At the intersection of Amalia Avenue and Rigillis Street, the pulse of Athens sounds like a living heartbeat. And yet, in a small alley next door, there is a small road that seems to absorb the noise of the city. This is Muruzi Street, which is barely more than two hundred meters long and ends at the greenery in front of the National Garden, collecting in itself a small history of the recent civilization of the capital. ERT and the fire department still maintain their historic buildings here, while art and journalism meet in the nearby apartment buildings where sculptor Natalia Mela and journalist and publisher Eleni Vlahova lived. On the same side of the street, in the 1960s, Mikis Theodorakis performed his works for the first time in the Ta Tzaki pub, and in a small alley a few meters below, a symbolic building made of modern Greek letters is hidden. Built in the Art Deco style in 1928, it was for decades the home of the philologist, critic and historian of modern Greek literature K.T. Dimaras, in the past few years, has also been the residence of the architect, historian and publisher Konstantinos Staikos, who died unexpectedly on April 3 at the age of 80.

Born in Athens in 1943, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of the Polytechnic Institute of Metzovian and then moved to Paris, where he was admitted to the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs and worked in architectural firms as well as in a modern furniture design house. Knoll. He became interested in the rich decoration of Parisian buildings and began to record their architectural details, starting his research from the streets and continuing in archival collections and libraries. In these first creative steps of his, there was already the spirit that characterized all his subsequent activities: an ethos of incessant research and self-education, a whole way of life outside of academic education.

Returning to Athens in the early 1970s, he worked alongside his architect father Spyros Staikos, one of the protagonists of the post-war reconstruction of the capital. In 1974, he opened his own office, where he exhibited designs for furniture, textiles, and decorative materials inspired by domestic tradition, which, he aptly remarked, was not on the market. Within a decade, forty stores operated throughout Greece, selling exclusively his own decorative products.

But it was the world of books that captivated him, and it was there that he channeled his research and creative passion. His interest in design details, which he developed in the field of architecture, was the initial impetus. The double-headed eagle, printed in red ink on a rare book from 1499, served as the initial inspiration for him to embark on an adventure as a book collector and researcher of Rod’s publishing activities from the Renaissance to the first post-revolutionary years.

In 1975, she organized a pioneering exhibition for its time in the basement of the National Gallery, which was still under construction at the time, entitled “Travelers in Greece from the 15th century to 1821”, organized by the then new “Hellenic Society of Bibliophiles”. At this exhibition, he brought rare and inaccessible publications out of the darkness and a narrow circle of collectors and researchers and brought them closer to the general public. Drawing on his experience and talent in interior architecture, he freed the books from their glass cases and placed them on the pulpits, making them more accessible to exhibition visitors. Konstantinos Staikos has given the dimension of “spectacle” to what was previously inaccessible and twisted.

Since then, he has studied Greek publishing in depth, from the origin of the archetype to the pre-revolutionary years (1470-1821), while he was especially fascinated by the pictorial details that adorned their publications, such as signs of printing and publishing houses. His research over the years has been summarized in a series of eclectic reference publications, including the 1989 “Map of Greek Typography” (which also won the Athens Academy Prize in 1992) and the 2009 edition “Publication of Typographic Signs”. Books of the Hellenic World (1494-1821)”, which appeared in the catalog of his Aton publishing house and is a satisfactory typology of the early era of Greek graphic design, “a tribute to eminent and anonymous publishers and printers”. which emphasizes the art of the book,” as he wrote in the preface to the publication. Today, on the publisher’s website, you can find several books from the catalog that are freely available in digital format, he said.

But it was also the imprint he left in the libraries that characterized his days and his work, and began during his ten-year research to renovate the historical library of the monastery of St. John the Evangelist at Patmos. There he also began a more general study of the institution of the library and its history, which resulted in another of his great works, the five-volume History of the Library in Western Civilization. Later, he carried out the reconstruction of the Library of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which was completed in 1993, as well as the ESIEA Library in 2018.

On the site “About Libraries”, which was recently developed by the AMEC “Kypos Filobivlon” in cooperation with the EKT, we find a digital encyclopedia of the libraries of the world from antiquity to the present day. As he said in an interview with the ECB’s Innovation magazine, “Every library is a product of history, timeline and spiritual journey.” Part of his personal library and collection, it is still kept in that atmospheric house on Muruzi Street, where he himself suddenly died. Jorge Luis Borges said that he imagined Paradise as a kind of library, and it is undoubtedly in such a paradise that Konstantinos Staikos continues to enjoy his bibliophilic walks.