Monday, 5 October 2026

“Two Hermeses”: guide Nikolaos Zafeiropoulos beside the statue of Hermes in an Athens museum, 1935

Black-and-white photograph of a young man in a jacket standing in profile beside a marble statue of Hermes.

Hermes in Marble and Hermes in the Flesh.

In 1935 the photojournalist Vasilios Tsakirakis took a photograph of a stranger in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The man, who turned out to be a guide named Nikolaos Zafeiropoulos, proved to be uncannily like the statue of Hermes, a copy of a sculpture by Praxiteles, beside which he was standing.

And so this picture, "Two Hermeses", came to be.

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