At Agios Konstantinou 34, on the corner of Nikiforou Street, there is an old apartment building. This is not a random building. It has been in existence since 1936 and is signed by architect Emmanuel Lazaridis. I stood obliquely opposite and tried my best to fit it in my field of view so that it would be five stories high, with blank balconies, with French shutters, not with blinds, with this artificial brown color and with traces of December bullets … , in Agios Konstantinos, below Omonia, this building had its own stories. During the occupation, he gathered the neighborhood in his hideouts, this was the first modern apartment building of Agios Konstantinos, in the shadow of the National Theater and the church that gave the street its name. Agios Konstantinos, the work of Kavtantzoglou, opposite the Chiller Theatre, and under this tenement building, smoky with time, by the hand of Emmanuel Lazaridis, an outstanding architect of the Venizel environment.

All these “say” even and not only them. There is the old building of the hotel “Delphi”, there is the Training Institute of the Bank of Greece in a neoclassical two-story building, a corner with Menandros. All these layers of history, mixed together, create that atmosphere that thickens in places and disappears in places … How can I not look at Sokratos, at the old Kathimerini, how can I not feel the aura of Omonia with all its stratification?

But whatever. Agios Konstantinou, pulling me to Karaiskaki Square, led me to Athens invisible to many. The nooks and crannies of Metaxourgio and the squares of Vatis, Satovriandu, Veranzerou, Deligiorghi and these dark narrow streets: Vilara, Kallergi… meanders and meanders in the areas covering the substratum of Omonia. Cruel world.

But I started with images of historical depth, architectural elegance and a certain urban holiness. The National Theatre, always on that awkward side of the road, without statues for decades, an elegant piece born from the collaboration of George I and Ernesto Ziller, has a conversation with Saint Constantine. But the real face of Agios Konstantinos was not the bequeathed 19th century, not 1910 and not the interwar period. I saw gaps, spaces of ruined houses on the street, in a row, like theater stages without actors, scaffolding and shabby walls, next to broken sidewalks (otherwise full of life) … These gutted houses of Agios Konstantinos, at numbers 36, 47, etc. .d. .ok they seem to have faded. I walked and looked at the place of Ascension, as if the trophy citizens, wrapped in the shroud of finite life, had ascended into the sky of Athens. I was thinking about the stratigraphy of historical performances on the Central Stage of the National Theater next door. The sound of applause 1935, 1945, 1965… Curtains. Seats. Programs. On the contrary, in Agios Konstantinos, I had dull images of thousands of candles, how many were lit, how many went out, smoke, pale light, images, pilgrims on the road, in favor of the poor, in memory …

And below, women from Georgia, no matter how many thoughts they had then …