Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum

This guide to the Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum in Athens follows a young law graduate who walked into his uncle's jewelry workshop in 1940 and became obsessed with a lost Bronze Age technique for fusing gold granules without solder. You'll hear how he pushed jewelers to relearn granulation, filigree and hand-weaving, and how his 1957 Archaeological Collection and later international galleries grew from that pursuit. It ends where he took over his old workshop in 1993 to open it as a museum. Look closely at the display cases of hammered gold and coiled wire as you go.