Friday 27 February 2015

The Alexandria Quartet Exhibition at the Hellenic Centre, London


Andreas Georgiadis, an Athenian artist, has made a collection of pen and ink drawings illustrating the Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell's Quartet.  Andreas' exhibition has already been shown at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria; now on 13-15 March 2015 his illustrations will be exhibited at the Hellenic Centre, Paddington Street, London.

Hotel Cecil on the Corniche.
Mnemjian's Babylonian barber's shop.
The Ambron Villa in Moharrem Bey, Alexandria, where Durrell lived during the Second World War.  He fixed up the tower on the left as his writing place and there he began the first few pages of Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet.
I took this photograph of the Ambron Villa back in 1996 while it was still inhabited and before the present owner, a property developer, quite illegally began smashing it up in the hope of building the usual ugly block of flats in its place.
Invitation to the exhibition at the Hellenic Centre.
For information about Andreas Giordiadis and his work, see his website.













And for more about Alexandria, including many old photographs of the city and its people, see Michael Haag's Vintage Alexandria, Alexandria Illustrated and An Alexandria Anthology, all published by The American University in Cairo Press.
 












And also Alexandria: City of Memory, Michael Haag's social and literary history of the cosmopolitan city which includes the lives of Constantine Cavafy, E M Forster and Lawrence Durrell.  This is published by both The American University in Cairo Press and Yale University Press.