History

The purpose of the project was to more fully realize the desire and vision of the national benefactor Eugenios Eugenides “to contribute to the education of young people of Greek descent in the fields of science and technology.”

The late Marianthi Simou, sister of national benefactor Eugenios Eugenides, the Foundation’s first administrator and director, and “heart and soul” of the Foundation, decided to create a planetarium on the Foundation’s campus, following relevant recommendations from her advisors Stavros Plakidis, professor of astronomy at the University of Athens, and Dimitrios Kassapis, curator at the National Technical University of Athens. 

At the same time, and at the urging of Stavros Plakidis, the late Marianthi Simou hired, in 1962, as the first director of the Planetarium then under construction, Dimitrios Kotsakis, then an assistant professor at the University of Athens and a professor of mathematics at the Naval Cadet School, who in 1965 was elected to the chair of Astronomy at the University of Athens.

The amount spent for this purpose was exorbitant for that time, while the extremely valuable central planetarium projector was a donation from Nikolaos Vernikos-Eugenides. That first Mark IV projector from Carl Zeiss, which was 6 meters tall and weighed 2.5 metric tons, consisted of 29,000 parts. Its two spherical ends, as well as the central body, were studded with 150 projection systems, which allowed it to project onto the hemispherical dome, among other things, 8,900 stars up to magnitude 6.5, the motion of the Sun, the Moon, and the five bright planets, an image of the visible celestial dome as seen from any point on Earth, and the seasonal changes.

On June 7, 1966, the new building complex of the Eugenides Foundation on Syggrou Avenue was inaugurated, and Greece’s first planetarium—and the only one in Eastern Europe.

To commemorate this event, the Hellenic Post issued a special stamp with a first-day-of-issue postmark.



The establishment of the Planetarium, a true gem and a major attraction for students and the general public, was considered from the outset a project of national significance, with the primary goal of improving the quality of scientific education for our people. A science center with an important mission and the specific goal of making the achievements of science and technology accessible to the public and promoting them.

From its very beginnings, in fact, it grew rapidly, eventually becoming a center for education, entertainment, and support for all fields of study. Because the Planetarium utilized all the creative and technical capabilities of audiovisual media through appropriate combinations, so as to be able to tell the story of science in the most impressive, spectacular, and entertaining way.

Dimitrios Kotsakis remained director of the Eugenides Planetarium until 1973, with Stavros Plakidis serving as the Foundation’s astronomy advisor.

During this period of the Planetarium’s operation, the contributions of astronomer Konstantinos Chasapis were also significant; as a gifted speaker, literally captivated his large audience during his weekly astronomy lectures in the Foundation’s Amphitheater, particularly during the last two years of his life (1970–1972).

During this initial phase of its operation, the Planetarium found many distinguished international partners to support its activities. Of particular note is the contribution of Sidonius Kopal, professor of astronomy at the University of Manchester in England, Henry King, director of the London Planetarium, and F. Paul, director of the Nuremberg Planetarium.

At the same time, emphasis was placed on the presentations for high school seniors who were taking the Cosmography course. Over the course of a year, the students had the opportunity to attend six performances specially adapted for them.

They also had the opportunity to attend special educational lectures, initially by astronomer Petros Rovithis (1967–1971) and later by astronomer Maros Papathanassiou (1971–1982), who were also responsible with conducting daily observations of the Sun, which were carried out using the Foundation’s telescope in collaboration with corresponding centers in Sweden and Switzerland.

Michalis Moutsoulas, professor of Remote Sensing at the University of Athens, also provided many outstanding services as an advisor to the Foundation and a friend of the Planetarium until his untimely death in 1995.

In the early 1970s, Dionysis Simopoulos, while still in the U.S., began working closely with the late George Athanasiadis, then publisher of the newspaper “I Vradini,” publishing extensive articles on the results of the space missions of the Apollo manned program.

That series of articles led to him being invited to Athens by the Hellenic Astronautical Society in the summer of 1972 to give a lecture, which gave him the opportunity to meet Marianthi Simou as well. That meeting was pivotal, since, two months later, he was appointed successor to Dimitrios Kotsakis as director of the Eugenides Planetarium, although he did not assume his duties until April 6, 1973.

Drawing on his five years of experience as a curator and later as director of the Zeiss Planetarium at the Louisiana Center for Arts and Sciences (one of the ten largest planetariums in the U.S. at the time), he introduced innovations (such as in the music, artistic design, and staging of the planetarium’s science lectures), resulting in a dramatic increase in its audience.

In 1978, the number of visitors to the Planetarium had quadrupled, reaching 116,000 per year, a number that, given the Planetarium’s seating capacity and the shows it presented at the time, was, in fact, unmatched. This dramatic increase in attendance at the Planetarium was due mainly to the impressive upgrade of its audiovisual equipment, with the installation of dozens of auxiliary projectors, thanks to which the shows became increasingly spectacular. In this way, dozens of new shows were created, and the Planetarium now catered to audiences of all ages and educational backgrounds.

During the 1970s, however, there was a global decline in the number of new planetariums being built, due to the fact that interest in the lunar missions of the  Apolloprogram had waned. However, this did not hinder the development of technologies related to planetariums. Many auditoriums began using seats that were oriented in a specific direction and not necessarily toward the center of the auditorium. This helped the audience focus even more on the essence of the subject matter, which was described throughout the performance. In 1976, a multi-projector system was built that projected an image (e.g., the interior of an observatory) that covered the entire dome.

Through various other experiments—particularly those concerning the audience’s perception of the dome—the viewer was given the impression of being part of the spectacle “floating” in space rather than simply watching a performance. In 1973, San Diego pioneered the creation of the world’s first space theater, where the dome was tilted and, for the first time, incorporated a cinematic dome projection system, known at the time as theOmnimax system. A year later, that experience had a significant impact, sowing the first seeds of what would become the Eugenides Foundation’s New Digital Planetarium as we know it today.

Automated control of shows was still rare, although in 1976 the world’s first fully automated planetarium was unveiled: the Albert Einstein Space Theater, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. To run a planetarium show, all you had to do was press a single button, and it would run automatically.

The sound quality has also improved significantly, first transitioning to dual-channel stereo and then to four-channel surround sound. These features gave rise to a new generation of planetariums, which were now also used to host plays, concerts, and special laser shows. This led to an increase in planetarium revenue, while also attracting an audience that might otherwise never have visited a planetarium.

The I.E. Planetarium also kept pace with these international developments, thanks mainly to the keen interest shown from the very beginning by the late Marianthi Simou, who provided the necessary funds to upgrade its equipment.

During that period, the static image of Athens was replaced by a system of projection screens capable of projecting panoramic views from all over the world onto the dome, as well as from the surfaces of other planets and moons, as scientists at the time calculated these would appear to their future visitors.

Thus, while in the early 1970s the Eugenides Foundation Planetarium used its main Zeiss World Projector and a single auxiliary projector capable of 5-10 slides per show, by the end of that decade it had over 75 projectors, each with 80 slides, and at least 200 special-effects projectors, which depicted hundreds of different astronomical phenomena that the Zeiss projector could not present.

The effort to upgrade the Planetarium’s audiovisual equipment was a success thanks to three technicians who were trained abroad for this purpose: the late Yannis Galatas, from the very first day of its establishment and operation, and later Dimitris Hatzakis and Giorgos Tsesmelis.

During that same period, the contribution of Maurice Alché, a true master of photography, was also significant in terms of the aesthetic and artistic presentation of the performances. Finally, it would be a major oversight not to highlight the significant contribution of ERT announcer Giorgos Athanasopoulos, who from 1966 to 1990 served, as the sole narrator, the “voice of the Planetarium” in more than 250 performances. Despite its renovation, however, the Planetarium’s activities, until the late 1970s, were limited to just a few meters inside its doors.

Although the audience visiting its facilities was satisfied, the services provided were limited to its performances, no matter how spectacular they had become in the meantime. This realization gradually led to a change in the philosophy underlying his activities.

Thus, the Planetarium ceased to be confined solely to its physical facility, expanding its activities beyond it through educational articles and interviews in daily newspapers and magazines, popular science television programs, as well as educational lectures throughout the country.

It was then decided to transform it into an informational, outreach, and educational center, participating—through long-term planning—in activities within the social fabric, since only through broad collaboration with society could its operation truly achieve its purpose and grow. This laid the foundation for the strong outward focus of the decade that followed.

In 1978, the Eugenides Foundation Planetarium, in collaboration with the Arma Planetarium in Northern Ireland and the Hamburg Planetarium, founded the European-Mediterranean Planetarium Association with the aim of fostering relations among Europe’s major planetariums. Sixteen years later, together with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), they formed a new focal point for the creation of a second pan-European scientific organization known as the European Association for Astronomy Education.

In the fall of 1996, the then-President of the Eugenides Foundation, Nikolaos Vernikos-Eugenides, following the example of the great national benefactors Eugenios Eugenides and Marianthi Simou, and recognizing that the coming new century would require the modernization and improvement of the services that the Eugenides Foundation had been providing in the country up to that point, he decided to allocate a substantial sum for the expansion of the Foundation’s facilities and activities and played a decisive role himself in shaping the plans for the expansion of the Foundation’s facilities and activities of the Foundation right up until his untimely death in November 2000.

His successor and the Foundation’s new President, Mr. [Name], has continued to work toward realizing this vision ever since. Leonidas Dimitriadis-Eugenidis.



In June 1999, the old—now— Planetarium closed its doors for good so that construction of the New Digital Planetarium could begin immediately. From then until today, ZEISS’s first central planetarium projector—this magnificent instrument—has graced the entrance to the Planetarium, now as an exhibit.

More than fifty years after the Eugenides Foundation established the first planetarium in Greece in 1966, its state-of-the-art “successor,” the New Digital Planetarium, has been open to the public since November 2003. While the old Planetarium was the only one of its kind in Greece and one of the most modern planetariums of its time, the New Digital Planetarium, with a dome diameter of 24.5 meters and a total area of nearly one stremma, is one of the largest and best digital planetariums in the world.