Her story art it is full of unsung heroes. Their names, either because we turned our backs on them, or because they decided so, remained in the dark. We find them hidden in archives, libraries, rare old editions, dusty shelves, and even in the age of the Internet, when one would expect all human knowledge to take its place in well-organized global digital catalogs, they manage to slip out. light, as if their secret should remain eternal. One of them is the French artist François Perilla, who came to Greece in the 1920s and eventually made it his second home.

His personal life is a mystery: we know that he was born in 1874, but we do not know when and where he died, while some called him François, others Francesco, still others Francisco. His memory lives on through a series of (now hard to find) books he wrote and designed containing the contents of his tours of the country.

We were lucky enough to hold in our hands one of them, “Mystra” from 1929, a travel diary of his long journey through the Peloponnese, as well as Central Greece and Attica, including Athens. Written in French, it is arranged in wide single columns which, although one might expect to tire the eye, in the end never tire, as they are supplemented by black and white sketches, a hodgepodge of landscapes that the traveler encounters on his way. and remember the pre-war predecessor of modern comics. Combined with unexpected, playful typography and vibrant travel stories, Mystra’s reading experience is devoid of the medieval seriousness of the Byzantine monasteries and Venetian castles to which it belongs.

Rhythmically interspersed in this black and white world of letters, sketches and black ink are colored watercolors and sepia photographs, precious testimonies of a long-lost Greece. There, priests, shepherds and peasants dressed in their traditional costumes, they all look like they stepped out of the pages of the 1821 revolution. In two of these photographs, the shepherd from Sparta has a touching innocence in his eyes. The same purity is found in the landscapes of photographs – from the rocks above the waves of the Mani to the courtyards of the monasteries at noon. In these images, we are confronted with a world that no longer exists.

Incredible as it may seem, the texts, sketches, watercolors, photographs, graphic editing and the publication itself bear the signature of François Perilla. Perhaps only one of his Greek colleagues – and in fact his contemporary – had such a versatile talent, the great illustrator Nikos Kastanakis. With this powerful creative arsenal, Perila traveled all over Greece, from the Cyclades and Chios to Delphi and Mount Athos, capturing the “spirit of the place” in a complete creative package, not with a colonial gaze and distance, but with love, intimacy and understanding. .

ELPA Maps

Looking into fleeting sources, we find a few more traces of her. We find that the then new and active ELPA prints road maps with his own design, and in December 1930 organizes an exhibition of his work, with the newspaper “Eleftheros Anthropos” reporting the fact: “In the halls of ELPA Kanari and Merlin Streets. The day before yesterday, an exhibition of works by a foreign artist opened, which exhibits exclusively Greek landscapes of Mistra, Chios, Skyros and the Peloponnese.

He was born in 1874 and came to our country in the 1920s, when and where he died is unknown.

Perilla often designed publications other than his own, as in the case of John Knittel’s The Commander and Somerset Mam’s Theater (published by Friends of the Book), for which he designed the covers. In addition, the book he published in 1949 about 1821 and Makriyannis (“Fragments of the heroic life of Makriyannis, suivis de ses images de l’épopée grecque”) was highly appreciated in the same year at the 12th Book Exhibition, organized by the Society of Artists. The cover he designed for this edition is a real “show of strength” – but it has been so with every cover he has made, as well as with “Mystra”. There, handcrafted letters and patterns with exquisite detail, skilful management of information and space, use of Latin dates and cryptic symbols create a visual feast that modern graphic design envy.

The mysterious artist at one time acquired fanatical admirers. He was praised by the pen of the master of travel literature Kostas Ouranis, who wrote about him in 1932 in the newspaper “Eleutero Vima” a laudatory review of his book on Macedonia (“A Traverse Le Macedoine”, 1932). The poet and critic Cleon Paraschos also wrote lovingly about him in 1940 in Nea Estia, in a review of his book on Pelion, In the Land of the Centaurs (Au Pays des Centaures – Le Pelion, 1940). . There he mentions him as “a widely traveled person and friend of travels”, “an ardent admirer and connoisseur of Greece” and “educated, sensitive and gifted, with a taste for painting and a memory of painting”, while emphasizing something that characterizes the text” Mystras”: the simplicity of the narrative, which, according to him, makes us live the life of the place “not lyrically or poetically, but close to its everyday reality.”

Indeed, reading in Mistra an excerpt from his visit to Athens and Piraeus, we seem to go back in time and relive the daily life of that time: “Piraeus is the port of Athens, towards which the capital is rapidly spreading. its tentacles along the electric rails, where soon houses and factories will hide this wide, dusty attic tape. In a smoky atmosphere, a forest of masts and rigging prepares for a tougher tomorrow and the creation of a larger port. Alleys and great arteries, shacks and palaces, steamships and ocean liners, carriages and limousines – all these make up the great commercial and sea Babylon.

The newspaper is like… bread

It is also interesting how he describes the Athenians as avid readers of newspapers during the train journey from Piraeus to the center of Athens: “For 20 minutes of travel, everyone reads a newspaper. It’s unbelievable how many newspapers are printed in Greece! And all of them are well made, presentable, in large formats and with a variety of names. Here the whole world reads with such frenzy that, they say, a newspaper is as necessary a commodity as bread! An insightful folklorist, a refined and tireless traveler and artist, endowed with a multifaceted and heaven-sent gift, Francois Perilla quietly, like a luminous apostle, came and just as quietly left. About 30 publishing pearls, which he left behind, glorify graphics and most impressively demonstrate the high ceiling of its possibilities, representing an unexplored visual treasure and an invaluable cultural heritage for our country.