Hotel Grande Bretagne: The Aristocrat of Athens

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

To weary travelers nothing comforts more at the end of a long day than a hotel that answers all their needs. The best of the best hotels have become great institutions because they give service. They anticipate guest requirements and provide more than is necessary, they take an intense personal protective interest in their clients and make them feel special even if they're not.

Every city has its favorite hotel. Some have no rivals. Some have to vie with not only other hotels but the attractions – scenery, museums and monuments -- that sometimes dominate the area.

To compete in Athens with the Parthenon, and the other monuments ancient Greece gave the world is no small challenge -- yet the Hotel Grande Bretagne, intimately bound up as it is in the chronicles of Greece, succeeds. Every famous hotel can claim its mark on history, but few can match the annals of the great hotels of Europe and none the record of the Grande Bretagne -- for example, consider the events of Christmas day 1944.

Although the Germans had been driven out of Greece three months previously, Athens remained in turmoil. Resistance fighters hurled accusations of collaboration at anyone politically to their right, and those accused, cried “Communist!” and saw the Kremlin in every anti-Nazi resistor. On 3 December 1944,the city's tensions exploded with gunshots. Twenty fell dead virtually on the doorstep of the Grande Bretagne. The wounded crawled away in a salvo of shots. Civil war had begun in Greece, a country which, 25, centuries before, had been the cradle of democracy.

While refugees streamed into the city, the British army tried to restore order. In negotiations with the Communist forces, first Harold MacMillan failed then Anthony Eden (both later to become British Prime Ministers). In the British House of Commons Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, announced he himself would go to Athens to help end the civil war which was tearing Greece apart, even though he had previously denounced in Parliament the Greek comminists as a “gang of bandits.”

He flew in to Athens to meet with Archbishop Damaskinos, the Greek leader, at the Grande Bretagne Hotel on Christmas day 1944. On that day of world peace the communist troops burst into the buildings five blocks from the hotel. Bullets and shells screamed across the streets. Amidst the din three British army engineers crawled into sewers below the hotel to conduct a routine safety check. Coming across a suspicious package, they sent an urgent message to their bomb-disposal squad.

Apostolos Doxiadis, the then managing director of the GB, took up the story. "They discovered three tons of dynamite below the hotel and defused it. I've often wondered since, was it found in time, or did Stalin hesitate to give orders?"'

Doxiadis was the great-grandson of the hotel's founder Estace Lampsa, a man whose life story reads like a Hollywood movie. In 1864, at the age of eleven, he walked from Odessa in the Ukraine through Romania and Bulgaria finally reaching Athens in his search for work.

Somehow he found a job in the kitchens of the newlycrowned King of Greece George I. He evidently showed promise and was sent to Paris to learn culinary skills in a small but prestigious hotel. Two years later the Shah of Persia arrived on a state visit to Paris. When the French government told the Persian ambassador it needed help to create the unusual dishes on the menu the Persian official remarked that there was already a youth in a Paris hotel restaurant familiar with eastern foods and skilled in their preparation. Young Lampsa was sent for. He readily agreed to prepare some pilaf dishes. The banquet was a great success, and when the Shah of Persia himself sought out the young apprentice chef, the newspapers were there and a legend was born.

The young Greek stayed on in Paris learning his profession and saving his money. He married a hat check girl, and in 1872, with his French bride, he returned to the kitchens of the Royal Palace of Greece as a fully fledged chef. He was aged 19. He was popular, capable -- even brilliant. Eastern potentates would thank him for his attentions with generous gifts, at times a bag of gold.

When word went round the palace that the young couple were looking at houses, the King summoned his chef and suggested that Lampsa buy the 60 room dwelling diagonally across from the palace and run it as a hotel for the staff of visiting royalty. Lampsa responded with flair. He bought the building and named it "The Great Britain" because this was the era of the British Empire and most monied guests on the grand tour of Europe were English. His wife, however, with her national pride insisted that though the hotel's name was British the words be French.

The hotel prospered and has now undergone expansion and renovation into 321 rooms most with marble bathrooms, and many with a magnificent view of the National Gardens, Constitution Square, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the former Royal Palace. The proximity of the Palace has added to the luster and legends of the hotel.

Its managing director, Doxiadis, glanced across at this building now the Greek Parliament, and said, "Most of the ambassadors over the years have come here to eat, relax and talk. I think we can say that the solutions to many different problems are often obtained informally, and frequently over meals or even coffee breaks. Thus I feel most of the history of Greece in the last 100 years has taken place in this hotel or in the Houses of Parliament opposite."

There are days, however, when a hotel can get too much history.

One such day came in 1941 when the German army occupied the country and its Wehrmacht headquarters, the hotel. A general summoned the Swiss manager, Rudolf Schmidt, and brusquely ordered him to change the name to something more German. Schmidt apparently stood his ground and made three statements." First," he said calmly,''I’m Swiss, I'm neutral. Second, you're trying to take over England. Be satisfied that you've managed to get the Grande Bretagne. Third, when Hitler stops using the Hotel Bristol in Berlin, I'll change our name to the Hotel Hamburg.

Schmidt then turned on his heel and went back to his office. The subject was never mentioned again.

If the hotel hasn't changed its name it has, however, changed its appearance. Its owners spent a million dollars to repair the damage caused by ten years of military occupation, then in 1956 demolished the central portion of the hotel and replaced it with a new seven-story building which still resembles the original. -We renovate backwards," said Doxiadis. Further renovations over two years were completed in March 2003.

They spent seven years rewiring the entire hotel for direct telephone dialing for all over the world. But you can still wander through magnificent marble halls admiring antique furniture, crystal chandeliers and vast Flemish tapestries five centuries old.

Some stay at the Grande Bretagne, because, like those tapestries, they want to be woven into the historical and political fabric of Athen's history. Some stay because they seek to be surrounded by charm even opulence. Some stay because everything worth seeing in Athens is a mere walk from the hotel's doorstep. Some stay because of the names in its guest books: Richard Strauss and Bing Crosby, the Duke of Windsor and Aristotle Onassis, the Agha-Khan and Henry Fonda. Not forgetting Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford who came frequently in prewar days with 50 pieces of luggage, reserving a separate room just for Miss Pickford's shoes. Others stay unimpressed by the past.

They stay because this hotel, for all its magnificent appearance, splendid traditions and awesome history, says openly that persons, the staff, are more important than institutions. It says that if it is a staff that creates legends then the GB has some families that have worked in the hotel for four generations. It believes how it looks after its guests is more important than how it looks to its guests. It believes that's how it got its claim to fame and its motto: "Service, courtesy and charm."