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The Sleeping Girl

The life after death of young Sofia Afentaki and the death in life of the sculptor of her burial monument, Yannoulis Chalepas.

By Desolation Road

December 21^st, 2020

Created in 1878, the tombstone sculpture of young Sophia Afentaki, in Athens’ First Cemetery, is a manifest of life in death: leaning gently on her couch, she seems to be asleep, rather than dead. She looks as though she’s resting, calmly, from a life that pulsates, breathing softly, without the deadly rigidity as she keeps her leg bent and her head resting on its side, while the sheet seems to change ripples as she gently moves in her sleep. The only element that connects her to the world of the dead is the cross she holds on her chest with her left hand.

The life in death of Sofia Afentaki, however, is in complete contrast with the fate of the monument’s sculptor, Yannoulis Chalepas. A few months after completing this sculpture, at 27 years of age, his parents and his doctors came to the conclusion that his mental health was collapsing. They confined him in the public psychiatric hospital of Corfu, brutally destroying the creativity of the most renowned modern Greek sculptor, for 40 years. For Yannoulis Chalepas, fate reserved death in life.

In a tragic variation of the ancient Greek belief that death and sleep are twin brothers, Sofia Afentaki and Yannoulis Chalepas met again in 1878: they were both now experiencing an eternal sleep without dreams.

The Sleeping Girl

Up until fate

As Chalepas, born in 1851 on the island of Tinos, grew up in the marble sculpture business of his family with his four younger siblings, and then studied at the School of Fine Arts in Athens and later in Munich, Sofia Afentaki was experiencing the carefree growth in Athens’ high society.

After her death, in 1873, and the fame that the sculpture of Chalepas gained throughout Greece, the deceased daughter of the wealthy family who was residing on Solonos Street, in the center of Athens, became notorious through stormy rumors.

The Sleeping Girl

They said that there was no boy capable of not falling in love with her, that the high society of Athens was enchanted at the dinners by her presence and the newspapers wrote about her, that students intended for mayors and industrialists organized poetry evenings for her in taverns, that she was asked to marriage by a brave Lieutenant with a spear mark, by a French Captain who claimed damage to the ship to stay for a few more days in Piraeus, and of course by the offspring of wealthy families.

It was also written that she fell in love with an Italian tenor, Mario Giovanni, on a trip with her father to Naples, that her father cut her off strictly from him and sent her back to Greece, that her unbearable misery finally led her in suicide by poison - and that Mario Giovanni, when he learned of her death, did the same on Naples' Hill of Love, putting a bullet in his heart.

But none of this was true. Sofia Afentaki had died of tuberculosis in December 1873, a few months after the best doctors in Athens had recommended her isolation on the island of her family, Kimolos, in order to breathe fresh air in the course of her treatment.

During that period, Yannoulis Chalepas was preparing his first two major works, Affection (1875) and Satyr Playing with Eros (1875-1877). The international distinction of these two works gained him recognition and fame. Thus at that time, in his newly built workshop in Athens, Chalepas was visited by Georgios Oikonomou Afentakis, who assigned him the creation of the burial monument of a girl lost in her time of blossoming. His niece, Sofia.

Death in life

In 1878, Sleeping Girl (Koimomeni, in Greek) by Yannoulis Chalepas, the third major work of his life and what was to become one of the most famous sculptures in Greece’s modern times, was now placed above the monument of Sofia Afentaki, as Chalepas himself was being surrounded now, menacingly, by his demons.

The tragic irony is that these demons came from nothing but his perfectionism, his exhaustion by his relentless work, and the heartbreak of a marriage denied by the parents of a beautiful young woman called Marigo.

The Sleeping Girl

The Sleeping Girl

The Sleeping Girl

Yannoulis Chalepas’ parents, realizing the catastrophic rage with which he was destroying some of his works, and his attempts to commit suicide, and then his sinking into silence, his isolation, his eloquent and needless laughter, at the suggestion of the psychiatrists of the time confined him in 1888 in a psychiatric hospital in Corfu. He spent 14 torturous years there, before returning to Tinos in 1902. There, his mother forbade him from any contact with any kind of art, believing that it was art that caused his mental illness.

In 1916, at the time of his mother’s death, he was a shepherd in the mountains of Tinos above his village, Pyrgi. He lived in poverty, with the stigma of madness, which intensified when he started again, timidly, to engage in sculpture, trying to create what he could, trying to turn back the unbearably lost time.

In 1925 he was to experience a cataclysmic rebirth. A professor at the Technical University of Athens, Thomas Thomopoulos, presented an exhibition with copies of the sculptures of Chalepas, whom he admired, and the latter in 1927 was awarded the Excellence in Arts of the Academy of Athens. Thus, in 1930, after a second exhibition dedicated to him, he settled again in the capital.

And so, on a very hot day at the end of August of that year, a biblical moment happened: in front of a crowd of thousands of Athenians who had learned what was to happen, and the policemen who were trying to control the pandemonium in the First Cemetery of Athens, Yannoulis Chalepas visited Koimomeni for the first time, after 52 years. He was, like her, alive again.

The Sleeping Girl

Visiting The Sleeping Girl

The original Sleeping Girl is now permanently in the Sculpture Gallery of the National Gallery of Greece, in the Army Grove in the Goudi area of Athens, due to the need for immediate maintenance. The tomb of Sofia Afentaki in Athens' First Cemetery is adorned by an exact copy of high quality.

Footnotes

Copyright © Desolation Road / Panos Diamantis

FootNotes

Copyright © Desolation Road / Panos Diamantis

© 2026 Desolation Road

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