An artist uses his craft to restore sculptures damaged by vandals

By Margarita Pournara

Our interview took place under the gaze of eminent architect and town planner Stamatis Kleanthis, the domineering figure of statesman Constantine Karamanlis, the slender form of Athena and a headless bust of actress Kyveli. On the floor, I see the head of Dionysus Solomos, broken off after a branch fell on the statue in the National Garden.

I am in the workshop of Praxitelis Tzanoulinos, impressed by this strange collection of broken sculptures of great artists, poets, politicians and religious leaders from bygone eras. The renowned sculptor from the island of Tinos, a man who is well educated in the classics and traditional folk art, has taken on the weighty task of rehabilitating Athenian sculptures that have been damaged by time and, mostly, by incidents of vandalism, which have grown in frequency since 2008. So, at the same time as producing his own original artwork, Tzanoulinos is using his knowledge and skill to restore that of great sculptors who came before him, such as Lazaros Sochos, Costas Dimitriadis and Dimitrios Filippotis, among others.

Tzanoulinos is part of a team set up by the City of Athens and comprising experts from various disciplines for its program to restore 100 emblematic sculptures from public spaces in central Athens. The program is funded through the EU-backed National Strategic Reference Framework (known as ESPA in Greek) with a budget of approximately 740,000 euros. Thanks to this initiative - as well as Mayor Giorgos Kaminis's general concern for protecting public spaces - the team was able to quickly start work on the statue of poet Costis Palamas and bust of Kyveli, the former smudged with black paint and the latter beheaded during a sit-in by anarchists at Athens Law School...