In the motley chaos of a second-hand bookshop in the center of Athens, among piles of dusty books, some hidden treasure appears, just unearthed on the cover of a 1934 magazine. His name is inscribed inside the dull, solid color of the cover. , made by hand in art deco style: “Athens”.

Long, narrow, elegant capital letters are in sync with the buzz of a busy street echoing a few meters from the house next door, while a mysterious old shape opens a portal to the past and the creative Athens of the interwar period. Bold in size and bright in design, the find looks precious, even if the seller estimated its value at only five euros.

The first page immediately reveals the design skill of the art curator of the publication, which is an independent world of paper, ink, film and typographic elements. Each text, each title, each article is treated as a separate, small work of art, and nowhere there is a feeling of processing or reproduction of stereotypes, but only signs of inexhaustible authenticity. It is a masterpiece of “handmade”, created with creativity and attention to every detail.

And yet this relic of our art history was found scattered on the floor of a dusty shop, judged as worthless and forever forgotten, just as the person who designed it is forgotten: the fleeting pioneer of domestic graphic design, Nikos Kastanakis.

The publication of Athenaeus lasted nine months (from October 1934 to June 1935) and was done on behalf of the newspaper Ellinicon Mellon, which advertised it with fiery words, calling it “the king of magazines.” What other graphic acrobatics would Kastanakis put on his pages in the future if his circulation had not been shamefully stopped? We can only imagine, and the samples that he managed to leave us are enough for this. But where else did the great designer leave traces of his genius?

Together with Angelos Spahis, he was a pioneer of modernism and graphics in our country.

Looking for them, sooner or later we find them all around us, hidden in plain sight: on the cover of the collection of prose and poetry by Kostas Kariotakis, published by Estia, in the Classics Illustrated editions of Pehlivanidis, in the first comic book magazine in Greece in 1939, on old travel posters or advertisements and next to the name of the painter Angelos Spachis, with whom he founded the first graphic studio in the country “Atelier” in Syntagma Square in 1927. The two were pioneers of modernism and domestic graphics, the forerunners of post-war design giants Michalis Katsourakis and Freddy Karabott. And although the work of Angelos Spachis was featured in a recent exhibition at the National Library, Kastanakis’s work is still unknown.

But this gap will be filled by a new, complete monograph about him by the researcher of our modern history and traditions, journalist and writer Kostis Liontis. It is called A Few Things About Nikos Kastanakis and is published by Odos Panos. It’s an exploratory process that Kostis Liontis himself told us about, laughing how he “changed his light” given the lack of primary sources. As he says in the introduction to the publication, “all evidence of the past is in twilight or deep darkness” to conclude that “lack of information hinders, if not poisons, initial enthusiasm.”

However, in the end, he does not lose the first spark that prompted him to shed light on this forgotten part of the history of Greek art. Just as the editorial holiday of the Athenai magazine was full of surprises, so were the research and articles of Kostis Liontis. As Kastanakis himself threw his colored rockets, so now his biographer amazes us with his own.

Of course, he himself writes in the epilogue of his book: “I am not a biographer, and even more so I would not like to fall into the insidious traps of psychology. However, could it be that as a character (including Nikos Kastanakis) he was on the other side of artistic narcissism? If something like this is true from Freud’s point of view, then this translated meaning is usually called modesty. Below is a short conversation we had with him.

He remains missing because he didn’t ride canes…

– One of the reasons is that cartoons and graphics in general are not recognized in Greece. If, for example. if we look at the cartoon bibliography, we find only two volumes, and they do not have a narrative, but a pictorial model. In addition, there are very few good monographs (and when I say “good” I mean those that completely recreate the physiognomy of a cartoonist) are very few. However, the case of Kastanakis was overlooked also because of his nature. You see, he was a modest man. A number of circumstances, mostly family ones, also played their role: after the death of his son Apellis during the war (the name is not accidental), his other son (also bearing the same name) did not deal with his father’s business, and his wife, after his death in 1961, gave all of his files in the ESIEA – six, seven albums, where he pasted his cartoons in the 20s, which are still buried there – until someone is looking for them.

– So you connect the silence that reigned about his work with his modesty. This cannot be said about other great artists of our graphics, such as, for example. Kostas Grammatopoulos?

– I was lucky enough to personally meet Grammatopoulos, and I remember that he was distinguished by honesty and modesty. In simple terms, he did not “ride the bait”. I didn’t get to meet Kastanakis, but those who saw him up close, ie. his fellow cartoonist Archelaus remembered that he did only two things: smoked and worked from morning to night. People like Grammatopoulos and Kastanakis were humble slaves.

– It was also impressive how he could change styles and techniques.

– In the country’s oldest registered comic book magazine called “Our Magazine”, first published in 1939, he draws different comics and changes in addition to his signature and his caricature font (!), so that readers cannot recognize that this is one and the same designer. It was an example not only of his design insight, but also of his humility.

– What can you tell about his work in the magazine “Athenay”?

– Firstly, let’s say that it was a very “aristocratic” magazine, addressed to the middle class audience and thematically offering “cultural” texts written by elected, at that time, employees. As for its design, it was ahead of its time. Kastanakis signed nine issues of the magazine as “art director” and, under behind-the-scenes Catholic supervision, showed this magazine his highest level of master typography.

– What would you say in a nutshell to describe him and his work?

“Looking at his case, we are dealing with an exuberant and elitist talent. He was simultaneously a cartoonist, cartoonist, illustrator, graphic artist, photographer, and even stage designer. All of this represents an incredible creative range that I don’t know if we’ve ever seen its equivalent in the work of a Greek artist in what we call “arts and crafts.”