Sotirios Anargyros | The Poseidonion Grand Hotel

Mavi Boncuk | The Poseidonion Grand Hotel has been a landmark on the Spetses skyline for the past 100 years with its exceptional architecture echoing hotels of Côte d’Azur style.

The hotel which first opened in 1914 was the brainchild of Sotirios Anargiros[1], a visionary benefactor who was responsible for much of Spetses’ development. Futhermore it represented the cosmopolitan face of the island and soon became one of its famous landmarks and, what is more, rapidly became a favourite destination for high society, royalty and the wealthy Athenians.


Even in antiquity, this island was called Pityoussa (Pine-Tree Island). Over the centuries, many of Spetses's pine trees became the masts and hulls of the island's successive fleets of fishing, commercial, and military vessels. In time, Spetses was almost as deforested as its rocky neighbor Hydra is to this day. In the early 20th century, local philanthropist Sotiris Anargyros bought up more than half the island and replanted barren slopes with pine trees. Anargyros also built himself one of the island's most ostentatious mansions, flanked by palm trees, which you can see off Spetses's main harbor, the Dapia. Amargyros also built the harborfront Hotel Poseidon to jump-start upper-class tourism. Then he built Anargyros College[2] (modeled on England's famous Eton College) to give the island a first-class prep school. Read more 

Despite a series of dreadful forest fires, Spetses's pine groves still make this the greenest of the Saronic Gulf islands. 

Regarding education, supported by the Greek prime-minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who envisioned the establishment of an educational institution that would educate the leaders for the nascent Greek society, a vision which Anargyros endorsed, he built in the 1920’s, together with another benefactor, Marinos Korgialeneios, the “Anargyreios and Korgialeneios School of Spetses – AKSS” to emulate the famous British schools Eaton and Harrow. Anargyros died in December 18, 1918, some short weeks after the establishment of the Anargyreios and Korgialeneios School of Spetses Foundation. 

[1] Sotirios Anargyros, descendant of a great 18th century Spetsiot shipping family was a Greek marine merchant. His branch of the family had fallen on hard times and he emigrated as a young man in 1868, when Spetses was declining as a maritime center. He worked hard at a tobacco-plant and due to his skills, he inherited the childless owner and his great fortune. In 1899 he returned from the USA, now a wealthy tobacco tycoon and started to transform the island of his youth. He decided to focus on two areas of development, tourism and education, which he thought would be ideal for that place and time. 

To support the first goal he built the famous The Poseidonion Grand Hotel and then bought half of the island, which had been deforested in order to support the many famous shipyards of the island, and planted it with pine-trees (Spetses, or Pityousa in ancient Greek, means the “pine-island”), in order to develop hunting tourism, which was very fashionable among the high class at the beginning of the 20th century. 

He built an impressive mansion and met with the rich Athenian hunters who visited Spetses from August to October, to hunt the turtledoves and quail migrating between Africa and Europe. 

[2] John Knowles taught here in the early 1950s and set his cult novel The Magus on Spetses.