The Katakouzenos House Museum project deals with the revival of an historical Athenian house from a residential venue to a community-oriented and education-based institution, following the principles and expanding the possibilities of house museums. The former owners of the house, Angelos and Leto Katakouzenos, belonged to the intellectual elite of their times, the so-called “1930s generation,” and functioned as cultural ambassadors of their country abroad and arbiters of international tendencies to Hellas. The Katakouzenos House Museum belongs to a specific group of museums, the house museums.
Houses, homes, go as far back as human beings. They always played a major role in the life of people, safeguarding their values, preserving their memories, structuring their stories. Houses are lived spaces that involve in their individual life horizons not only their everyday inhabitants but also casual, passing visitors. Lives are remembered, retold, recreated but also inspired, planned and experienced inside, around and because of houses. They are the primordial shells of human thought and action, the primeval elements of what makes as humans.
The Katakouzenos house functioned since 1960 as a literary salon; its rooms have hosted many visitors of international fame, mainly artists but also writers and poets; it also contains a representative collection of works by the most important artists of the so-called Hellenic “1930s generation”, and by many international artists, too.
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