Greece after the war. Years of hope

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.