Description

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Stirring images of Greece and her people in a time of change, from noted photographer Robert A. McCabe.

When photographer Robert A. McCabe first came to Greece as a college student in 1954, he found a country still scarred by the Axis occupation of World War II and the civil war that followed: poverty was widespread, and the infrastructure was underbuilt and battered. But, at the same time, these were years of hope: new ventures ranging from shipping lines to state-sponsored tourist hotels to ice cream distribution heralded the nation’s rapid development into a modern European state. And all around were visible the beauty of the Greek landscape, the splendor of the Greek archaeological heritage, and the optimism of the Greek people, who maintained age-old cultural traditions even in the most challenging conditions.



This volume, published on the occasion of an important exhibition at the European Culture Centre of Delphi, collects 118 of the most compelling photographs that McCabe took in Greece between 1954 and 1965. Working in both black and white and color, he ranged through the mainland, the Peloponnese, and the islands, capturing scenes of a country on the brink of rapid change: a policeman directing traffic from a booth in the middle of an Athens intersection, before the city had traffic lights; a caique full of freshly harvested grapes pulling into the port of Katapola on Amorgos; a performance of Euripides’ Hippolytos in the ancient theater at the very first Epidauros Festival.



Furnished with meticulously researched captions, as well as essays by the literary scholar Panagiotis Roilos, the journalist Katerina Lymperopoulou, and McCabe himself, Greece after the War is an essential visual document of modern European history.

About the Author

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Robert A. McCabe was born in Chicago in 1934. He started taking photographs in 1939 with a Kodak Brownie given to him by his father, who published a tabloid newspaper in New York. His work is featured in a permanent exhibition at the Greek consulate in Boston, MA. McCabe’s fifteen published photo books include the Abbeville titles Mykonos, Mycenae: From Myth to History, The Ramble in Central Park: A Wilderness West of Fifth, and Three Days in Havana.

Panagiotis Roilos is the George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, as well as a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. He is the President of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi. He is the author and (co-)editor of ten books. He is currently completing a book on hyperreality, the crisis of representation, and posthumanism (Neomedieval Metacapitalism), and another one on Postclassical Imaginaries: A Cognitive Anthropology of Late Antique and and Byzantine Phantasia.

Katerina Lymperopoulou has more than three decades of experience as a journalist for the leading newspapers in Greece. Her marriage to a native of Zakynthos has connected her closely with the Ionian islands and the Strofades.