Santorini through a philhellene's lens

Sailing down memory lane

On his first trip to Greece half a century ago, Chicago-born Robert McCabe was still a student of English literature at Princeton University working on his thesis on Byron's philhellenism. Traveling from Venice to Piraeus and eventually the Ionian islands, he came across a landscape which was still unspoiled, where villages had a distinct architecture and traditions were holding strong. A nostalgic journey down memory lane, his photos immortalize an era where high-speed car ferries, charter flights and package tours did not exist. As his travels took the form of a pilgrimage, McCabe nurtured his interest in Greek antiquity capturing with his lens the country's major archaeological sites: from the Acropolis, Mycenae and Sounio to Knossos, Delphi and Epidaurus.

His first travel photos of Greece, which cover the period between 1954 and 1965, make up the album Greece: Images of an Enchanted Land 1954-1965. First published by Patakis Editions in December 2004 and reprinted a year later, the book will make its US breakthrough this fall with the Quantuck Lane Press. In the meantime, visitors to the island of Santorini can catch a glimpse of McCabe's nostalgic photos at a new exhibition at the Nomikos Conference Centre. Running through to August 25, Santorini and the Aegean: the Innocent Years comprises 109 black-and-white photos taken in Greece between 1954 and 1965, seventy-five of which are of Santorini before the devastating earthquake of 1956.

* Sponsored by the National Bank's Cultural Foundation and the Petros Nomikos Conference Centre

(Athens News)