Nauplion's Bavarian remnants

This is the front door of Bettina Schinas' house, opposite. Ag. Giorgios. The door was imported from Trieste, probably just after 1830 -- apparently all the best new houses had doors from Trieste. Bettina and her husband Konstantinos rented the house from Andreas Miaoulis for 1834-35, before they moved to Athens with the Bavarian court.  It is a splendidly carved door.

Photo, Brigitte Eckert, 2010.

Another view of Bettina's house. This deterioration cannot be blamed on the economic crisis. It takes a long time for a house like this to disintegrate. But this house is a significant element in Nauplion's heritage, and it is a disappointment and a shame that no one seems to find it important. Bettina wrote wonderful letters to her family from this house, describing Nauplion and the people she met --Kolettis, Miaoulis, Petro-Bey Mavromichaelis -- and later wrote wonderful letters about Athens. Brigitte Eckert made extensive translations from the letters so Surprised by Time could publish them.

If you stand facing the bus station, and take the first corner to your right, you will come almost immediately to the door with these elegant lion heads (there is a small cafe). Below the lion heads are panels of exceptional carving – swags of leaves and little monster heads on either side of a shell, and then below that, a deeply-inset panel with the head of a Bavarian Green Man. 

 The condition of this door has been developing for a long time: it is not a casualty of the economic crisis.  But the disregard of Nauplion for such an exceptional work of art is another example of the carelessness demonstrated, for example, towards the Venetian staircase and gate to Akro-Nauplion.  I would imagine that there is a lot of experience in Bavaria where preservation and restoration of wood carvings are concerned, and some of the ill feelings of the economic crisis might well be relieved by a Bavarian mission to help restore this shared heritage.

The grandest of the surviving Bavarian houses is just up the street if you take the first left when you are facing the bus station.  Here a classical-style Bavarian door has been built accommodated to the contemporary Greek stonework. The house belonged to the Count von Armansperg, First Minister to the King.  

Photo, Brigitte Eckert, 2010.

This was the first house in Nauplion to have a piano.  Bettina wrote about going to a party there.

"I must report about the evening at the Armanspergs. Beautiful rooms nicely decorated, filled with all kinds of people, diplomats, officers, dressed in Bavarian uniforms, as palikaria or French; also the ladies dressed French or Greek. The countess in mourning because of the Duke von Altenburg’s death. She received me very kindly, complaining there would be no dancing because of the death. The daughters very pretty, very modest and polite, offered me conversation as they noticed I didn’t know anybody. The older played the piano later very skillful. The many rooms were crowded -- tea, ice cream, lemonades were offered. When the Countess saw me speaking with Kolettis, (I was standing up because he is so tall) she came and offered us 2 chairs next to each other so we could speak seated; the daughter played the piano, so we stopped our conversation." 

Photos, DW, November 2014.

PS, Part Three: Nauplion Details

Picking up on both of the two details in Nauplion: Two Details.

Going back again to the 16th century map detail of the inverted Y at the plateia of Ag. Spyridon, I said that I had found at that plateia strong support for the reliability of that drawn Y.  I have now found a picture of the end of the right-hand fork where it comes into old Nauplion's main plateia at the southwest corner.

You will recognize the pretty little mosque used for the Trianon cinema --  porch domes and columns now removed, and the building across the street to the left that has been a restaurant for three generations.  To the right of the mosque, where the yellow Acropolis hotel now stands you can see an open space going up the hill.  The top of the space, in a larger version of the picture, shows clearly a ribbon of steps.  So the mosque was built beside the road coming down from the Y.  In the 15th and 16th centuries, before the mosque was built, a church stood where the picture shows houses, just about where Dmitri Kountalis' shop and the bank are now.

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I wrote that the platan tree at the plateia -- diagonally across the plateia from the end of the street shown above -- was old enough to remember the Turks.  So I have been told many times.  But I found this undated photo on Facebook, and that platan tree looks to me extremely unlikely to have ever seen any Turks at all.  I cannot get the photo clear enough, large enough, to guess at the date from the clothes the people are wearing, so for now, this platan is one more fiction that needs to be allowed to rest quietly although it is a lovely tree, and fine for spending hours under. This means that the wanton slaughter of the great trees by the owners of two restaurants destroyed the two great trees remaining from the 17th century.  

The best Nauplion can do now is point out a palm tree or two, supposedly planted by Kapodistrias at independence. The palm in Greek is phoinix, and the first symbol of free Greece was the phoenix, the bird-lion that is reborn out of the flames that consume it.  This one being decorated for Christmas does not, I think, quite convey the power of that symbol.

You can find a couple of phoenixes left on buildings of the period, and one was used on the first coinage of the country. But a tall skinny palm with its little whoosh of feathers at the top cannot compare with those broad-spreading massive-trunked trees I remember.  Despite all one hears about "preserving our heritage," such preservation is extremely partial and easily influenced by profit.