitute its architectural highlights.  Pyrgi features Greek peasant artifacts, rare furniture, characteristic Greek carpets, village troughs, jars, millstones, an important collection of Greek ceramics, paintings and prints pertaining to the early history of modern Greece and several important items from Greek antiquity.  Originally the two houses and the stable were separate. They were united into a single whole in such a way, however, that the visitor is not able to differentiate between the new and the old buildings, because the new construction was also done in the traditional Greek peasant way.

It is important to keep in mind that Pyrgi is not an exact reconstruction of old Greek peasant houses.  It is rather a readaptation and readjustment of traditional Greek architectural features and of popular artifacts and objects used in daily Greek life, to reveal their inherent beauty and their practical use.

Pyrgi also offers a few examples of rate foreign furniture (i.e. early 18^th and 19^th century Italian, French and Spanish) that belonged to the Vorres family.  This type of furniture is in keeping with Greek decorative tradition.  In the 18^th and 19th century Greek sea captains used to decorate their homes, especially in the Aegean islands, with important furniture brought from Europe during their travels.

The gardens form in indispensable part of Pyrgi and there is an open intercommunication between the buildings and the outdoors.  One of the main features of the gardens are the surrounding walls built in the ‘xerolithia’ method (i.e. dry-stone construction), a Greek peasant art which has disappeared.  Embedded in the walls are old millstones, antique marbles and other artifacts in a decorative display often found in the Aegean islands.  Placed in the courtyards are 300 year old village jars used to store oil or wheat, marble horse troughs, millstones and ancient stone anchors.  The gardens themselves are basically wild, featuring typical Greek flora, such as cypresses, pines, laurels, juda trees, lemon and orange trees, bougainvilleas, geraniums, lavender, etc. A great variety of flowers is displayed throughout the year.

Every care has been taken to preserve the beauty of the environment.  The whole museum has been built in such a way as to leave historic Mt. Hymettus to dominate the background unscathed.  All telephone and electrical installations are underground.  Thousands of trees and shrubs have been planted to enrich the beauty of this impressive Attic landscape.

The Vorres Museum serves as a means of convincing Greeks to save and preserve their national heritage.  It took 40 years to complete the museum, which is considered one of the most personal and original of its kind in the world.