Capital of Culture Elefsina : where the mysteries are at home

Elefsina already had one superlative when it was nominated: As one of the three European Capitals of Culture for 2023 – alongside Veszprém in Hungary and Timisoara in Romania – it is the smallest place in terms of population to have been allowed to bear the title in its 38-year history.

Only 3,000 people live in the port and industrial city on the outskirts of Athens, which was allowed to adorn itself for the first time in 1985 as – as it was initially called – “European City of Culture”, a tribute to the cradle of European civilization.

Elefsina, the former Eleusis, also refers to Greek antiquity. And with better justification than merely showing an archaeological dig site; like many other places can do the same. Eleusis was the seat of the Mysteries, which literally dates back to ancient times, in this case from about 1500 BC. BC, until exactly the year 392 AD, when the Roman Emperor banned them. Just three years later, the Goths under Alaric reduced the temple to rubble and Eleusis virtually ceased to exist.

It was only in the late 19th century that Eleusis, which had been a fishing village up until then, awoke to a present worth mentioning and grew into an industrial center of Greece. But this epoch passed much faster than that of the Mysteries. Elefsina recently gained a rather sad notoriety as a ship graveyard.

A number of wrecks jut out of the water off the coast, while LNG tankers unload their coveted cargo nearby and drillships lie at anchor further out.

How Elefsina, with its badly fragmented history, was chosen as the cultural capital is one of the mysteries of modern politics. Anyway, that’s how it is, and last weekend the opening was celebrated, with the folk festival-like Saturday being followed by the stillness of a sleet-blown Sunday.

Opening spectacle with giant fish

The busy Artistic Director Michail Marmarinos, who is well connected in Europe, spoke of the “tangible” and “impalpable” legacies that the year of the City of Culture should produce. The fascinated spectator might have guessed what he meant by that at the opening spectacle, when a ship crane lifted a giant steel fish, alternately illuminated yellow and red, out of the water, while wind instruments and, via loudspeakers, choirs played music on barges cruising all around.

Speaking of choirs: they had their place in the ancient mysteries, and in a modified form they will wander over the ancient marble pavement in the annual program to the Telesterion, the repository of the sacred relics of this cult of the fertility goddess Demeter, which has been preserved in its ground plan. The mysteries are about death and rebirth, the underworld and return, passing away and becoming in the eternal rhythm of the seasons.

What is that little bit of industrial history compared to that – even if it has spoiled the place, which now does something with the legacies in the form of empty halls, towered over by cold chimneys – culture, of course. Heiner Goebbels, the master of staged concerts, brought his play “Sieben Pillar” into one of the halls of the old oil mill, while next door an exhibition pays homage to Melina Mercouri, the film actress and, as the powerful Minister of Culture in the 1980s, the main inventor of the concept of the city of culture.

Performances also sing, hurry and declaim about the ancient excavations, while in the old town hall a very carefully prepared exhibition introduces the local history of labor migration, wage struggles and social advancement and decline.

A total of 25 million euros are available for the City of Culture year. A nearly 400-page program book with seven forewords and awe-inspiring quotations from Hegel to Virginia Woolf records a kaleidoscope of events. Director Marmarinos has called each one “mystery” and given it a number, there are over 200 in total.

The journey from Athens is not far, the ancient procession covered 21 kilometers. It should be that far today, only that the expressway makes a short visit from Athens possible, which would be a shame, because today’s Elefsina stands for deceleration.

Capital of Culture in 2023 is primarily an internal program for the renovation and revitalization of the respective venue, and so the programs are inevitably similar. The Eleusian unique selling point for almost 2000 years, which the top secret and therefore not fully deciphered mysteries possessed, no longer exists today. But a visit to Elefsina, as soon as spring is announced, should still be worthwhile to feel a little what Demeter and its annual return is all about.

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