The collection of non-residential houses is even enriched with the former pillars of bourgeois life. The streets that define the hinterland of Fokionos Negri have what we would call the atmosphere of the Hive in a version of an ingrained urban experience. There is stratigraphy, there are inscriptions, there is a gaze imbued with successive readings of the place. And the place is the Athenian country, a city within a city, yesterday’s urban beehive.

As much as one would like to see reality, blurry and noisy, sometimes exhilarating and sometimes depressing, Kypseli around Drosopoulos and Eptanissa, in the streets of former glory, still capitalizes on this added value of the urban past, whatever that may mean today . That is why in the straits, in the body of the Hive, these ruins are found. They are reminiscent of the drama of the fall, they are like broken angels, like Icarus of the homeless, dishonorably landed. What we would call old houses in Kipseli are buildings after 1915-20, and in most cases between 1925 and 1940. This is the urban heritage of the pre-war period in the area. In other words, these are mansions, semi-detached houses and tenements of an era that was already moving towards the modern world and which, after the creation of Fokionos Negri in 1937, was even more organized and took off after the war until the mid-70s.

But the sight of city ruins gives rise to a feeling of sadness and melancholy. You think about life cycles, but you think more about the inability of the present to prioritize itself. I have a map of the ruins that form the paths in the Hive’s body. However, this is a dead end path. However, these dull palaces or simple houses, in which there is so much nobility, are those brackets of silence that, perhaps, balance the excess of noise. At 17 Chanion Street, on the corner with a small dead end, there is a wonderful two-family house built in the 20s. The entrances, one to the ground floor and one to the top floor, are located in a cul-de-sac and are surmounted by a circular skylight. The doors are green, the chameleon-shaped mailbox is also green, the stucco is a sweet, deep, delicate Athenian ocher. That ocher we can’t do anymore…

It reminds me of another gated house in Kypseli that is for sale, at 31 Tenedou Street. With eclectic stucco on the front, front door on the side, this house is poetry on the street. Opposite it is a three-story apartment building, at Tenedos 30, a deep fiery color, closed, with a built-in entrance. With its beautiful bay windows, this is a fine example of Kipseli modernism, built around 1935. Closed and the largest tenement house of the interwar period, on the corner of Thira 11 and Drosopoulos, once an elegant architecture, now a real ruin. Life rides in ease and scatters its wealth like dust.

The famous closed house of Eptanisos 54 with its red color on the covered veranda, perhaps better than any other occasion, symbolizes the cycles of life in Kypseli. After all, Eptanisou Street itself is perhaps the concentration and ultimate symbol of the urban beehive.