The once-hailed Xenia hotels fall into ruin
The Xenia hotels represented an exciting time for tourism and architecture in a modern Greece recovering from World War II and the Civil War. They graced the covers of European architecture magazines. They starred in Greek films, showing the elegance and cosmopolitan air of their locales. For Greece, the Xenia hotels were an experiment that combined politics, architecture and economics. Private and public money helped build 40 of these top-notch hotels between 1950 and 1967. A Greek architecture journal once praised the facilities for «combining American financing with Greek public funds» in a low-cost, high-quality result. But now, the Xenia hotels and their unique architectural styles are faced with the threat of being relegated to the history books. One hotel is set to be demolished, and the others have fallen into disrepair.
