On This Day
168 BC: The Romans defeated Perseus of Macedon at the Battle of Pydna.
1826: Ibrahim Pasha invaded Mani but was repelled with heavy casualties.
1892: Charilaos Trikoupis formed a government which was still in power when Greece declared bankruptcy.
1920: Beginning of the Greek offensive in Anatolia.
Births: Sofoklis Schortsianitis, basketball player (1985).
Ernst Moritz Theodor Ziller (Ernestos Tsiller; 22 June 1837, Serkowitz (now part of Radebeul-Oberlößnitz) – 4 November 1923, Athens) was a Saxon architect who later became a Greek national, and in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a major designer of royal and municipal buildings in Athens, Patras and other Greek cities.
In Greece, where he spent most of his life, he designed over 500 buildings, including mansions, theaters, churches, markets, schools, museums, hotels, office buildings, shops and apartment blocks. His works were built not just in Athens but all over Greece. Aside from being a gifted architect, he was also an amateur archaeologist and a knowledgeable engineer. Today, the buildings that he designed stand out for their stately, noble style, a reminder of the late neoclassical period of architecture in Greece.
His name is well known yet it is likely that few know exactly which buildings he designed. Moreover, we are still finding out more about him: Archives come to light, data is cross-checked, buildings are identified. The research goes on.
A new book from Melissa, “Ernst Ziller 1837-1923: I techni tou clasikou” (The Art of the Classical) is the basic introduction to the world of Ziller. It is a spectacular, lavishly illustrated collection and a revaluation written by Maro Ardamitsi-Adami, one of the leading architects writing about Athens who has made a special study of Ziller.
Ziller grew up in Radebeul, a suburb of Dresden, where a street has been named after him. Ardamitsi-Adami visited the area to absorb the atmosphere of the place and culture in which the architect “who built half of Athens” was reared.
He was the son of the architect Christian Gottlieb and the grandson of building contractor Johann Christian. His three brothers, Moritz, Gustav and Paul also became architects. The first two ran the Ziller architects’ office in their hometown, with their own quarry and steam-operated timber mill. Ernst used to visit them whenever he left Athens for a while, and Paul stayed with him for a time in Greece.
Ziller had the opportunity to go to Tiflis in 1859 where he had won a competition run by the Russian government or to start work in Germany, but he received a letter from Theophilus Hansen, a Danish architect with a large business in Vienna, who was close friends with Baron Sina, who explained that he had secured the plot of land of the Athens Academy.
It was Hansen who brought out Ziller’s talent, offering him opportunities, inspiration and work. In the mid-19th century, Greece must have seemed to Ziller like an insignificant realm at the very edge of Europe. We follow him at the age of 22, as he traveled with his brother Moritz to Prague on the way to Vienna, excited by the remarkable architectural monuments. Hansen had been in Vienna since 1846 and had opened an architectural studio there. He had just returned from Greece, where he had been with his brother Christian. Ziller began working there in an environment in which the aura of Greece was present like a distant echo, and laid the foundations for a new life. The plans for the Academy, which he worked on for years in Vienna, would take him to Greece, initially in 1859 and permanently in 1868.
Ziller oversaw the work of the Academy but gradually set up his own studio. He was a man who was interested in everything, who loved learning, and who trusted his own judgment, with daring and vision. He traveled to Greece, whose border at that time was just north of Lamia, sketching and observing. He loved archaeology and conducted excavations. His finds and the discovery of the ancient Panathenaic Stadium made him famous and won him the friendship of King George I.
We don’t know why Ziller settled in Athens, though he had married Sofia Doudou, whom he met in Vienna, a piano soloist, and they had five children. Living conditions were not easy in Greece at the time. Travel was arduous until at least the end of the 19th century, when the administrations of Prime Minister Harilaos Trikoupis embarked on modernization projects.
At a time of rapid change, Ziller embodied the architectural expression of the new middle class. His clientele grew, reaching a peak in the 1880s and 90s. It was then that he designed major projects such as the Royal (now National) Theater, the Melas Mansion, the Stathatos Mansion, the Successor’s Palace (now the Presidential Palace), the Municipal Theater, Ermoupolis City Hall and numerous other buildings throughout Greece.
He built the Ziller residence in Kastella, of which almost all the neoclassical belvedere overlooking the Saronic Gulf has been demolished, villas in Kifissia, mansions, offices and the first large apartment block. Ziller designed a new landscape for Athens. His house still stands on Mavromichali Street, near Academias Street. He sold it for 150,000 drachmas to the art-loving banker-collector Dionysios Loverdos when an inopportune business deal ruined him in 1900. His family learned to live on less after that and Ziller opened another studio on the corner of Kanaris and Solonos streets, where he found himself the butt of the anti-German sentiments of the Athenians in the years leading up to WWI. He worked unceasingly till the very end, in 1923.
As well as being an architect, Ziller was also an exceptional engineer and builder who created an army of tradesmen and a whole world of workshops that supplied builders all over Greece with clay statues, painted borders, railings and friezes for houses and public buildings.