Georges Meis and his photographs of summer colours on Greek islands

An image of Santorini by Georges Meis, bought in Rethymnon last year (click on image for full-screen resolution) …

… is based on one of his well-known original photographs

Patrick Comerford

You may not be familiar with the name of Georges Meis. But if you have been on holiday in Greece then I am sure you know his work as a photographer, even if you have not noticed his name.

His photographs appear on many of the most popular postcards throughout Greece, and his collections of photographs provide some of those popular, heavy colourful books that tourists bring home as presents or coffee table books.

His exceptional photos of stunning Greek Island scenery, especially Santorini, Mykonos and Crete, are easy to recognise and have been reproduced on thousands of postcards, posters, calendars, placemats, magnet calendars, and other souvenir items sold throughout Greece.

They capture the colours of Greece, particularly the blue domes, doors and windows and white walls that create images that are now almost every tourist’s stereotypical image of Greece in the mind’s eye.

But Georges Meis also captures wild primary colours, fading doors, mesmerising sunsets and gnarled and dignified faces of old people who know every joy and every hardship that modern Greece has endured.

Almost every year, without failure, I have had a calendar with his photographs hanging in one of my studies or offices, and each year I buy countless copies of his photographs on postcards – not to send to family and friends but just as keepsakes to enjoy as the sun fades and summer turns to autumn.

The 3,000 bare, rocky outcrops in the blue Aegean are his raw material as an artist. His eye, how he frames and catches old doors, narrow steps, inviting alleyways and the domes of churches, and the way he uses panoramic opportunities to provide vistas of harbours, bays and island shorelines have inspired my own efforts to take photographs in Crete.

His panoramic photographs, which are a result of a lifetime of research, were considered avant garde when they were first published. It was the first time that photographs taken from an angle of 360 degrees were presented in compositions like these. It is so easy to forget how revolutionary and influential he has been now that we all have apps that allow us to take panoramic photographs with our iPhones.

Although Georges Meis has been taking photographs since he was a 14-year-old, he only became seriously involved in photography while he was studying to be an electrician. By 1973, he could no longer restrain his passion for photography. He went to Paris to study photography and cinema, and there he widened his views and the range of his photographic experience.

When he returned to Greece, his first expectation was to establish his name in the glamourous world of fashion photography, and for five years he lived in the world of fashion photography, working in his own Meis Studios.

But, at the peak of his success, he realised he was still not fulfilled. He gave up the glamour and commercialism of fashion photography to concentrate solely on creating fine art photographic prints.

Ever since, he has walked the length and breadth of the Greek isles, seeking out hidden corners and the inconsequential details of everyday life. The warmth of the Greece and its people speak through a worn mat, a well-trodden stairway, an open door, colourful staircases, pots, walls and ripening fruit.

He became known for his series of postcards that became popular with tourists, and many of his photographs of Crete soon became famous as they were reproduced on postcards and posters and earned worldwide attention.

He attracted international attention for his unique presentations of the Greek islands – particularly Crete, Rhodes, the Cycladic and Aegean islands such as Santorini and Mykonos, and Dodecanese islands including Rhodes and Symi – and mainland Greece too. He has exhibited at international fairs in New York, Atlanta, Sydney and Birmingham.

He first saw Crete in the 1970s. Inspired by his early reading of writers such as Nikos Kanzatakis and Thanos Kondylakis and the music of Nikos Xylouris, who made him ‘feel Cretan since childhood,’ he approached Crete, ‘camera in hand – taking photographs wherever he went.’

His book – or is it an album? – Land of Crete, Land of the First European Civilisation (2000), took six years to produce, from 1994 to 2000.

This book is a fulfilment of promises first made almost three decades earlier to a Sfakiot shepherd, Manolis Nikoloudakis, and to Yiorgis Anyfantakis, a well-known photographer from Kastelli Kissamos. Both had encouraged the young Georges Meis when he was journeying throughout Crete after he had returned to Greece from Paris. Some of Meis’s black and white photographs taken at that time were included in the book – atmospheric images of elderly villagers and their day-by-day life: baking bread, tending animals, gossiping on the village bench.

After an introductory tour through Cretan mythology and Minoan civilisation, Georges Meis plunges into the wonderful colours and textures of the modern world. Many of the photographs are in a fold-out form, presented in angles as wide as 360 degrees, offering truly panoramic views from many different points. The colours are glorious, the shots superb, the locations varied and interesting – ranging from a detail of a stone step or a blazing geranium in a pot, through to a majestic vista of the Lefka Ori or White Mountains covered in snow.

Georges Meis freely confesses, however, that he has tinkered with some of his photographs to remove the more modern and less photogenic things he did not want in his pictures.

Two other coffee table books of his spectacular photographs – Thera or Santorini, Born from Tephra (2006) and The Diamonds of the Aegean (2007) – are also popular treasures for travellers to take home from their Greek holidays.

Then, 14 years after his first book on Crete, Meis produced his second album on the island, Crete – Mother of the European Civilisation. He says: ‘In essence, I would say this is something new. Something, perhaps more modern. However, the old exists side by side with the new.’

I often find copies of his work are hanging in rooms in hotel rooms and apartments I rent on holidays in Greece.

Last year, while I was browsing through the shop at the Fortezza in Rethymnon during my few weeks in Crete, I added to my collection of photographs and postcards by Georges Meis when I bought two ‘canvas-effect’ images based on his photographs taken in Santorini.

They evoke sweet memories of a relaxed, sunny, summer afternoon about 30 years ago in Santorini, sitting on a balcony listening to Mozart, looking out across the caldera and watching the sun set beyond the neighbouring islands of Nea Kameni, Palea Kameni and Therasia. Now they are framed and hanging in the front room of Saint Mary’s Rectory in Askeaton. They have joined the other posters, photographs and paintings on these walls. And I am looking forward to the promise of another return journey to Crete this summer.

A second image of Santorini by Georges Meis, bought in Rethymnon last year (click on image for full-screen resolution) …

… is based on another of his well-known original photographs

Islanders remember waves of invaders

World View

Patrick Comerford

Kremasti and the small villages of Rhodes, with their tavernas, white-washed domed churches and neoclassical public buildings, appear for all the world like picture-postcard Greece. It is hard to imagine that Rhodes and its neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese have been part of the modern Greek state for only 50 years.

Looking across the narrow strait that separates the western coast of Rhodes from the thin, finger-like peninsulas that jut out from Anatolian Turkey, it is easy to understand why local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come,” and rarely “if …”

The shore line is pock-marked with gun positions which, despite their wilting camouflage, are always ready for use. Turkey and Greece have gone to war twice this century, and both states have yet to find a way to implement an agreement reached 10 years on reducing tensions in the Aegean.

The signs of invasions that came wave after wave are to be seen throughout the island. Rhodes has been attacked or conquered by each and every civilisation that has sought to impose its might on the Mediterranean, including the Minoans, the Dorians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Byzantines, Genoese pirates, and the Crusading Knights of Rhodes, who were forced by the Turks to abandon the island for Malta in 1522.

In the old town of Rhodes, the Turks have left a monumental legacy, with their terracotta pink mosques and minarets, Ottoman libraries and harems, fountains, baths and bazaars providing an oriental atmosphere in the narrow streets with their hanging balconies. There is still a small minority of 4,000 Muslims of Turkish origin on the island, and their integration into island life is typified by Mustafa, the taxi driver, who insists on being called Taki by his colleagues.

But while the Turks left their mark mainly in the old town, the Italians were the last invading force to leave their mark everywhere in Rhodes and throughout the Dodecanese. Despite their name, there are more than 12 islands in the Dodecanese: over 1,000 islands – only 26 are inhabited – fell to Italians after they defeated the Turks in 1912.

Under the command of the Italian Governor, Mario de Vecchi, Italian architects rebuilt the Palace of the Grand Masters, destroyed in an explosion in 1856, as a summer residence for King Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini. They were given free rein to their fantasies and proved indiscriminate in their mixture of architectural styles, features and furnishings, plundering early Christian mosaics from Kos and misplacing them in the upper floors. The overall kitsch effect was later ridiculed by Lawrence Durrell as “a design for a Neapolitan ice”. Ironically, the rebuilding was completed in 1939, and neither the king nor Il Duce ever stayed in the palace.

A project that was a disaster – although on a lesser scale – was the building work at Kalithea, where Hippocrates had advised his patients to take the spa waters for kidney and arthritic complaints. The Italians tried to restore the thermal baths, laid out terraced tropical gardens, and built domed pavilions with pink marbled pillars, arcades and walks in pseudo-Moorish style. The project failed to attract Italian visitors, and today the site is only of passing interest to tourists on their way south to the popular resorts of Faliraki and Lindos.

Further north in the Dodecanese lies Leros, once famous as the island of Artemis, but now infamous as the home of Greece's most notorious psychiatric institutions, and as the island to which the colonels exiled their opponents. After Mussolini came to power, Italian architects and town planners started working on Mussolini’s vision of a fascist dream town in Lakki, building wide boulevards, a saucer-shaped market building with a clock tower, a cylindrical town hall and fascist centre, and the vast art deco Albergo Romana, later the Leros Palace Hotel, with a cinema and theatre complex.

To defy the Italians, the people of Leros abandoned Lakki and made the village of Platanos their own capital. Today, Mussolini’s summer residence houses the State Therapeutical Hospital, and Lakki is a ghost town by day, resembling a disused film set.

***

BUT, despite Durrell's criticisms of the rebuilding of the old town of Rhodes, the pleasant shape of the new town is a credit to Italian architects. They built the Nea Agora (new market) in the style of an oriental bazaar a Moorish inner courtyard and heptagonal domed fish market; they built the imposing and stately Post Office and the Bank of Greece; and they rebuilt the Evangelismos Church, a faithful reconstruction of the Crusaders’ Church of St John. The Governor's Palace - now home to the Greek Orthodox archbishop - mixes elements of Arab, neo-Gothic and Venetian styles, and has been compared by some with Doge’s Palace in Venice.

To view the authentic architectural styles of the islands, one must travel to Symi – squashed between Rhodes and the Marmares peninsula of Turkey – with its pastel-coloured neo-classical houses rising in tiers above the the semi-circle of the harbour they embrace. On the harbour-front at Symi, a small plaque commemorates the surrender of the Germans on May 8th, 1945, and the end of the second World War.

Durrell arrived soon after in Rhodes to edit to re-establish local newspapers and as part of the British administration. The British continued to administer the Dodecanese and in the old Governor’s Palace in the new town, the Italians formally handed over the Dodecanese in 1947.

This year, Rhodes and the other islands have been marking the 50th anniversary of their incorporation into the Greek state on March 7th, 1948. If Mussolini and Victor Emmanuel never managed to take up residence in the Grand Masters’ Palace, the Italians’ lasting legacy may well be the introduction of tourism to Rhodes. Close to the Villa Kleoboulos, where Durrell once made his home, they built the now-abandoned Hotel des Roses in Moorish style as the island’s first holiday hotel. And while other Greek islands have suffered from depopulation over recent decades, tourism has allowed Rhodes to see its population almost double from 66,000 in 1971 to the present 110,000.

The Italians are welcome and popular tourists today. No longer a threat, they are praised for the efforts to enhance the island’s beauty. But the islanders still look across the straits to Anatolia, and worry about the Turks who first and invaded and conquered them in 1522.

This ‘World View’ column was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 June 1998

Dropping Ankara in Rhodes

By Patrick Comerford

Early summer is the time to go island hopping in the Aegean. The harbours of Greek islands such as Rhodes, Kos and Kalimnos are lined with small ferries, fishing boats and caiques offering day trips to neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese, and to Greece's nearest neighbour, Turkey.

From Agathonissi in the north to Kastellorizo in the far south east, the Dodecanese is a chain of over 1,000 islands, islets and rocky outcrops at the end of the eastern Mediterranean, strung out like a necklace along the west and south-west coast of Asia Minor.

These are islands dripping with history and oozing with culture: Kos, where Hippocrates formulated the foundations of modern medicine; Patmos, where St John the Divine wrote the Book of Revelation; Kalimnos, Leros and Simi, with their neo-classical mansions; and Rhodes, where the giant Colossus once straddled the harbour of Mandhraki, holding aloft the flame of freedom that inspired the Statue of Liberty.

The casual freedom of land and sea, to hop from one island to the next, is part of the lure of a holiday in the sun in this part of Greece. But it’s a freedom that comes with a price, and a freedom valued by the local Greeks. At the crossroads of three continents, this island chain was once ruled by Alexander the Great and Ptolemy; it has been occupied by the Romans, the Crusaders, the Venetians, the Knights of St John, the Turks, the Italians and Nazi Germany. Only with the end of the second World War was it finally handed over by Britain and incorporated into the Greek state in 1947.

Today, only 26 of the Dodecanese islands are inhabited: the largest, Rhodes, has about 100,000 people, but most have only a few hundred residents or less, and there are only 79 people left on Pserimos.

The large Turkish minorities in Rhodes and Kos and the mosques and minarets still dotting the skylines of many islands are ever present reminders that Turkey occupied the Dodecanese for almost 400 years, from 1522 to 1912. Turkey is Greece’s nearest neighbour, and from many islands you can feel it’s almost possible to touch the Turkish coast with its harbours and towns, houses and hotels.

The fishermen and ferry operators supplement their income during these months with day trips from Rhodes to Marmaris, from Simi to Data, and from Kos to Bodrum, site of the ancient world’s Hallicarnassus and its Mausoleum.

On Saturdays and Sundays, the NV Nissos offers day trips to Turkey, leaving Kos at 9 a.m. and returning at 5 p.m. But as a small group of not more than two dozen journalists boarded the Nissos in Kos Harbour, close to the Plane Tree of Hippocrates and the Mosque of Hatzi Hassan, we were reminded of the ever-present fear of an invasion from Anatolia, five kilometres across the stretch of water: local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come”, not “if”.

With blue skies and blue seas, it could have been an idyllic summer trip. Apart from goat herds and environmentalists, few people ever bother to visit the more remote rocks off the coast of Kos, Kalimnos, Kalolimnos and Pserimos. The crew took down the sign reading “Turkey” as we sailed off for the islets of Imia or Limnia, two flat pancakes less than two miles from Kalolimnos, almost 2½ miles from the Turkish island of Cavus, and over three miles from the western-most Turkish coast on the peninsula of Bodrum.

The Greek naval frigate HS Limnos, which had taken part in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, was fresh back from the Adriatic and had offered to take us out to look at the rocks. But before we left, Turkey protested and summoned the Greek ambassador in Ankara, Dimitrios Nezeritis, to warn against the media trip.

It was no idle warning – two days earlier, a Greek coastguard vessel and a Turkish patrol boat had collided in Greek waters, a mile south of Imia.

For more than 60 years, Turkey had accepted the maritime boundaries in the Aegean, defined by treaties and agreements with the Italians in 1923 and 1932, and ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The boundaries were never challenged by Ankara until last December.

But as Turkey faced a major political crisis with the unexpected electoral success of the Islamic Welfare Party, the Foreign Ministry in Ankara claimed for the first time that Imia was part of the Turkish province of Mugla. Tension began to escalate and on January 27th Turkish journalists from the daily Hurriyet landed on the largest of the two Imia islets, tore down the blue and white Greek flag and hoisted the red and white star and crescent of Turkey.

Four days later, Turkish troops landed on the smaller rocky outcrop. The two countries were on the brink of war when President Clinton intervened and the Turkish troops withdrew.

The crisis was a temporary boost at home to Turkey’s Tansu Ciller as she searched (in vain) for a coalition partner to keep her in power. But it threatened to bring down the new Greek Prime Minister, Costas Simitis; his Foreign Minister, Theodoros Pangalos; and the Pasok government in Athens. Both sides agreed to withdraw their forces from the area around Imia and return to the status quo ante, although Ms Ciller continued to press Turkey’s claims to 3,000 Aegean islands – the sum total of all islands in Greek waters.

As we sailed out of Kos, the military tension was palpable and visible. Greek and Turkish jets buzzed overhead sporadically, a Greek coastguard vessel and a navy ship were within sight and, in the distance, we could catch a glimpse of a ship with Turkish naval markings.

Costas Bikas, the Foreign Ministry spokesman from Athens on board the Nissos, insisted there was nothing out of the ordinary about the cruise and it was none of Ankara’s business. But the Turks made it their business. As the Greek and Turkish jet fighters swooped low over the area, the Turkish foreign ministry took a group of foreign and local journalists out from Bodrum. Once again, there were new Turkish claims to the islets known to the Turks as Kardak – by Defence Minister Oltan Sunguklu and by naval spokesman Ali Kurunahmut, who told cruising journalists: “Kardak is a Turkish islet and we are in Turkish waters.”

Trailing both groups were reporters and camera crews from the Greek and Turkish press and television. The crisis had moved from territorial claims and counter claims to cruise and counter cruise for journalists in the Aegean. As Imia faded out of sight, we followed past Psenmos, Kalolimnos, Leros and Kalimnos, through the straits separating Kalimnos and Telendhos, into Pothia, the port harbour of Kalimnos – names that once tripped off the tongues of backpackers in the 1970s.

As we disembarked at the dockside in Pothia, the microphones and cameras crowded into our faces: the foreign media had become the message.

The rocky island of Kalimnos is famous for its traditional sponge fishing; its fame in the past rested on Homer’s reference in the Iliad to the ships from the “Kalyndian Islands” taking part in the Trojan wars. Today, war remains an ever-present threat to the peace of the islanders and their sponge fishers.

The Nissos returned to Kos to prepare for Sunday’s day trippers to Bodrum, and a launch from the Hellenic coastguard took us out from the harbour to the navy frigate Timnos, with its crew waiting to take us on to Rhodes. For four hours we watched the crew tracking Turkish moves in the Aegean sea and skies, before our odyssey came to an end and Rhodes came into sight with its medieval castles and palaces, mosques and minarets and three harbours.

Two deer stand at each end of Mandhrki where the Colossus once straddled the entrance to the harbour, with ships passing through its towering legs. A small tug, the Herakles, took us ashore, reminding us of the apt inscription that once graced Colossus, praising the lovely gift of unlettered freedom. “For to those who spring from the race of Herakles, dominion is a heritage both on land and sea.”

This feature was published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 6 July 1996