The name Fix was originally Fuchs, German for fox.
Section 4,
Number 392
Section 2, Number 115
There are two
Fix graves in the First Cemetery, one for Johannes, and one for his son Karl.
Johannes (Ιωάννης) founded the Fix Beer Company and
Karl (Κάρολας)
developed it into an industrial behemoth whose truncated remains still cover a
large piece of real estate on Syngrou Avenue just south of the Αcropolis. Like the Fix family, a large number of
Germans made Greece their home during the 19th century. Many would assimilate and some became Greek citizens. Paleo
Iraklio, a suburb of Athens which was the home base of the Fix family, has the
distinction of being the only German colony ever officially founded in
Greece.
It all started in
the 1830s…
An early add
The Bavarocracy and Mr. Fox.
The first Fuchs/Fix to enter Greece was Georg, a
metallurgist who came along in the mid 1830s as one of the many German experts King
Othon was recruiting to jump start the Greek economy. Georg was there to assist
in the reopening of the Greek mining industry in Lavrio and Simi. Some texts
claim that he also brewed beer. If he did, it was likely a small affair. His
name is not among the list of names producing beer between 1830 to 184O, names like
Melcher Fischer, and Seel. In fact,
brewing beer was of necessity a small business at that time in spite of the
presence of the big Bavarian thirsts that came along with the new king. The beer business was not yet mechanized.
And, it has to be mentioned that Germans were not
the first to make beer in 19th century Greece. Apparently, sometime
before 1821, there was an Armenian brewer in Tripoli, the Ottoman capital of the
Peloponnese. Poor fellow. Such a venue,
in Muslim territory, seems like a masochistic business choice…
Georg Fuchs (1809
- 1862) arrived at the height of the so-called Bavarocracy, an era in
Greece’s modern history when all things German prevailed in the new state. The
choice of the Big Powers (France, England and Russia) in 1832 of Bavarian King
Ludwig’s teenaged second son to be Greece’s new (and hopefully biddable) king had
been intended to maintain their own balance of power in the region. Their
choice set off a series of events that would affect the new country for a very
long time: an influx of thousands of German troops (the Bavarian Auxiliary
Corps) to act as an interim army, an influx of German experts in fields as
diverse as architecture, archaeology, sculpture, statecraft, town planning, mining,
astronomy, and a royal court where German was not only spoken, but the official
court circular was in that language. (1)
It could have been worse. King Ludwig, like so many
Germans at the time, was a fervent Philhellene so the many Bavarians entering
Greece at least had good intentions – as did the young king himself. Greece was
to be ruled by three regents until Othon came of age in 1835. If they were
flummoxed that the Greeks they met upon their arrival were not quite the
ancient Hellenes they expected, they set out to remedy that as best they could.
By happy coincidence the Bavarian uniforms were blue and white. Still…
Apparently Georg Fuchs prospered and, at least for
some part of his stay, lived in Paleo Iraklio, the foreign enclave that was
given official status as the Bavarian Military
Colony in 1837 – an attempt by King Othon to give his countrymen a place
they could call their own because so many soldiers from the 4,000 strong
Bavarian Corps as well as his imported experts had decided to settle in Greece. (2) The colony soon had Saint Luke the Evangelist, a gothic-style Roman Catholic church as
a focal point! It is still there.
Funded by King Ludwig and in the gothic style at the request of King
Othon
Johannes Fix
(1832-1895)
Tragically, Georg was shot and killed by robbers in
1862 while awaiting the arrival of his son Johannes from Bavaria. His grave can
be found in Iraklio’s Roman Catholic cemetery. In spite of that terrible event,
Johannes decided to remain in Greece. Informed sources have him working at the
palace briefly, gaining the concession for the importation of ice from Mount
Parnitha to Athens and/or apprenticing at the brewery of Melcher and then
taking it over around 1864 when Mr. Melcher died. However much of that beginning is solid fact,
it is true that he had begun his own small brewery and moved it from Paleo
Iraklio to Kolonaki in the late 1860s.
His business grew, partly because of hard work and partly because his
beer had a reputation for consistent quality.
Ioannis Fix
(Note that the transition from a German royal family
to a Danish one after 1862, does not seem to have diminished the growing taste
for beer among Athens’ large foreign population
and no doubt among the Greek population as well.)
‘Metz’ is
Born
By 1871, Johannes had opened a beer hall (or was it a
beer garden?) in what was then a rather seedy area outside of town on the
Arditton Hill – not far, in fact, from the First Cemetery. It was an area
famous for prostitution and wild night life, so one assumes that gathering and drinking
beer – at least in places like this – was not yet an upper class pastime. The
name of the Beer Hall was Metz. Fix named it to mark the 1870 victory
of Prussia over the besieged town of Metz in France and not, as many guides suggest, because the proprietor’s name was
Metz. The name of the tavern has remained the name of this area in Athens
although it is considerably more upscale these days.
Fix beer went from success to success and was soon
known all over the country. In the 1880s, Johannes, who was thinking ahead, had
bought a large tract of land just south of the Acropolis and by 1883 he had completed the first large mechanized brewery
in Greece on what is today Syngrou Avenue.
By 1885 Johannes had passed the baton to his son
Karolos (? - 1922) After an obligatory stint in the Greek army, he managed to
parley the brand into the biggest business in Greece. It would eventually boast
over 2,000 outlets. He started a successful export business as well. Winning
the gold medal for Fix beer at the Milan exposition of 1900 did not hurt sales.
Fix Beer was also ‘By Appointment to the Greek Royal family’.
Thus, Fix’s
company continued its virtual monopolistic place in the Greek beer industry until
into 1960s.(3) In its heyday, the Fix factory
had over 5,000 workers, had been the first to bring in the very best mechanized
machinery and the first to bring in large scale refrigeration. Beer in Greece
until then had been cooled by ice.
Karolos Fix
When Karolos died in 1922, he left the business to his
two sons Ioannis and Antonio. It was during this decade that the family built
their large mansion on their estate in Paleo Iraklio.
The Fix mansion is now a ruin.
https://irakleionews.blogspot.com/2012/07/
Antonio, for reasons of his own, would eventually split
from the brewery and create Alfa beer. It would never achieve the success of
Fix.
In the late 1920s Karolos’ sons funded a small Roman
Catholic chapel in the First Cemetery to honour their father:
The chapel of Saint Charles inside the First Cemetery
The Fix brewery built a new and modern factory on
Syngrou avenue between 1957 and 1961. It was state of the art, an important
work in the ‘international style’ by the architect Takis Zenetos. It had bold horizontal
lines and was purposely designed to be flexible in terms of its inner space.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the Fix
enterprise. In the 60’s their monopoly was shattered when Georgios Papandreou
decided to open up the industry to competition and allowed Heineken (which also
produced Amstel) into the Greek market. In 1983, after many ups and downs, the former
industrial powerhouse was forced to throw in the towel and declare bankruptcy.
And yet…
The Fix brand lives on. The National Bank had taken over
the trademark and sold it to Kourtakis A.E. It changed hands more than once and
today belongs to Olympic Brewery S.A, a subsidiary of Carlsberg.
Today’s adds play on the Greek nostalgia for Fix beer
– and why not? (4) The Fix family and their beer
had been a big part of Greek life for almost 100 years. Even their factory on
Syngrou, somewhat truncated today, has survived to become Athens’ new Museum of
Contemporary Art:
The Graves
Section
4, Number 392
Section 2, Number 115
It is fitting that a family that came to Greece,
assimilated, and contributed (and still is contributing) so much to the country
(5) should be represented here in the First
Cemetery.
Map
Footnotes
(1) See http://www.greece-is.com/little-bavaria-in-athens/ by
Lina Giannarou, Nov. 23, 2015. I came across this hopeful song sung by the
arriving Bavarian soldiers:
Revive you Bavarians, light-hearted,
The day of
departure is here.
We ship joyfully
and without complaint
over that sea
into ancient
Attica…
One Otto departs
with us,
The king’s dear
son.
In Greece we will
ground,
We Bavarians will
ground forever and ever
Bavaria’s high throne
(2) There were many Bavarian
officers in the Greek army until the rebellion of 1843.
(3)
We say ‘virtual’ because there were rivals – more like gnats attacking
an elephant, but there nonetheless. In 1876, Lorenzo Mamo started the first
Greek owned brewery in Patras, for example.
(5) Sandra Fix Marinopoulos is
president of the Athens Cycladic
Museum.
Sources
2.
http://mlp-blo-g-spot.blogspot.com/2013/06/blog-post_11.html This is in Greek but it is an exhaustive
history of Fix Beer for those who want every detail and it comes with copious
photographs.
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