Xenia (hotel)

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The first logo (around 1975)
The second logo (from around 1975)

The Xenia ( Greek Ξενία ) hotels and motels were built in Greece as part of the Xenia program of the Greek National Tourist Board founded in 1950 (ΕΟΤ, Ελληνικός Οργανισμός Τουρισμού).

history

The Xenia on Andros, 1958. The colorful coloring is a quote from the island of Andros as the residence of Greek painters
The state ownership enabled a large selection of different and good locations, such as on the harbor promenade of Vathy on Samos (the hotel in the center of the picture, 2006)

The EOT maintained a construction department that dealt with tourist objects, for example the renovation of abandoned residential towers in Mani and their conversion into a hotel complex. In 1950, all new building projects were assigned to a new department that oversaw the Xenia program. The model for the program was the state school building program of the 1920s, when under the architect Patroklos Karantinos over 4,000 schools were built in the classic modern style. The technical director of the new program was the Greek architect Charalambos Sfaellos from 1950 to 1958 ; from 1957 Aris Konstantinidis headed the planning team and selected a team of young architects to plan and build the houses. The staff also included Dimitris Pikionis , who designed the hotel in Delphi (1951–1956).

Preferably at tourist locations such as archaeological sites, islands, healing springs, but also on major traffic routes, around 50 hotels and motels all over the country were built during this time. It was accompanied by numerous other infrastructure projects, such as road construction, tourist kiosks , museums, cable cars, etc. that were coordinated with one another. It made a significant contribution to tourism development and to the economy at national and local level and became the largest client of public buildings after the Second World War and the Civil War .

The Xenia program developed a role model function for the private construction of hotels, holiday resorts and excursion restaurants. Thus it had already fulfilled its task from the 1970s and the EOT was able to limit itself to its function of indirect tourism promotion and advertising. The hotels were then rented out and occasionally also sold. Unprofitable houses like the motels were closed. In recent years, many properties have been given to local authorities against conditions. In total, there are still around 40 properties from the Xenia program in the portfolio of the state tourism property company Eteasa SA

resonance

While the architectural features were praised in international trade magazines, visitors appreciated the comfort of the hotels:

Karl-Heinz Krause wrote about the hotels in a report from a trip from 1983: The [Xenia] hotels we stayed in weren't cheap, but we had comfort. You have to give the Greeks one thing, they keep a keen eye on their tourism. There is no mess of southern countries here. The hotel categories are right, prices are fixed and clearly displayed everywhere.

Hermann Korte about an encounter with Norbert Elias : “I can still see myself in 1969 with him and friends in Samos sitting on the terrace of the very noble hotel 'Xenia' and pointing with a raised index finger that no theory is useful that is not for the liberation of the working class leads".

Beverly Beyer and EA Rabey wrote in Passport to Europe's small hotels & inns : Xenia hotels throughout Greece can usually be counted on for simple but clean and comfortable accommodations, even if they have been later sold to private firms. This one meets all the standards, including a restaurant . The overnight double room with bathroom in the Xenia Skiathos was given in this source with 20 $.

Valerie Strong looks back nostalgically in her work In Those Days : The government had led with the Xenia hotels, models in good taste and sensitive location. Each had its own character depending on the site; they could be built into a mountain top, nestled into an orange grove, or alog a stretch of a beach. They were intimate, beautifully and individually appointed, most featuring local crafts, and run with personal service .

The American writer RB Weber wrote a collection of poems about a hotel: Poems from the Xenia Hotel . The Finnish typeface designer Emil Bertell has named a typeface Motel Xenia .

Architecture and meaning

The holiday village of Paliouri in Chalkidiki, 1962
Restaurant in the holiday village of Paliouri, 1962

The hotels are outstanding examples of post-war Greek architectural history.

The planning of a new property began with a topographical assessment of various properties in one place. This was followed by preliminary drafts, each dedicated to one focus. The selection criteria included a. the inclusion of the landscape, the relationship between interior and exterior space, as well as the simplicity and clarity of form. The main use in the warm season was also taken into account: flaps for ventilation of the rooms at different room heights, large shady canopies, green pergolas, etc. The combination of local building materials and construction methods such as stone walls with the use of standardized prefabricated parts is characteristic.

The buildings stand in contrast to the less attractive large buildings of the International Style that were pulled up at the same time by large chains, such as the Hilton in Athens (1963) and were a model especially for smaller projects. They can be seen as the forerunners of critical regionalism .

The hotels offered a contemporary four-star standard, had an upscale restaurant and a tourist information office. Unusually for public buildings, only a few works of art were installed, one of them a sculpture by Klearhos Loukopoulos in the garden of the 1962 motel in Olympia.

today

Kos Aktis Art Hotel (formerly Xenia) on the waterfront in Kos town
The former Xenia on the riverside road in Zakynthos City now houses club rooms and a dormitory (part of the building on the left)

Three hotels were demolished in the past. The city administration of Chania discovered irregularities in the building permit (the hotel is illegally partly located on an archaeological excavation site that already existed at the time) and was able to force the ministry to demolish it, in Heraklion and Ioannina it was also demolished. The latter was the only major project by the architect G. Vokou and the only building with over 100 rooms. A 500-bed hotel complex was built.

Package tourism mainly expects a post-modern to neo-rustic design of the accommodations, consequently there is no appreciation by the travel literature. Dirk Schönrock, for example, criticizes the location of the hotel in Navplio in the Dumont travel guide and describes it as a “concrete block”. Many hotels have been converted to meet these needs. The hotels in Mesolongi and Poros (today: Poros Image Hotel ) were rebuilt beyond recognition, which extended to Kos , Patmos and Larisa . The hotel in Drama and the one in Chora Sfakion on Crete are in their well-kept original condition and both are operated under the original name. The Xenia Hotel, built in Mykonos in 1960 , has been restored according to the requirements of historical monuments and is run as a design hotel under the name Theoxenia . Likewise, albeit less lavishly, the hotel in Serres (today: Phillipos Xenia Hotel ).

If the locations of the hotels were created under the aspect of tourism promotion, economic operation is not possible at many locations. The Xenia Motel in Amnissos, the holiday village Xenia in Paliouri, Chalkidiki and the hotel on Andros are dilapidated and orphaned, as are the hotels in Vathy on Samos and in Limenas on Thasos, where in both cases the city wanted to acquire the building, but without success . The latter and the Xenia Hotel in Komotini are to be sold internationally by the TAIPED privatization fund. Some of the houses were sold to cities or given as a gift on condition that they were preserved as a historical monument, including one of two in Olympia (used today by the fire brigade ), in Volos and in Arta . The city council has decided to lease the hotel building in Arta to a private investor.

Numerous Greek architectural theorists and historians have drawn attention to the importance of the program. The architecture professor Dionisis Zivas from Athens even made an inventory of all the EOT's construction projects. In 2004 the Association of Greek Architects (ΣΑΔΑΣ) called on the responsible ministers Vasso Papandreou and Evangelos Venizelos to “urgently care for these monuments of the history of tourism in southern Europe”. Seven houses are under monument protection and proceedings are ongoing for nine more. A seminar at the National Technical University of Athens is dedicated to hotels.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Description of the seminar on the Xenia hotels. National Technical University of Athens, accessed June 15, 2011 (Greek)
  2. ↑ List on the Eteasa SA website, accessed June 11, 2011
  3. ↑ Karl-Heinz Krause: Des Daseins Adversity . Smirk stories + other more, p. 203.
  4. ↑ Eberhard Firnhaber, Martin Löning, Günter Albrecht: Norbert Elias: Bielefelder Treffen , p. 20.
  5. ↑ Beverly Beyer, EA Rabey: Passport to Europe's small hotels and inns , p 109. 1985th
  6. ^ Valerie Strong: In Those Days . 2010, p. 164.
  7. ^ Arts magazine , Volume 37, p. 30, Art Digest Inc. 1962.
  8. ↑ A daily newspaper about the hotels today. ( Memento of October 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (Greek)
  9. ↑ Dirk Schönrock: Peloponnes , p. 183.
  10. ↑ Hotel "XENIA" in Andros: An example of indifference for the greek modern architecture . monumenta.org
  11. ↑ Xenia Hotel Thasos transferred to the TAIPED privatization fund (Greek)
  12. ↑ Xenia Thasos and Komotini are sold by TAIPED (Greek)
  13. ↑ Xenia Arta is to be leased to private entrepreneurs (Greek)
  14. ↑ "Save the Xenia Hotels" , petition by the Greek Architects' Association from 2007, (Greek, archived on its own website www.sadas-pea.gr )
  15. ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: press release of the member of the Greek parliament, Kostas Kartalis, who is committed to the preservation of the hotels (Greek)@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.ana.gr