“I came to Tinos because in Mykonos they won’t give me a room, the scoundrels — but it’s good here too: meltemi wind, fish, tomato salads, peace…” wrote Yiorgos Theotokas in a letter to Giorgos Seferis nearly a century ago. “Still, I won’t stay in Tinos for a whole month, that’s too much. I’ll head somewhere else — Mykonos, if those bastards give me a room, Santorini, Syros… The islands are full of people, and God is great.”
Written in July 1931, these words capture not only the beginnings of modern tourism in Greece — what would become the country’s so-called “heavy industry” — but also a timeless truth: the enduring charm of the Greek islands. Then as now, they remain irresistible to locals and international travelers alike.
Today, those climbing to the impressive Historical House of Lazaros Kountouriotis on the island of Hydra — now a branch of the National Historical Museum — can experience the evolution of Greek tourism firsthand. The exhibition “Advertising Greece: The Origins of Greek Tourism” traces the journey of the nation’s image-making from 1930 to 1967, inviting reflection on how a destination becomes a myth.
Posters, Guides, and the Birth of a National Image
Posters, travel guides, brochures, trip programs, and the famous red Baedeker guide — once said by Seferis to “bloody the hands” of Parthenon visitors from overuse — form a rich archive presented in the exhibition. Opened on June 20 by Tourism Minister Olga Kefalogianni and running through October, the show documents how, even in the difficult years between the wars and after WWII, Greece was methodically promoted as a tourist destination through both state and public institutions.
“A current of group travel to Greece is already visible in the second half of the 19th century,” said archaeologist and curator Venia Vogiatzis, who co-organised the exhibition with historians Natasa Kastriti and Regina Katsimardou. Key factors included improved transportation, interest in thermal springs in line with the spa trends in Europe, major archaeological excavations in Olympia and Mycenae, and the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896. By the century’s end, the first private leisure travel companies were founded.
In 1929, the government of Eleftherios Venizelos established the first Hellenic Tourism Organisation (EOT) as part of a modernization program. Its purpose was to promote Greece abroad, regulate hotel operations, and oversee transportation. The country’s branding strategy was rooted in its classical heritage, with EOT’s first poster featuring a photo of the Parthenon by the renowned photographer Nelly’s. She would also photograph the Delphi Festivals of 1930, funded by EOT.
A “Tourism Paradox”
“Greece’s archaeological wealth has been timelessly highlighted through EOT’s posters as the main tourist attraction, crafting an idyllic and static image of the past,” said Dimitris Plantzos, professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Athens. “From the Parthenon to Knossos and Vergina, monuments are shown detached from their historical and social context, becoming aesthetic objects for consumption. According to the ‘tourism paradox’, this obsessive projection leads to the dulling of cultural heritage — the past is reconstructed as marketable nostalgia. Posters don’t promote history but an imagined landscape, filtered through the needs of the tourism industry.”
Nationalism, Spas, and Fashion
During the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936–1941), tourism took on a new institutional role aligned with state ideology. Internal tourism was encouraged so that the people could “know the beauty of their homeland”. EOT was replaced by a Ministry of Press and Tourism, and spa towns like Loutraki and Aidipsos were promoted, in line with broader European trends.
In 1937, the Greek Touring Club proposed a three-day train tour of the Peloponnese with stops in Tripoli, Kalamata, Kyparissia, and Olympia. A 1938 hotel guide appeared alongside the magazine La Mode Grecque, designed and illustrated by artist Nikos Engonopoulos. Featuring models in Greek haute couture photographed by Nelly’s, the magazine aimed at international clientele, blending antiquity and Greek tradition with fashion.
From Antiquities to the Landscape
Over time, Greece’s image shifted from its monuments to its landscapes.”The ideological gap left by territorial aspirations was gradually filled with the ideology of ‘Greekness’,” explained Dr. Angelos F. Vlachos, tourism historian and CEO of OLK SA. “This vision was tied to celebrating the uniqueness of Greek land and the worship of its landscape.”
This period saw a deliberate effort to identify new attractions — notably beaches. The 1930s saw the first cohesive attempts to define the visual identity of the Greek seaside through collaboration among photographers like Nelly’s and Giorgos Vafiadakis, painters such as Spyros Vassiliou, and other artists, architects, and journalists. These efforts helped craft what Vlachos calls the first “construction of Aegeanicity.”
EOT played a leading role, commissioning artists to create an extensive visual catalogue — paintings, maps, photographs, folk art, replicas of traditional dress — to promote the country. “It’s no exaggeration to say the most talented Greek artists didn’t just collaborate — they enlisted,” Vlachos noted.
This strategy’s success lies in what he calls “the metonymic power of the image” — where the image replaces the place. “We see a windmill and instantly think of a Cycladic island, Mykonos, etc.”
War, Reconstruction, and American Influence
World War II and the Greek Civil War halted tourism. Yet even during this bleak era, artists like Panayiotis Tetsis and Yiannis Moralis created works for the General Secretariat of Tourism that evoked a peaceful Greece of rest and calm, far from the raging conflict.
Tourism planning intensified in postwar reconstruction, particularly through discussions related to the Marshall Plan. “In the American designs we find the idea of creating infrastructure critical to Greece’s tourism growth,” said Michalis Nikolakakis, assistant professor at the University of Crete and specialist in tourism sociology.
“Although most of the funds ended up in napalm bombs, the concept of public hotels (Xenia), devaluation policies, and a development law modeled after Mexico were all part of the effort to attract foreign capital and enable investment in tourism.”
Were these policies successful?
“As an investment plan, Xenia was not a financial success,” Nikolakakis stated, “but as a stimulus for local economies to turn toward tourism, it worked. The Americans helped build a tourism-focused administrative structure that played a key role in integrating Greece into the Western economic system as a service-based, tourist-receiving country.”
A Myth That Lasts
“Greece. The Aegean Isles. Land of Myth and Magic” reads a 1955 EOT brochure — a clear precursor to the highly successful 2004 campaign slogan “Live Your Myth in Greece.”
A 1956 poster shows EOT’s cooperation with travel agencies to organize twelve bus tour routes. Blue-green seas, orange sunsets, ruins, whitewashed houses, guesthouses and hotels, bicycles, boats evoking seafood and the sea, chapels, and quaint cafés — all feature in the colorful mosaic of the 1963 poster by artist Michalis Katzourakis.
The dictatorship that followed in 1967 marked another turning point. Hand-drawn images gradually gave way to photography. Still, the iconic Greek triptych — island houses, sun, sea — born in the interwar period, lives on. It survives today in modern digital posters — or more precisely, in the selfies posted by influencers on their social media walls.
