Athens Epidaurus Festival 2026 Opens with Schliemann III by Heiner Goebbels and Michael Simon at Pireos 260

This year, a landmark year marking twenty years of continuous operation for Pireos 260, the Festival welcomes to its opening event Heiner Goebbels, one of the most important figures of the European music and theatre scene. Schliemann III by Heiner Goebbels and Michael Simon premieres at Pireos 260 (Space D) from May 29 to June 1.

Schliemann III is an attempt to create different experiential spaces for the audience, allowing for a renewed examination of our perception of History. The starting point of the work is the reconstruction of a plan of Troy – with its nine discovered layers – as it emerges through the diary narrative of Heinrich Schliemann documenting the excavations conducted there between 1871 and 1873.

Voices, performers and musicians interact with a heterogeneous textual and musical material that includes pseudo-archaic recitations and excerpts from the Iliad, parts from Les Troyens – the opera by Hector Berlioz – as well as folk songs, electronic sound samples and pre-recorded pieces.

The result is a series of distinct “excavations,” as the performance, together with its sources, refers not only to Schliemann’s attempt to uncover the remains of Troy, but also bears the imprint of various site-specific forms it has taken in the past: the original stage installation by Michael Simon and Heiner Goebbels titled Newtons Casino, first presented in 1990 at Theater am Turm, as well as the Schliemann Construction Site version, created in 1997 in collaboration with the group Diploys Eros in Athens.

In addition, in 1993 Goebbels created the award-winning and purely acoustic radio composition Schliemann’s Radio. In collaboration with some of the original contributors, Simon and Goebbels now develop a new version of the work, attempting to unfold the idea of the permeability of historical layers through a journey across the spaces of Pireos 260.

All these trajectories – artistic, historical and geographical – now converge in Schliemann III, a multilayered stage composition that approaches History not as a static narrative, but as an ongoing process of excavation, interpretation and reformulation.

The performance includes an excerpt from the song “Makrya” (“Far Away”), taken from the unreleased musical work by Thanasis Moraitis based on poems by C. P. Cavafy, titled To You I Turn, Art of Poetry.