Field Notes
Most people come to Athens to look backwards. The marble and the columns, the long argument with antiquity. We came this time to look at something newer, on Syngrou Avenue, where a former brewery now holds the country's national collection of contemporary art.
The building tells its story before a single canvas does. Beer was made here from 1893, and in 1961 the architect Takis Zenetos, working with Margaritis Apostolidis, gave the FIX brewery the austere horizontal lines of Greek postwar modernism. When brewing stopped, the shell stood derelict for years, a modernist ruin on a main road. EMST itself was founded in 1997 with no permanent home, a collection in search of walls. It moved into the converted building in 2015 and only opened fully, all four floors, in February 2020, weeks before the world shut its doors.
A national museum that spent its first two decades effectively homeless now feels like one of the most certain things in the city.
So this is a young institution in an old place, and it behaves like one. Under Katerina Gregos, its artistic director since 2021, EMST has turned its gaze south and east rather than towards the usual northern capitals. The current rehang of the permanent collection, South by Southeast: Re-Orienting the Collection, which opened on 11 June, reads the holdings through the Mediterranean and the Global South. It is a quiet act of repositioning, and a confident one.
The space carries it. Some 18,000 square metres rise over a small footprint, and the conversion kept an open public passage running through the ground floor, so the building gives something back to the street even when you do not buy a ticket. The roof terrace is one of the better unannounced views in the city, the Acropolis on one side, the haze of Piraeus on the other.
What stays with us is how little fuss surrounds any of it. There is no blockbuster queue, no wall of merchandise doing the thinking for you. You step in off a loud avenue and the noise drops away. The work is often difficult, sometimes political, rarely decorative, and the museum trusts you to meet it halfway.
Athens has spent a very long time being told what it used to be. Barely six years into its full public life, EMST is one of the rooms where the city gets to say, plainly, what it is now.
