A Day in the Life of an Ancient Greek Airport
Airports and nostalgia go hand in hand (or plane in plane?)
What strange creatures are airports! The more monstrous and overgrown they come the better the odds your modern life will be intertwining with theirs, if only for a fleeting and probably angst-ridden rendezvous. From the brutalist lumbering monstrosity of Charles de Gaulle’s Terminal One, which not even a supporting role in The Facts of Life Goes to Paris could soften, to the slumbering if protean labyrinth of LAX, these places thumb their big concrete noses at the notion that man wasn’t meant to fly, and are generally awful reminders that however glamorous the journey, likelier than not it’s going to begin with a TSA pat-down (‘I will have to touch the inside portion of your leg, sir!”) and end with you staring down a squeaky baggage carrousel.
The weirdness of airports, which exist outside of time yet are slaves to it too, only grows when you subtract the functionality from them: I’m talking about zombie airports, those that are one whisker away from the wrecking ball because of something bigger and ostensibly better that came along. Or maybe it was a war, as in the case of Nicosia International Airport on the divided island of Cyprus.
There, departure lounges crumble and ghost flights have been waiting to take off since 1974. Another zombie airport is Athens’ storied Ellinikon, near the tony suburb of Glyfada. It was not only the home of former Greek flag carrier Olympic Airways but also for many years an operations base for the US Air Force. Its vast East Terminal was designed in 1968 by Eero Saarinen, the Finnish modernist architect who made his mark at JFK with the iconic TWA terminal in the ’60s. Ellinikon has languished since 2001 when a newer Athens airport opened inland, leaving an entire 747 abandoned on the tarmac and Sararinen’s terminal structure in a state of spectacular disrepair.
But not for much longer. The entire site, which straddles the Mediterranean Sea, is slated for a total reboot to the tune of a reported $9 billion and that will include a high rise luxury residence tower, hotels, shopping centers and best (or worst, if you’re a Vegas loather like me) of all, a showcase casino—an American company, Hard Rock, is rumored to be one half of the managing consortium steering it through. Whether this construction fest will raise the cultural profile of the birthplace of democracy or cheapen it remains to be seen. For the time being however, some are finding untapped beauty in the ancient airport’s accelerating decay.
If there is a muse of travel perhaps she’s the one who put the bee in Greek artist Dionisis Christofilogiannis’s bonnet to spearhead MOMAFAD, the “Museum of Modern Art for A Day” which pretty much did what its name indicated: reclaimed spaces and transformed them into a museum for the duration of one day, one edition bringing together the works of a group of contemporary artists which were handed over to the project’s organizers for 24 hours. MOMAFAD’s virgin edition took place a while ago in Saarinen’s abandoned East Terminal, but its “ghosts” are still relevant.
After all, the notion of a pop-up modern art museum with a deserted airport for a stage has considerable resonance, particularly during a pandemic when airports could be said to represent freedom and fear in equal measure. Not that the 26 installations necessarily drew on travel themes; displacement might be a more apt term, or subtle provocation. There was Yannis Adoniou’s frenzied choreography of three women, sans chemises, in front of the abandoned terminal, Nichomachi Karakostanoglou’s minimalist trifecta of marble statuary, artfully placed paintings and video projections and my favorite (and one of MOMAFAD creator Dionisis’s own), a Smart car going nowhere fast, wrapped as it was from bumper to bumper in a Greek folk village tablecloth parked curbside in front of the zombified Departure terminal. Fun!
I mention the pandemic because prior to it some airports were on the way to becoming quasi-gallery spaces; think Urs Fischer’s hulking yellow Lamp Bear holding court after passport control at Doha’s Hamad International. But no one wants to linger much in an airport anymore, if they ever did, and that makes the MOMAFAD concept both prescient and kind of eerily perfect: the temporary installations were subsequently photographed, turning them into a permanent piece of Ellinikon’s history that you can peruse at will and on your own, in book form—long after the now haunted place that gave them life, and launched so many forgotten journeys past, is obliterated.
All photos of the artists’ works by Dionisis Christofilogiannis