Exhibition of jewelry with Greek motifs by Sofia Thanopoulou-Maroulina
The jewelry of Sofia Thanopoulou-Maroulina will be on show at the Benaki Museum, which has one of the most representative collections of Greek jewelry, until November 7. The jeweler was known as Maroulina after her grandmother from Myconos, Maroulina Kabani, who came from the same family as the heroine of the 1821 revolution, Manto Mavroyenous. In 1954, when intellectuals and artists from Greece and abroad began to discover Myconos, Thanopoulou-Maroulina opened her boutique, To Magazaki tis Maroulinas (Maroulina’s Little Shop), which had its heyday in the 1960s and closed in 1972 when she moved it to Athens, where she continued to create her jewelry and her amulets. All the famous foreign visitors, from Yehudi Menuhin and Maurice Bejart to the sisters Jackie Bouvier and Lee Radziwill, went to the store, shopped and were photographed. Wearing the jewelry, they carried the name of its skilled creator to New York, London and Paris. Her compositions brought together cheap and expensive materials – shells, beads, leather with pearls, gold, silver, and coral. It was Bejart who advised her to make genuinely valuable jewelry. Every year she made her own amulet and hung it on the wall of her house on Solonos Street. Thanopoulou-Maroulina died in 1997 after a long illness, close to her daughter and grandchildren, who remember her every year on September 15, livening up the white garden of her home on Myconos with «a genuine Myconian celebration.»
