COINS AND POETRY
The Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis
An exhibition in the Coin Cabinet of the Kunsthistorisches Museum
in the framework of the event serie “Greek Fall Vienna 06’ ”
November 28, 2006 – March 31, 2007
Kunsthistorisches Museum
The exhibition „Coins and Poetry“ focuses on what forms both background and basis for many of the poems by the Greek poet, Konstantinos Kavafis (1863-1833), who is not only one of the most important poets of his home country but also one of the most significant representatives of European modernism. Of his 294 poems, around 101 are considered historical poems; 145 of them have been selected.
Reading the historical poems chronologically is like watching an imaginary procession pass before our inner of the whole history of Hellenism from Classical Antiquity to the Fall of Constantinople. At the same time almost every one of these historical poems is closely related to coins from Ancient Greece, Rome or Byzantium. Over 70 of them have been selected, they depict persons and events mentioned in Kavafis’ emotional and multifacetted poems.
It is generally accepted that the artist, who spent most of his life in Alexandria, got to know
and love coins like these during his frequent visits to the city’s Greco-Roman Museum
which was located close to where he lived.
To complement his poems about the Trojan war, the ups and downs of Greek rulers and
empires, about the late Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and various incidents during
the reigns of different Byzantine emperors coins depicting the same events have been
selected; the Greek section features depictions of Homer and Hector’s farewell – through,
naturally, from the later Roman period – as well as of a number of Hellenistic rulers. The
Roman period is represented by coins from the Roman Republic and from the Roman
Empire - the former by coins issued by Marius, Sulla, Caesar, and Marc Anthony, the latter
by examples minted during the reigns of Augustus, Nero, Galba, Seprimius Severus,
Tacitus, Constantine the Great, and especially Julian the Apostate who favoured a return to
the old gods shortly after Christianity had been established as the empire’s official religion.
However, the Byzantine Empire is also well represented (Justinian, Leo III, Basileos I and
Alexios Komnenos to name but a few).
The exhibition, curated by Stephanos Geroulanos from the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre and Günther Dembski from the KHM’s Coin Cabinet, features Kavafis’ poems in their original Greek accompanied by a German translation and a selection of appropriate coins from Classical Antiquity. The exhibition is held under the patronage of H.E. Mrs. Ursula Plassnik, the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and H.E. Mrs. Dora Bakoyiannis, the Foreign Minister of the Hellenic Republic; it is supported by the Greek Embassy in Vienna, the Austrian Embassy in Athens, and the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.