First Cemetery of Athens
Tree-lined cemetery of elaborate marble tombs, featuring a beloved sleeping-girl sculpture.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the First Cemetery of Athens follows the marble figure known as the Sleeping Girl, carved for seventeen-year-old Sofia Afentaki, who died of tuberculosis in 1873, by a young, largely self-taught sculptor from Tinos named Yannoulis Chalepas. You'll hear how the statue became the cemetery's most beloved monument, and how within a few years of finishing it Chalepas began suffering violent breakdowns that led doctors to shut him away on Corfu and forbid him from touching stone again. It traces what finally brought him back to sculpting, decades later, after his mother's death.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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