A taste for all things Byzantine: Byzantium in the collections of Antonis Benakis

Abstract

‘His pockets were always full of treasures. What marvellous things you could find in them! Nails, marbles, pebbles, sponges, twine, maybe a chewed piece of gum, and always that crystal triangle piece from the church chandelier that would shine brilliantly when held up to the sun.’ With these words, Penelope Delta, the famous children's writer and sister of Antonis Benakis, painted a portrait of her brother as a child in her much-loved book Trelantonis (Crazy Antonis). In this book, dedicated to the childhood adventures of the Benaki family siblings, and set in the cosmopolitan yet conservative colonial environment of the upper middle-class Greeks of late nineteenth-century Alexandria, Antonis was always the protagonist. (Fig. 1)