Confidential - Mykonos Confidential Luxury Magazine - Summer 2023
The long journey of Greek Tourism
Ira Sinigalia 2023-07-20 13:12:44
Lots of surprises punctuate the history of Greek tourism through its long journey.
Till the late nineteenth century, the Greek state happily ignored both the term tourism and the related economic activities. After the Industrial Revolution however the European middle class was proselytized to the ideas of mass recreation and unoccupied time, and the desire for temporary escape from the grey industrial town. Social and technological changes, from the development of the cities and the working class to salaried work and rights for the people, and from the steamship to the train and the telegraph, facilitated this epochal change.
New consumer desires and models came forward. The first tourist bureau opened its doors in the 1840s in London, and it was Thomas Cook’s. Seafront resorts, such as Les Cannes in France or Brighton in England, and also spa towns from Baden (Austria-Hungary) to Baden Baden (Germany) became destinations for the thriving hygienist movement, also supported by the cultural sensitivities of Romanticism. Clean air, virgin nature, pleasant climate, healthy nation, return to the roots. But where? In the Alps or in the Mediterranean, which also offered strong notes of exoticism? Greece was also touched by these movements, even though land travel was only moderately supported by the rough terrain and the lack of modern infrastructure. In 1910 the country had just 1.573 kilometres of railways.
By the early twentieth century the excavations by Heinrich Schliemann (Mycenae, Tiryns) and Sir Arthur Evans (Knossos) as well as the archeological activities of the École Française d'Athènes brought many voyagers eager to drink from the sources of Western Civilisation. They came mainly on ship, from Brindisi, Marseille, Trieste. In 1869 Thomas Cook included Greece to his destinations, as a stop on the way to Egypt, while in 1883 he opened his first Athens bureau, initially inside the Grande Bretagne hotel. Pre-paid tour packages were now a reality, and modern Greece’s image was promoted by the first Olympic Games in Athens, in 1896.
Recreational hiking, developing also among Greeks, was a parallel current to tourism. Love of nature became more and more fashionable in the city. Hiking unions and clubs fed a wide circle of activities connected with transport, catering, and hospitality around Greece. Following in the footsteps of northern European resorts, spa towns sprang up, from Loutraki and Kaiafas to Cyllene and Aidipsos. They offered rudimentary services, but harmonized with the mantra of personal hygiene and body culture. As Aggelos Vlachos interestingly remarks, “spa towns and sea resorts, planned and supported by infrastructure, constitute the first tentative wide-scale public (or private) interventions related to tourism, beyond the urban frame”.
At any rate, pre-war tourist development was delegated to businessmen such as Eusthathios Lampsas, who founded in 1873 the Grande Bretagne hotel together with Savvas Kentros. Or the shrewd Panayotis Ghiolmas from Cephalonia, initially a dragoman (a job combining those of tourist guide and translator) who created in 1902 the first Greek travel agency. The time when tourists would substitute travellers was approaching. After the Great War the European states managed more actively the economy. Some of them, after lots of pressure from below, even instituted the eight-hours work. The labouring classes now had free time, and states wanted both to organize and control it. Mass tourism was a solution.
The eight-hours working day became a reality for some in Greece too, yet the majority did not even dream of recreational travel. Tourism concerned exclusively the middling and higher strata. Unions such as the Touring Club, an offshoot of the previous Hellenic Bikers’ Society established in 1895, helped organize the movement in this direction. In 1914 the state founded the first Foreigners’ and Expositions Bureau, directed by Nikolaos Lekkas, who wrote many analyses of the novel phenomenon of tourism.
In 1924 fashionable society stalwarts created the Automobile and Touring Club of Greece, that diffused among the wealthiest strata modern bourgeois notions of free time and directly helped the development of Greek tourism. Many Greeks who moved in from the West, but also from Russia, Romania, Turkey, and Egypt, influenced society in the same direction. Despite political upheavals and uncertainties, the Greek National Tourism Organisation (GNTO) became a reality in 1929. Earlier Greece had been a founding member of the important Conseil Central du Tourisme International (1925), aimed at fostering collaboration for tourist development among public and private actors, hotelier associations, and hiking unions. The Metaxas Dictatorship (1936-1941), caring for Greece’s public image rather than tourist infrastructure, replaced the GNTO with the Vice-Ministry of Press and Tourism. In the same years other European countries, such as France, instituted the paid summer leave from work and other reforms that greatly influenced the European tourism market.
The Second World War arrrested progress, especially in Greece that also suffered from a civil war. The idea of vacations however spread among ever wider social strata in the post-war decades. With growing demand, the state GNTO was reborn in 1951, now undertaking to direct the development of necessary infrastructure. Its programme, promoting Greece’s beauty with high class modernist architecture organically integrated in the natural landscape, included the famous Xenia hotels as well as motels, tourist kiosks, and organized beaches.
Charalambos Sfaellos directed the Xenia effort from 1953 to 1958, succeeded by the important architect Aris Constantinides who designed the Andros Xenia and the Myconos Theoxenia. Until 1967 this programme helped to fashion a modern tourist identity, aimed at the middle strata, for Greece.
THE COUNTRY'S MODERN IMAGE LINKED WELL WITH THE MEDITERRANEAN JOIE DE VIVRE THAT FOUND ITS EMBLEMATIC PERSONIFICATION IN ALEXIS ZORBAS
Wings of change
Postwar tourism however meant mainly air travel. Thanks to the air connections, arrivals multiplied. The country’s rough terrain and abundant islands made airplanes attractive, hydroplanes even more so. The latter were used for the first regular air connections of Athens, with Brindisi and Istanbul, in 1926. Regular internal services came in 1930, with the Hellenic Society of Aerial Communications connecting Athens with Thessaloniki, Drama, Agrinio, and Ioannina. In 1939 Deutsche Lufthansa started servicing six flights a week. The travel between Tatoi Airport and Berlin, passing from various European cities, started at 7.15 A.M. and lasted about twelve hours.
Ιn 1956 the state TAE National Greek Airlines, formed postwar, passed in the hands of the shipping magnate Aristotelis Onassis who renamed them Olympic Airways. Their colorful history included names such as Coco Chanel, who designed the stewardesses’ uniforms (1966-8), and the Greek couturier Yannis Tseklenis (1972-6).
It was a good time for air travel. Since 1952 ΙΑΤΑ had instituted in transatlantic flights the tourist class, and later the economy class, thus announcing the era of mass tourism. Greece, in its perennial quest for balanced trade, moved ever closer to the sun-sea model. The country’s modern image linked well with the Mediterranean joie de vivre that found its emblematic personification in Alexis Zorbas, central hero of the eponymous film directed by Michalis Kakoyannis (1964), with protagonists Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates, Irene Pappa, and Lila Kedrova who even won an Oscar for her performance. Zorba the Greek, filmed in Crete, became a synonym for the island. The music of Mikis Theodorakis turned it into an integral part of the idea of Greece, and travelled to the four corners of the world thanks to the bouzouki interpretations of the virtuosο Lakis Karnezis. Another film that caused commotion was Luc Besson’s The Big Blue (1988), that also captured sides of Greece and even brought into the small list of top destinations a Cyclades island, Amorgos. Highbrow culture afficionados, on the other hand, frequent every summer the ancient theatres of Athens and Epidaurus, where a famous festival has been taking place since 1955.
In the spirit of the Sixties, Crete turned into a legendary hippy destination, as well as the Cyclades in the next decade. The energy crisis of the 1970s however sent away the American tourists, whose arrivals to Greece almost halved from 1973 to 1974, passing from 615.606 to 371.795. On the other hand, entry into the then European Economic Community secured a steady rise of tourists from Germany, France, and other continental countries. Soon they surpassed the Americans, and Greece started to coordinate its national tourist policy to the European ones.
To wrap up, the modern phenomenon of tourism, adventurous and multifaceted, defined the economic choices and the cultural self-definition of Greece in the twentieth century, and kept its steady rise till our own days. Passing through many vicissitudes in the meantime, risking a cornucopia of clichés but also offering splendid vistas to enjoy, it has rightly been called the country’s heavy industry. It has also given in part modern Greece’s form and touched its soul.
©Brainbuzz Media Consulting IKE. View All Articles.