Our Founder
Early Years
Anastasios G. Leventis was born in Cyprus in December 1902, in the Cypriot mountain village of Lemythou, the home of his mother Salome. The earliest records of her family go back to the 18th Century when a young ancestor had travelled to the Peloponnese to join the abortive 1770 uprising against Ottoman rule (known to history as the ‘Orlov’ rebellion). During this time, they counted among their family members and acquaintances a number of distinguished clerics who served at the highest levels - metropolitan bishops, patriarchs from the Orthodox churches of Jerusalem and Antioch, as well as from the Church of Cyprus.
After World War I he went to Marseilles, where he worked and studied commerce in Bordeaux. In 1920 he was employed by an Anglo-Hellenic company and saw assigned first to a managerial position in south-eastern Nigeria, then in 1922 to a position in Abeokuta, in south-western Nigeria, and, subsequently, to the position of general manager for the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Ivory Coast and Togo of G. B. Ollivant & Co., a British Company.
A. G. Leventis & Company Ltd
In 1936 Anastasios G. Leventis formed his own trading company, A. G. Leventis & Company Limited, which expanded rapidly in the Gold Coast, after 1942, in Nigeria. The new Company was soon to rival the large, long-established trading companies based in England, France and Switzerland that stood at the heart of the colonial West African economy. When resentment of high prices and the incipient nationalist movement brought about the Accra riots of 1948 - the most serious instance of anti-colonial violence in post-war Western Africa - the only large stores not to be burned were those of A. G. Leventis & Company Limited.
Over the quarter- century after the end of the war, the business changed and expanded into a number of new ventures in the manufacturing and technical fields, shifting its focus in the process from Ghana to the much larger Nigerian economy. By the time of A. G Leventis’ death in 1978, it had become one of the largest enterprises - and one of the two largest employers- in Nigeria and poised to expand into other parts of the world.
Social and philanthropic work & protection of cultural heritage
Business was by no means Anastasios G. Leventis’ only interest. He had played a leading role in social and philanthropic life in pre-war Gold Coast. He was appointed honorary Consul-General of Greece in Accra and threw himself heart and soul into the war effort, collecting aid for the war-torn community. He also helped with many projects to improve life in the Cypriot villages connected to his family, supporting many students at courses overseas, and helping many in need.
These efforts were intensified in the face of the political turmoil that unfolded in Cyprus in the late 50’s and 60’s, and Anastasios G. Leventis aided his newly independent homeland in a number of ways. President Makarios, with whom he had collaborated to found the main old people’s home in Nicosia, made use of Anastasios’ political expertise at several meetings of the United Nations General Assembly and, in 1966, appointed him Cyprus’ first Ambassador and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO, in recognition of his support for education and the cultural heritage of Cyprus.
Anastasios G. Leventis had been particularly active in supporting the Department of Antiquities’ restoration of two important Byzantine monuments and in helping the Cyprus Government project the image of its cultural and artistic heritage abroad. He himself was very interested in the arts and built up a notable collection of French and European paintings in Paris. In Athens he acquired the important first collection of Evangelos Averoff, champion of Greek art and artists of the early 19th to the mid-20th century.
Final years
The 1974 invasion of Cyprus imposed a particular burden on him, with the personal loss of the cultural centre and family church he had built in Petra, but also coping at UNESCO with the widespread destruction of Cypriot cultural heritage. He helped to repatriate looted and smuggled treasures, but he primarily tried to alleviate the needs of the injured and of refugees.
Anastasios G. Leventis died in October 1978, having provided for the establishment of a foundation to support educational, cultural, artistic and philanthropic causes in Cyprus, Greece and elsewhere.