Simple, small roads. You can go without stopping. Canary and Leonidas Spartiatou stand opposite each other. They are separated by Demosthenes, the great road of Kallithea. I walked there. Why; Perhaps it was curiosity that prompted a quick glance at the house as I drove by. I returned. On foot you breathe the surroundings, you can touch the houses. And Kallithea, despite the first impression of a single image created by the intensive reconstruction of the 20s from 1970 to 1990, rescues unexpected remnants of its past, until 1940, when urban and popular houses made up this charming mixture side by side.

But where I stood, my walk blessed me with scenes that made me linger long and marvel at the uninhabited houses left to the mercy of time. Soon their flesh would be eaten again, this wonderful substance of the houses that sheltered life and now accompany us like tents, the forests of ancient Rome. On Kanari Street, the corners with the wide Demosthenus Street end with old houses. The right corner is a two-storey interwar building with a mansion façade at number 56 Demosthenes. I stopped to look at the door, but my gaze was fixed on the two lush, tall pines that adorned the pavement and gave rise to images of Rome in Kallithea. It was an atmospheric niche at the corner of Demosthenes and Kanari. But in another corner there was another old house with the same wonderful front door, all boarded up, as dilapidated as it was described. But despite his armor, airy and perforated, the plaster radiated warmth, as if immersed in liquid terracotta, which dried in the air and left the warmth of the matter. Up there, on the plaster, I could see the raised Doric pilasters.

Further down and vice versa. Demosthenes and Menelaus. There is a neoclassical sofa, one of those old, authentic, harmonious and light ones, one of those that would have shifted the lens of Stelios Skopelitis in 1975. This is an uninhabited house, some gypsies came in and out, I quickly passed but stood opposite to absorb it all with my eyes, get enough of it, so special that there were many doves with a wreath of horns and among the pigeons. Like Athens and this image, how much it reminds from an indefinite depth.

I wandered between tenements, I went out into the narrow streets, because the midday sun blinded you in Demosthenes. So I discovered the glorious street of Leonidas Spartiatou. This stomping became sympathetic, if you see what a small road. There are large apartment buildings, in addition to a row of three single-family houses, simple and authentic. Both are in ruins. I approached with reverence. In No. 6, only the front wall remains. Between the two ruins one can see chambers with pink walls and paneled half-open doors, with courtyard fig trees sprouting where there used to be a dining room, sideboard or bed. But most of all I noticed the frieze in the house. Was it a piece of plaster decoration, a romantic frieze of 1910? Now it looked like an archaeological find, there was a feeling of excavations, soil, greenery and dampness, like in an arrested grave. The garland in the old house resembled a Roman sarcophagus, a Hellenistic tomb, a poem by Cavaf.