National Gallery of Athens

Listen for a moment. Outside, the traffic on the wide avenue keeps moving. Inside, the noise drops away, and there is only the soft squeak of shoes on polished floors and the low murmur of people standing in front of paintings. The light here is calm and even. It falls across canvases that hold more than five centuries of Greek seeing. You are inside the National Gallery of Athens, and this is a good place to slow down.

The full name tells part of the story. It is the National Gallery, Alexandros Soutsos Museum. Soutsos was a nineteenth century collector who left his paintings, and money, to the Greek state. His gift joined an older state collection, and the gallery was formally established in 1900. At that point Greece had been an independent country for only a few generations. A national gallery was a statement. It said that this young state had its own art, and not only ancient marble.

The building around you is very different from the classical columns elsewhere in Athens. The main wing is a modernist block of concrete, glass and clean horizontal lines. It was designed in the second half of the twentieth century by the architects Pavlos Mylonas and Dimitris Fatouros. For many years it felt too small for the collection. Then, in 2013, the gallery closed its doors for a long and ambitious expansion. It stayed closed for about eight years.

When the gallery reopened in 2021, the timing carried meaning. That year marked two hundred years since the start of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. The renovated building had far more exhibition space, new galleries and a rooftop terrace with a view across the city. Many Athenians came back to see paintings they remembered from school trips, now hung in brighter rooms. For some families, the reopening felt like the return of an old friend.

A good way to see the gallery is chronologically, starting with the oldest works. Here you will find icons painted after the fall of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire that ruled from Constantinople for a thousand years. Look at the gold backgrounds and the long, still faces. These painters followed strict traditions, but small details change from one icon to the next. A fold of cloth, a tilt of the head, a darker shade of red can show the hand of a single artist.

One of those artists left Greece and became famous elsewhere. Domenikos Theotokopoulos was born on the island of Crete. He trained as an icon painter, then worked in Venice and Rome, and finally settled in Spain. There, people called him El Greco, which simply means the Greek. The gallery holds works by him, including a painting known as the Concert of Angels. Notice the stretched figures and the flickering colour. You can still sense the icon painter beneath the Spanish master.

Now move forward to the nineteenth century, the heart of the collection for many visitors. After independence, many Greek painters studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, in Germany. Greeks call them the Munich School. Names to look for include Nikiforos Lytras, Nikolaos Gyzis and Konstantinos Volanakis. Their work is careful, warm and full of detail. They painted village customs, family scenes, history and the sea.

Volanakis is the painter of the sea. Stand in front of one of his harbour or ship scenes and watch how he handles the water. The light seems to sit on the surface. Sails catch the wind, and the horizon is often low and quiet. For a nation of sailors and islands, these paintings felt personal. Many Greeks grew up with reproductions of them on calendars and classroom walls, so for locals they carry a strong sense of home.

Here is a detail most visitors miss. The painter Georgios Iakovidis, another artist of the Munich generation, was also the gallery's first director. He guided the young institution in its early years. Look for his gentle scenes of children and family life. There is something fitting about this. A working painter helped decide how Greek painting would be collected and shown to the public.

As you continue into the twentieth century, the walls change character. Colours become bolder. Forms become simpler. Artists such as Konstantinos Parthenis, Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika and Yannis Tsarouchis looked at modern European art, but they also looked back at Greek light, Greek landscape and folk tradition. Look too for the self-taught painter known as Theophilos. He painted heroes, saints and villagers in a direct and joyful style. His work was overlooked for years and celebrated later.

A second surprise has nothing to do with brushwork. In 2012, while the gallery was preparing for its renovation, thieves broke in at night. They took several works, including a painting by Pablo Picasso and one by Piet Mondrian. Picasso had given his painting to the Greek people after the Second World War, as a tribute to their resistance. For years the works were missing. In 2021, Greek police announced that they had recovered them.

Before you leave, take the time to go up to the higher floors and the roof, if it is open. From there you can look out over the rooftops of Athens toward the hills around the city. Inside, the paintings showed you how Greek artists saw their country. Outside, you can see the same light, the same pale stone and the same blue sky. It is a simple comparison, but a powerful one, and many visitors find it the most memorable moment of the visit.

As you walk back toward the entrance, the hum of the avenue will slowly return. Take one last look at a painting that stayed with you... perhaps an icon's gold, perhaps a Volanakis sea. Then step outside and notice the real light on the buildings across the road. It is the same light these painters spent their lives trying to hold on canvas. Now, for a little while, you will see it with their eyes.