Our Sunday in Athens began with a memorable sound rather than a sight.  Not long after I rose, I heard liturgical singing from the street below my hotel room.  I leaned out of the window to confirm that the source of the chant was the minuscule Orthodox Church across the street.  Sunday services must have been concluding, and the rich harmony of voices rose above the noise of traffic.

         It was the day for HL and I to take our first ride on Athens’ Metro.  We rode the train for one stop, to the station nearest the National Gallery of Art, the Alexandros Soutsos Museum.  We were gratified to emerge and spot the museum, as many of the signs on the underground platforms were written only in Greek.

       The National Gallery’s rectilinear facade was as anonymous as that of a car dealership.  Though it had undergone a renovation costing 60 million euros a few years ago, its Minimalist interior looked bare instead of coolly contemporary.

       The collection included works from the 14th to the present Century, almost all of them by Greeks. Thus we were introduced to some admirable artists who are not well known in North America.  Their fame may be confined to Greece, though I intend to learn more about those that interested me most.

We boarded the Metro’s Blue Line at the Syntagma station.

There was no line for museum admission even though it was a Sunday afternoon.

Idealized family scenes featuring the Greek bourgeoisie were fashionable about 1900.  This one, by Iakivos Rizos, was set on an Athens  terrace with a view of the Acropolis.

There was an extensive exhibition of paintings by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika.  He was a prolific painter, sculptor and engraver who studied in Paris in The Twenties.  I appreciated this picture of his studio for its palette (pun intended) as well as its composition.   

Another new favorite of mine was this view of Santorini by Konstantin Maleas, painted around 1925.