On Monday afternoon, Spetses became the perfect canvas for the trailer of one of the most anticipated films of the year: “The Lost Daughter", starring Olivia Colman.
We visit the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School that became part of the filming, captivating the film's stars and soon the international audience.
Leaving Dapia, you pass the small red chapel of the Resurrection with the pebbled walkway on the beach, and walking parallel to the sea and a high fence, under clumps of trees, you see five sturdy, two-storeyed neoclassical buildings, among towering century-old pine trees, olive trees and fig trees. But it is not a stage, it is the place of real life that this year marks 100 years since Eleftherios Venizelos' original idea, its heyday, its fall and now its return. It's the Anargyrios and Korgialeneios School, which last fall became the filming location for one of the most promising films of the coming winter.
The Lost Daughter, starring Oscar-winning Olivia Colman - as the recent Queen of England in The Crown, Dakota Johnson and Oscar-winning Ed Harris, directed by the well-known actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. The film, which will be released on Netflix in December, is based on the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante.
The Anargyrios and Korgialenios School is a place of unique history, and incredible beauty. iefimerida visited it and was guided by the President of the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School Foundation, Petros Petrakopoulos.
When Venizelos wanted to educate the next leaders of the country
It was in 1921, exactly one hundred years ago, when Eleftherios Venizelos conceived the idea of establishing a college on the model of the famous Eton, with the aim of educating the offspring of the families of expatriate Greeks who would become the next leaders of Greece. The time was shortly after the First World War and E. Venizelos decided to create twenty shares and invited the financially powerful of the time, shipowners, aristocrats, industrialists to buy one each in order to finance the creation of the school. It would essentially be a form of sponsorship that would lead to the creation of this school, which Venizelos at the time wanted to build in Mesogeia.
The first to rush to buy a share was the Kefalonian benefactor Marinos Korgialenios. And then silence. No other benefactor appeared, much to the annoyance of Venizelos who saw his dream wrecked. Korgialenios had a close friendship and collaboration with the Spetses-born Sotiris Anargyros. They shared the same beliefs and visions - and not just business ones. Thus, Anargyros approached Eleftherios Venizelos and told him that he would buy the remaining 19 shares, under one condition: that the school, this Eton-type college, be built on his island, Spetses. He was adamant, so Venizelos was forced to accept - and that's how a close friendship with Anargyros began without a second thought to finance every project and idea of E.Venizelos.
The school immediately began to be built in Spetses and was completed in 1927. A month later Anargyros died without seeing his dream come true, since he was already bedridden and could not even attend the inauguration held by Venizelos and all of Greece talking with expectations about this school that would create the next leaders. Five buildings of unique architectural value designed by the important architect of the time, Panagiotis Zizilas, on a vast 179-acre site on the sea.
The school where Fowles taught and Janis Xenakis studied
And indeed, up to the Second World War the Anargyrios School functioned normally, based on the original vision. Rallis, Iannis, Jason and Cosmas Xenakis studied there. English and French are among the teachers, among whom was the famous writer John Fowles, who wrote, among other things, "The Magus", which is set on the island (it is characteristic that the café of the School bears the name "Magus"). During the war the School played an important role, hiding islanders hunted by the Germans, while the oil produced by its olive groves fed a large part of the population; in the Civil War it became a nucleus of developments.
After the war, decay began, for many reasons. On the one hand there were of course tuition fees and with the crisis that followed the war, it was difficult to cover the costs - we should point out that from the beginning there were scholarships for gifted children from all over Greece. It was a boarding school, a cruel school: it is typical that in the heavy winter the pupils were woken up early in the morning and asked to swim in the icy, raging sea. Thus, after the war it begins to become more of a school for children of separated families, or sailors. In 1983,this it huge school of large facilities, of five buildings had five students only. And so it closed.
Watson and Frick: The scientists who decoded DNA at the Anargyrio
But already since the 1960s it had conferenced activities with an emphasis mainly on Molecular Biology and so even today sophisticated laboratories are to be found in the classrooms. It is significant that already in July 1966, 13 years after the discovery of the double helix that earned them the Nobel Prize in Medicine, James Watson and Francis Crick went to Spetses to teach the secrets of DNA structure at the first summer school of Molecular Biology was organised at the Anargyrios and Korgialenios School. In fact, one room bears their name. Since 1986, by decision of the Court of Appeal, it has been operating as an International Sports, Cultural and Conference Centre, managed by the Anargyrius and Korgialeneio Foundation and collecting income from the conferences and summer schools held on its premises - income that has increased tenfold in recent years. The Foundation's property also includes the sensational Posidonion Hotel in Spetses and the Kaiki Coast.
Who was the demonic Sotiris Anargyros of Spetses
The son of a wealthy family of Spetses captains, Sotiris Anargyros lived in the second half of the 19th century, a time when the island experienced great poverty, while the use of steam in ships had radically changed the economy of Spetses, hading been based on shipyards solely. Anargyros decided to sail abroad. He went to Romania, Asia Minor and then to Egypt which defined him, even as part of his aesthetic. In his magnificent mansion in the heart of Spetses, a masterful but completely abandoned building opposite the Museum of Bouboulina, one can see sphinxes at the entrance and other symbols of Egyptian culture - the symbol was carried along on the case of the tobacco company he later created.
But in Egypt he also learned the secrets of tobacco and carrying this knowledge along he went to France and then to London where he acquired the secrets of tobacco distribution. Impish as he was, he decided to make the long journey to the United States, to New Jerseyin particular. He took a job with the tobacco company Thompson and Thompson. In three years he had already become CEO, in five, with the death of Thompson, Anargyros inherits the entire tobacco company.
He returns to Greece to marry a Greek woman, a distant cousin, much younger than him, and sails back to the United States. But nostalgia won out: he sold his company to the Colossian American Tobacco in about 1900 and with an untold fortune he moved home to Spetses. The first thing he did was to set up a sewer system on the island, and in 1904 he built his famous mansion in Dapia - recently taken over by the Attica Region to restore it as a 42% of Spetses was bought and planted with pine trees.
He started thinking about how to support the island's economy and ended up with tourism and education. It is only 1914 and the visionary Anargyros creates the hotel "Posidonius", one of the three in Greece facilitating hot water (only The Grand Brittain in Athens and a hotel in Corfu had it), creates the first Greek bains mixtes in Costa and buys 42% of the island which at that time had no tree, since most of it were used in the shipyards.
Thus, the visionary Anargyros, decides to plant this 42% of the land with pine trees in order to create conditions for tourism, which was then on the rise and aimed at high-income tourists. In 1914, the opening of the Poseidonio Hotel was held, at the opening of which Eleftherios Venizelos attended and, delighted, asked for the creation of the organisation that became the precursor of the present-day EOT.
Waiting to be named a national benefactor
In 1916, Anargyros financed the creation of the Greek Air Force, again helping his friend Eleftherios Venizelos to make another breakthrough. It is extremely interesting that despite these moves, he has not yet been declared a national benefactor, but remains a local benefactor.
As he had no children, his wife's family was concerned about the way he was spending his fortune out of control and decided to frame him: legend has it that they had a maid approach him to accuse him of having an illicit affair. The case was thrown out in court, he disinherited them all, left only a trust to his wife until her death, and so decided to set up the foundation that bears his name. The entire estate passed to the Foundation and a few years later, in 1921, he died.