ETERNAL HELLENISM (2): THE ARCHITECTURE OF MODERN ATHENS

During the summer months we are producing a three part series on the 5,000 year old culture of Greece. The first part is on what we coined "the Cosmic Story", a medium not simply relating a narrative, but a means to convey reality, wisdom and morality, rooted in the ancient myths about the gods and heroes and present to this day in songs, prose and poetry and yes, in the liturgy (link). Part two will deal with the architecture of the city of Athens and how it was able to grow into a metropolis of over three million people in a relatively short period of time. The final piece in the series is about the history of the music style called rebetiko, sometimes called the Greek version of blues.


April 5, 2024 The Urbanist: How Athens Became a Modern Metropolis. Subtitles are also available in Greek! Υπάρχουν διαθέσιμοι υπότιτλοι στα ελληνικά.

I lived in Athens on and off three times since my first holiday trip in 1979. I remember it like yesterday that I was leaving my hotel on bustling Omonoia Square, falling in love instantly. No, not with a former fiancé whom I met at the time, but with the chaos and energy of Athens. It felt like a home coming. 

A family member later described this city square as "hell on earth". But my experience of Athens over a long stretch of time gives me a perfect overview of how things have changed.

I can attest to the fact that in the eighties of the last century people hated to be in Athens. You were there to work, and that was it. A cloud of exhaust fumes called the nephos contributed to the sweltering cauldron that was down town Athens in the summer. Still apparently, it was all great enough for me to stay on for some six years. 

During my second stay I chose my place of residence more carefully. It was just after the Olympics had returned to Athens in 2002. There had been efforts to clean up the city. House owners had given their properties a fresh coat of paint, and the economic situation had improved markedly.

A middle class had developed with all the trimmings that entails: pets, home improvement and car wash rituals. I can't remember people complaining at the time about the awfulness of the city or of the nephos. 

Now at my third stint it has become clear that people have started to enjoy their place of residence. The accursed polykatoikia of the 1980s has by now almost reached protected status, as attested to in the Urbanist's video. It is certainly on par with industrial heritage. 


Aug. 29, 2016 Yannis Kotsiras: Κάθε Φορά (Kathe Phora). Platforms. YouTube channel. 

Walking through an Athens street is a special kind of experience. While all architecture looks superficially the same, with every meter of your walk the atmosphere changes. It is baffling. I did not understand it at first.

Boredom is a word unknown in the Athens urban vocabulery. For one thing, most street level build ups are shops, of which not two are alike. It is a show case of Greek creativity and inventiveness of which this vibrant city is filled fit to burst. 

Athens is full of mysteries like that. The rows of polykatoikies are interspersed with small, empty plots of land. These are idle plots into which no contractor has been able to fit another polykatoikia. 

These are the ownerless paradises for stray animals and other urban wild life. Or you may find the abandoned, derelict ruines of an age gone-by in the neoclassical or ottoman style of its time. 

While the brutalism of modern architecture in the West may drive people to crime or suicide, this is not the case in Greece. As explained, there is constant variety within the superficial sameness. 

The second factor that contributes to Athens having escaped the brutalist urban pitfall, is the lack of planning or any form of order. I now know Greeks do not organize anything as a rule, full stop.

They pay with a shockingly low productivity, but the winner in this culture is agile multitasking and resourcefulness. The popular capitalist system of the antiparochi that paid for all that anarchist building activity, is proof of that. 


April12, 2024 The Urbanist: How Athens Survived Near Collapse.

In a urban series on Bloomberg (link) we read this:

"The municipality of Athens only practiced zoning for heavy industry, leaving people free to set up shop in a polykatoikia. Even today, these buildings are often hives of activity, mixing offices, medical practices and even the odd workshop among homes (...) 
 
this was “a cancellation of all the problems of modern urban planning, just by mistake. No one had thought about it, but the result was a fantastic mix of uses within a small-scale building. That’s why the streets of Athens have a wonderful level of life all day, all night and all week.”

You get that? "Just by mistake". This is how some people think of liberty, as a mistake. You get the Western mindset in which the state is omnipresent? A rules vacuum is a lucky mistake. They never turn that around, that maybe it's the rules that are the mistake. Which they clearly are!

While all that anarchism leaves ample space for acts of God, a Spanish political scientist who made Athens his field of work -- we see him in the second Urbanist video, How Athens Survived Near Collapse at the 24:20 mark -- has a more down to earth theory.

According to Isaac, Greece in essence is a post colonial country with typically weak institutions. Which is supposed to explain the lack of urban planning and the absence of a public housing system. But that is a good thing, as we discussed. Not "a mistake". 

That loose relationship of the people with their government that created so much liberty was destroyed in recent years by the German tax collectors who set up shop in Athens after the financial crisis of 2008 in order to ensure return on their investment. Sovereignty has become an illusion. 

The Germans taught Greece's bureaucrats how Western European confiscatory tax collection works. So now every entrepreneur has his cash register directly connected to the tax office.

A vote buying edifice is being erected by the current globalist government that increases people's dependency on government in an effort to turn Greece into a 'normal' European country. 

But I have more reasons than one to hope and predict this is not going to happen. Some of which I discussed in earlier posts in present blog. 

The Urbanist YouTube channel
The Athens Urbanist playlist
The Urbanist in Greece playlist

ETERNAL HELLENISM:
1. The Cosmic Story (link)
3. Rebetika Music (link)



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