Ernst Ziller

Ernst Ziller                                                 Ερνέστος Τσίλλερ

Born 1837, Germany                                    Died 1923, Athens

The Importance of Being Ernst

http://texnis-egkwmio.blogspot.gr

 

I love the First Cemetery of Athens, it’s trees and pathways and the way it commemorates in stone the cultural and political icons of the nation: the rich, the very rich, - and sometimes, even the poor. Schliemann’s temple overlooks Averoff’s mausoleum, which is near Melina Mercouri’s stele in the Plaza along with Andreas Papandreou’s large rectangular grave, the more modest one of his father George, and those of many a Greek Prime Minister. Even a dictator or two can be found in the Plaza (the more notorious ones are farther back).  Astronomers, mathematicians, beer barons, poets, musicians, actors, martyrs, and heroes of the Greek Revolution are all here.  True, some, like Eleftherios Venizelos or Constantine Karamanlis chose to be buried elsewhere  but my focus this time is about  a great man who was buried here in the Protestant Section, and whose only monument today, as near as we can make out, is somewhere down this lane …

not far from this:

Of course I refer to Ernst Ziller, that architectural genius from Saxony who not only took Greek citizenship, made Greece his home, and married a Greek He was also a personal friend of Schliemann, King George 1, movers and shakers like Andreas Syngos, and  also designed and built their showplace mansions. The list of structures he built ranges from 500 to 800 depending on who’s counting. 

His Work:

Ernst Ziller could turn his hand to just about anything: 

a church,

http://www.trekearth.com (1893)

In Vilia

 a funeral monument,

The Negropontis family tomb, Section 4, Number 584

a theatre,

In Patras (1871-2)

a museum,

Milos Archaeological Museum (1870)

a market place,

http://www.gtp.gr

in Eghion (1890)

 a sumptuous home,

The Syngros mansion (1872-3)

 a hotel,

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                                                                  Megas Alexandros, 1889

  and even a royal palace. (1)

built for crown prince Constantine(1891-1897)

It would be fair to say almost half of the existing Neoclassical buildings in Athens bear the imprint of his unique style – a style which, while grounded in neoclassicism, blossomed and developed into something more – incorporating Palladian, Byzantine, and Renaissance touches,  making him what one writer has called ‘the poet of modernism in classical architecture’. (2)

 

Ernst mixed and matched as he planned every one of his architectural gems down to the last detail, be it a decorative feature, a floor tile, a shutter, central heating, a metal beam or a metal reinforcement bar, even furniture: no detail was too small to attract his attention or to be enhanced by his vision.

The Metaxas mansion in Piraeus

And that is not all. He was an avid traveler inside and outside of Greece and something of an archaeologist too, even, at one point, buying the land where the ancient Panathenaic Stadium (Kalimarmaro to you), lay unexcavated hoping that he might excavate it at his leisure.(3)

The stadium after excavations

 It was Ziller who steered Schliemann to Hissarlik and Troy. He was a civil servant for a time, put in charge of public works under the progressive government of Charilaos Trikoupis. In sum, Ernst Ziller was amazing: polymechanos is the word that comes to mind.

And yet….

 He died in relative obscurity, suffered severe financial hardship in the later part of his life and appears to have been socially abandoned by the bourgeoisie whose place in the modern history of Greece he had helped to define and shape. Shame!

His Life

Ernst was born into a family of architects, studied architecture in Dresden and was tempted to offer his talents to the city of Tbilisi in Georgia before he began work in the offices of Theofilos Hansen(4) in Vienna, charged with working on the plans of the Athens Academy (still there on Academias Street). He gained Hansen’s admiration and trust, came to Greece in 1860, and was put in charge of the works.

Less than ten years later, he had started his own business; by 1872 he had became a popular teacher of architecture at the School of Arts, a branch of the Polytechnic University, and in 1876 he married Sophia Doudou, an accomplished and multi-lingual pianist whose family hailed from Kozani in  northern Greece but lived in Vienna. Together they had 5 children.

The Zillers

 Ziller would eventually build his own mansion on Mavromichalis Street, not far from the National Library, whose construction he had supervised.

Ziller’s Home

 Number 6 Mavromichalis was not as grand as his plan for Heinrich Schliemann’s home would be:

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Ziller’s drawing of the proposed Schliemann mansion 1878-81)

 nor was it as large as that of Andreas Syngros , but it was substantial enough: with a semi-basement, a ground floor consisting of four large rooms, two of which were his offices, a first floor with reception rooms and a second one with 5 bedrooms – all on a lot of just over 1,000 square meters. Like many of the homes he built for wealthy merchants, it was dual purpose: offices below and living quarters above. Ziller also had a building in his back garden from which he made and sold products such as tiles and iron railings of his own design. 

To keep it separate from the mansion’s impressive entrance on Mavromichalis Street, he had a narrow entrance fronting a very long passage-way leading from Academias Street into his back yard so that his family would not be troubled by tradesmen or customers.

I am still shaking my head, wondering how many times I have walked by this entrance in the last few years and didn’t notice it! It is on the east side of Academias Street, almost at Ippocratous Street: once seen, never forgotten; a little bit of Gothic weirdness in the center of Athens.

Then

 and now.

Around the turn of the century, Ziller overreached himself financially in a joint venture with German partners to build dams.  This debacle, along with the loss of his government position in 1893 (when Trikoupis declared Greece bankrupt) and an even earlier ethical disagreement with Polytechnic boss Anastasios Theofilas which had resulted in his resignation, led Ziller into serious economic difficulties which his later commissions (he never lacked work), the sale of his daughter Iphigennia’s excellent drawings, or his wife’s piano lessons could not cover.  

To pay his debts, his home went up for auction in 1912 and was bought by  wealthy banker Dionysios Loverdos who saw its potential as a backdrop for his icon collection. (5)

The ravages of time and a fire have been obliterated by a steller refurbishment. The house is now open to the public as the Loverdos-Ziller Mansion and well worth a visit if only to see the amazing floors and wall paintings. It is probably the best example of a late 19^th century home of the upper middle class open to the public and the best way to get an idea of Ziller’s aesthetic in the homes he built for the Athens elite:

 

 

A charming wall detail

A ceiling

 

Ziller recouped to some extent and opened again for business not far from his old home. (What a bitter pill that must have been: so near and yet so far...). He continued to enhance Athens and the rest of Greece in spite of his straitened circumstances and the fact that he was apparently subject to the increasingly anti-German sentiment that pervaded the country just prior to and during the First World War. How difficult that must have been socially for this avid Philhellene. Even the fact that his wife was one of the first working women in Greece (teaching at the Athens Odeon) – something admirable to us today - might have caused sneers and mistrust at a time when women of the Zillers’ class were supposed to stay home. 

His Death

When he died in 1923, Ziller was buried in the First Cemetery, with what sort of head stone, I would dearly like to know. It certainly would have been nothing like the magnificent mausoleum of Schliemann which he had designed in the late 1880s.  But there must have been something!  In the Protestant cemetery, a yearly sum is expected for the maintenance of plots. (6) If that sum is not paid, then the cemetery committee can take over the plot and offer it to someone else. This must be what happened to Ziller. We contacted a Mr.Tangaroulias of the Greek Evangelical Church, one of the institutions responsible for the Protestant Cemetery. Our question was this: in the case of a Protestant, grave being reassigned, were the bones disinterred as they would have been for the Orthodox departed? His answer was ‘no’. Although the grave is given to someone else, the bones remain. So Ernst Ziller is still there.

A larger issue is this:  then and now, even an abandoned grave can be allowed to remain by the authorities if the person is prominent enough and a committee has agreed that the person’s contribution to Athens significant enough to warrant it being preserved. (7)  And yet, his grave was not.  That seems strange and somehow wrong. 

Here is a man whose name no thoughtful traveler to Greece  can avoid encountering, whether enjoying a coffee opposite the impressive town hall in Syros (1876-81), visiting the old market in Eghion, a church in Vilia,  a museum in Olympia or Milos, the Numismatic Museum (Schleimann’s house), or simply wandering about in the center of Athens itself. His wonderful work is everywhere.(8)

In Athens we see statues to just about every worthy (and some not so worthy) whom Greece has produced since 1834. Our Neoclassical architects are not well represented - although those who financed their buildings are.

Ernst Ziller deserves a memorial in the First Cemetery – even if only a cenotaph - and at least one full sized statue somewhere in the city he did so much to enhance. Kotzias Square would be a good choice.  After all, the impressive  Melas Mansion (1874) which he also designed, could keep him company.

Footnotes

(1)When Prince Constantine was born in 1868, King George 1 wanted a fitting palace for his son and asked Ziller to design and build it.  It is now used by the president of the Greek republic.

(2) See http://www.grreporter.info/en/architect_who_changed_image_greece/1818

(3) He eventually gave the land at cost to the king, although he did some excavations of his own in 1869.

(4) Theofilos Hansen would certainly have his own entry on this blog – if only he had not died in Austria.

(5) The mansion was bought by Dionysios Louverdos who did some renovation of his own to incorporate his icon collection. The building eventually was used as a dressing room for the National Opera, until a fire made it uninhabitable. It now belongs to the Byzantine and Christian Museum which have turned it  into an annex of their excellent museum. In the process, they are said to be uncovering and leaving in place a lot of Ziller’s original details.

(6) My source for this was a very interesting chat we had one day with Miltiadis Bertzos in the Protestant Cemetery. He is one of the caretakers. Apparently decisions about who remains are committee decisions, made by the various organization ( several embassies and the Greek Evangelical Church) in charge of the Protestant Cemetery.

(7) I wonder if any reader knows more about this?

(8). To be exhaustive about Ziller’s work would need a very large book. Fortunately, there is one: Classical Revival: The Architecture of Ernst Ziller 1837-1923 by Maro Kardamitsi-Adami, Melissa Publishing House, 2006 - 287 pages.  If you want to investigate Ziller on the internet, this site lists his buildings and is well worth a look: http://m.eirinika.gr/article/144143/ernestos-tsiller-o-germanos-arhitektonas-poy-allaxe-tin-athina-pethane-pamptohos 

ERT has http://archive.ert.gr/4739/  a half an hour tribute (in Greek) to him.

 For a real Ziller experience, you could even check in at a new hotel on Metropoleos Street. One of his buildings has been recently renovated and is named after the great man himself.