2023-05-02 11:21:10
Digital representation of the Istanbul Philological Association. On May 2, at the Cultural Center of the Municipality of Athens “Melina” (former Poulopoulos sausage factory), a large exhibition about the City opens.
1934, Pera, Istanbul. Akylas Millas, a baby in his mother’s arms, crosses the threshold of 115 Koumparatzi Street. The family lives in the appartement on the second floor, as he narrates with French, Turkish and Greek alternating in his conversation spontaneously. The apartment building is a micrograph of civic life in the 1930s. Mr. Cohen lives in the apartment on the sixth floor, on the fifth the Georgiadis family, elderly people, who rent a room to Mrs. Seimiri. On the fourth floor lives the Austro-German Rudolf Schindler with his probably Roman wife and a tenant, a foreign language teacher who was a hunter of wild animals in Africa, on the third floor the flour manufacturer Mr. Lambrinidis, as for the doorman, at first it was Sophia from Imbro and then Bertsuhi from Armenia.
The tenants of 115 Koumparatzi Street could be the heroes of a novel, with Akyla Millas as the protagonist, who, approaching 90 years of age, maintains such energy, dynamism and zest for life. His family came from Andros and Nisyros. His grandparents were connected to the old generation of his grandmother, who came from Fanari and took root in Pera. He grew up in Stavrodromi, where Kumparadzi meets Pera’s Great Road – now Istiklal, Independence Avenue since 1923 – and lived in this apartment for 30 years. He studied and excelled in medicine in Istanbul and at the same time was intensively involved in sports. From a young age he drew and made collections (stamps, shells, insects, postcards).
The rich and ubiquitous past of Vasilevoussa turned him to the study of politics and Asia Minor Romanism with parallel tours in the interior of Asia Minor. He is a prolific writer, he has loyal friends and readers in Greece and Turkey, as his books – “purely of Romany content”, he underlines – are translated into Turkish, sell out quickly and are republished. He often travels to the City for lectures, but mostly stays in Prince. “I am a Prince”, he clarifies, “meaning a holidaymaker in Prince”. His heart beats for the Princess Islands. “I would have been there if it wasn’t for the event,” he explains, and so we leave Propontida to go to the great exhibition that opens on May 2nd at the Cultural Center of the Municipality of Athens “Melina” (former Poulopoulos’s pilon factory) under the auspices of the Municipality of Athens. Its title, “To Pera di chiros Akyla Milla”, based on an idea of his friend, emeritus professor of Neurology at EKPA Ioannis Evdokimidis. He coordinates it himself under the supervision of Katerina Koskina.
The exhibition concerns the plans of Mr. Millas, which capture the Great Road of Pera, the Straight Road or the Grande Rue, as the Romans called it. This street, backbone and showcase of European Constantinople – the Pera of the Europeans, the Peraia of the Roma, Levantines, Armenians and Jews, the Beyoglu of the Turks – is depicted in 32 plans that were shelved for 20 years in the hope of become a book someday. At first he drew with a pen, then with a tachograph. Every house, every block of flats that he painted is documented with photographs from the time, from the beginning of the 20th century. Today, many of the buildings have been demolished and replaced by modern apartment buildings.
“I have no architectural knowledge, but I am a perfectionist. I was a surgeon, i.e. a good craftsman, I had a good hand as they say.”
“These plans made themselves,” says Mr. Millas. “I have no architectural knowledge, but I am a perfectionist. I was a surgeon, i.e. a good craftsman, I had a good hand as they say. In 1973-74 I was visiting Halki and saw that some of the mansions were being demolished. So I started drawing them for myself. When I came to Greece in 1980, I confess that I had a hard time adjusting to Athens, so I threw it into painting. Why did I leave the City? Because, as I have said in an interview with the newspaper “Milliet”, I got tired of counting the Romans who leave and I preferred to come to Greece to count those who arrive”.
“Akylas Millas paints what he saw, what he remembered and what the old photographs testified to,” says Mr. Evdokimidis. “In essence, he paints the declining multiculturalism with grace and slight sadness, because he is trying to capture a world that has not only been lost for good, but is also beginning to fade in people’s memory. His drawings are always black and white. The lines are clean, the contours clear, the details intertwined with the larger compositions. The result has an aesthetic imprint on the memory, and this imprint could perhaps be the challenge for further research that goes beyond nostalgia.”
The visitor to the exhibition will therefore walk along the Grande Rue de Péra, as it was around 1900. The right length of the long narrow hall of the Cultural Center will become the right wing of the Grande Rue de Péra, from the Tunnel to the crossroads of the Galata Sarai . The left length, the left side of the street, extending towards Taksim Square to include some important buildings – the Church of the Holy Trinity, the School of Painting, the Zappeion Girls’ School. As for Koumparadzi Street, we will meet it on the right side. Mr. Millas has drawn the view of this very uphill road, as he saw it from his balcony.
“I spent my childhood in these windows,” he recalls. But “memories usually need representation”, comments mathematician and art theorist Dr. Aris Mavrommatis. With his contribution, the modern digital technology of 3D Modeling was used to transform 2D design representations into 3D dynamic digital models and then, thanks to 3D Printing, to become objects, “so that the visitor to hold them in his hands and develop his personal fantasy narrative based on his own experiences”.
“They gave me a gift of my house in Prince”, Akylas Millas tells me, referring to the model they gave him. What excites him is the Turks’ interest in all this. He has philhellenic friends who love Romanism, young children who want to know the history of their city. In the context of a Greek-Turkish approach, the book with the drawings that follows the exhibition is written partly in Greek and partly in Turkish. “Perhaps it is this lonely and persistent preoccupation of Millas with a recently lost past that moves the opposite side of the Aegean – at least a part of it – and that is why they have embraced his work so much,” says Mr. Evdokimidis. “The editions of his books in Turkish become popular because they bring up memories unknown and largely “forbidden” for a long time. The bridge of memory will work and the exhibition will travel well beyond the waters of the Aegean”. Exhibitions of his own works have already been presented in Prince, but a larger one is officially planned for Peran in Istanbul in the near future.
#Straight #Road #Romans