Christos Kapralos (1909-1993) is one of the most important Greek sculptors of the twentieth century, and for some forty years the place where he actually made things was a modest workshop by the sea at Plakakia, on the coast road running north out of Aegina town. Two years after his death the workshop opened as a museum of his work, and since 2006 it has been an official branch of the National Gallery of Greece - which makes Aegina one of the few Greek islands with a National Gallery outpost of its own. Entry is free, and the museum remains one of the most quietly rewarding cultural stops on the island.
The centrepiece is the Monument of the Battle of Pindus, a frieze roughly forty metres long that Kapralos carved between 1952 and 1956, commemorating the Greek resistance to the 1940 invasion through a procession of figures - soldiers, women, mules, the machinery of a mountain war - rendered in a style that reaches back past classical sculpture to something older and rougher. The museum holds the work in limestone along with its full-scale plaster cast, and walking its length is the closest thing Greek modern art offers to reading a stone epic. It sits in striking company: the Parody from the Olympia Pediment (1971-1972), a sly reworking of the famous temple sculptures composed from eucalyptus trunks, sums up the other side of Kapralos - playful, rooted in material, entirely unbothered by solemnity.
Around these two anchors the museum gathers the range of what came out of the Plakakia workshop: sculpture in wood, porous stone, and marble, small works in clay and bronze, paintings made on the island, and a series of carved furniture pieces - including anthropomorphic chairs - that blur the line between sculpture and object. Because everything here was made or kept in the place where you are standing, the museum has an atmosphere that larger institutions cannot manufacture: this is not art transported to a gallery, it is a working space that history happened to fill.
The museum is at Nikou Kazantzaki 73 in the Plakakia district - the street, fittingly, is named after the novelist who also worked on Aegina - about a fifteen-minute walk from the port along the coast towards Kolona, which makes it easy to pair with the archaeological site there. It opens Wednesday to Friday from 8:30 to 15:30 and weekends from 9:30 to 16:30, and is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Admission is free; enquiries on 22970 22001.