Unlike the philistine sharks of today, Aleko Goulandris is an art collector of the old school

Aleko Goulandris is my oldest and closest friend. We met in the summer of 1945, at the Semiramis hotel in a northern Athenian resort. The Allied bombing and the ensuing communist uprising of 1944 had not been kind to ritzy houses, nor to glitzy hotels. The Semiramis was the only one still operating during the hot months of July and August. Aleko and his twin brother Leonidas befriended me, aged nine, and, as they say, it was the start of a beautiful friendship.

The boys were shipping heirs and had become heroes of sorts because during the previous winter, when the battle for Athens was raging, they had answered the call to hold the line against the reds who had come down from the mountains and tried to take over through force of arms. The Goulandris clan is a very large one, and most of them did their duty during the war. My father was down near the Acropolis where the battle raged for days, and that is where Aleko and Leonidas went and presented themselves. A grizzly veteran told the 16-year-old twins to dig a trench, get inside it, and shoot at anyone who tried to cross after dark. The twins had a distinctive way of speaking, so when they saw a figure coming they yelled out ‘Ti Si’, which in Greek military lingo means ‘Who goes there?’ ‘What are you, Egyptians?’ came the answer from a regular army captain who had been out reconnoitering. The boys took it badly. It got worse the next night when their mother arrived with cakes and other goodies, and they endured the barbs of weary veterans who had been fighting for weeks on bread and water alone.