Passionate Collectors
Vincent and Olga Diniacopoulos struggled for most of their lives to find worthy homes for their unsurpassed collection of Mediterranean and Egyptian antiquities. Today, their fascinating finds live in museums and private collections the world over.
On March 16, Concordia launches a second book on the couple’s work, Life and Death in Ancient Egypt: The Diniacopoulos Collection, 12 academic essays in English and French by scholars from six countries, examining specific artifacts in the context of current scholarship.
Clarence Epstein, the author of an essay in the first book on the couple (The Diniacopoulos Collection in Québec), rightly said their story could be the basis for a film.
Vinkentios Diniacopoulos (1886–1967), born in Constantinople, began his career at the age of 14, collecting artifacts in the Turkish countryside. By 1922 he was carving out his career in excavations in Asia Minor and the Middle East. His future wife, Hélène Olga Nicolas (1906–2000) was born in Cairo to an engineer father who worked on the Suez Canal. She moved to Paris at the age of 17, where she married Vincent. Olga went on to study archaeology at the École du Louvre and the Sorbonne. Prestigious institutions like the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art hired the couple to scour Egypt and Asia Minor for rare finds.
But the passionate couple also collected many works for themselves – so many in fact that when they sailed from France to Canada in 1951, they took 22 crates with them, and that was not all of their collection. Three years later they opened one of the most unusual shops in Montreal, Ars Classica on Sherbrooke Street, offering a combo of antiquities alongside European and Canadian paintings.
Their son Denis would eventually make Olga and Vincent extended members of the Concordia family by joining the faculty in the Department of Communication Studies. “He was a passionate teacher who willingly spent time with his devoted students well after office hours,” writes President Fred Lowy in the book’s foreword.
The academics weigh in
Life and Death in Ancient Egypt examines a variety of Egyptian works in the Diniacopoulos Collection. These include portable limestone offering tables, which were used for supplying food and drink to the deceased in the afterlife. The Egyptians believed that a life force, or “ka” was preserved after death, and that the ka needed nourishment. As such, those who were close to the deceased left special foods on offering tables in the “house of ka,” where the body of the deceased and its ka reunited.
The book also examines funerary statues that represented the likeness of the deceased (and contained a portion of their ka); Romano-Egyptian “frog lamps” (representing resurrection); and a miniature statue of Zeus in swan form penetrating Leda, Queen of Sparta.
In her essay “Placating the Gods: Egyptian Votives,” Susan Redford writes, “For centuries, ancient Egyptian cemeteries have been plundered by treasure hunters. Otherwise lost to scholarship, many of these plundered antiquities later entered legitimate collections like the Diniacopoulos Collection, which fortunately have allowed their display and publication.”
Extended family
The university has established major endowments in the departments of Classics, Communication Studies, Mathematics, and Psychology in honour of the Diniacopoulos family. The Vincent, Olga, and Denis Nicolas-Diniacopoulos Scholarships have been awarded to more than 60 students who have demonstrated an interest in interdisciplinary studies.
And, as Lowy writes “There could be no more fitting tribute to this family than to have future generations of scholars and students benefiting from the exceptional cultural and educational legacies that they left behind.”
“Life and Death in Ancient Egypt: The Diniacopoulos Collection” lecture and book launch takes place Wednesday, March 16, in the Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, 1379 Sherbrooke St. W.). A reception will follow.
RSVP by email or 514-848-2424, ext. 2809.
Life imitates art