National Gallery - Alexandros Soutsos Museum
Fine-art museum of Greek painting, once home to a Picasso stolen and recovered from a dry ravine.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the National Gallery in Athens opens on a January night in 2012, when a construction worker who called himself Art Freak crawled through an unlocked balcony door after months of studying the museum's cameras and guard routines. It follows what he took, including a cubist Picasso the artist himself had given Greece in 1949 as thanks for resisting Nazi occupation, and traces the years the paintings spent missing before police finally caught up with him in 2021. He confessed at once, and told them exactly why he'd taken three works instead of the one he wanted.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation
Eleven-story museum of Impressionist and modern masterworks in a former neoclassical mansion.
Frissiras Museum
Twin neoclassical Plaka houses filled with four thousand figurative paintings and sculptures of the human form.
Benaki Museum
Neoclassical mansion holding a diaspora collector's vast trove of Greek, Byzantine and Islamic art.
Byzantine & Christian Museum
Neoclassical villa museum of icons, frescoes and textiles tracing fifteen centuries of Byzantine art.
Metaxourgeio
Former silk mill turned neoclassical art gallery, anchoring a once-industrial arts district.
Benaki Museum of Islamic Art
Neoclassical museum wing built around a transplanted Cairo reception room with a marble fountain.