The three-story corner building of Akadimia and Zoodochos Pigi, clean and well maintained, in a two-tone ocher-green color scheme, together with the adjacent one, in deep warm tiles, creates a compact urban image. The exceptions are parts of Athens, which were severely damaged by the numerous demolitions of historical or simply atmospheric buildings, small and large, built during the period of rising urbanization from 1880 to 1925.

I notice what’s left. Most of the buildings that replaced the old ones are dull and often dull. I like, however, the tenement house of the year 55 on the Academy, opposite the church of Zoodokhos Pigi, with its warm, swarthy complexion. But most of all, a new look is needed around.

However, at the corner of the Academy and Zoodochou Pigis, the Athenian sun played on the skin of the building at that time and shadows flickered on the theatrical floor masks, these sexless masks, which, like decorative motifs, give a certain style to this Athenian building. I am always touched by these stylistic tricks in the buildings of this architectural transition, swift between dying historicism and early modernism. But there are many such buildings in Athens. Almost all of the 1920s are buildings of this transition, a period that possibly starts from 1915, and in some cases continues until 1932-1933.

Those years of urban osmosis, as Athens mutated into something shapeless but shockingly intense after 1922, changed the city forever. Where I stood, in Zoodochos Pigi, behind me was a glass mausoleum, abandoned and dirty on the site of the old Ionian school, and further along Olympia, old Lyrics, a 50s complex on the site of the romantic (and historical) Olympia of 1916. Opposite is the interwar tenement house Akademia and Mavromichalis, which replaced the house where Harilaos Trikoupis and his sister Sophia lived. What is left of all this today?

Cities are changing… But inaction deepens the abyss. Higher still, at Zoodochos Pigis, an elegant 1926 piece lies in disrepair, designed, as the shattered marble slabs tell us, by the Smyrna architect Ilias Kurmoulis (who studied in Paris in 1902). There, at the back of the courtyard, Karolos Kun sowed the seeds of the Art Theater (Alki Zey describes visits there to Katochi in his autobiography “Me molvi Faber number two” published by Metaichmio). The wounded buildings of the city, left unattended on a mental stretcher. They are thirsty. I had this paradoxical mixed reality feeling as I walked. Cenotaphs of buildings, inelegant offices in overlapping rows, shards of noble Athens, apartment buildings smoked, aged, overcooked into the fabric of a city. Together they coexisted. I needed the shadows to follow me more. And there were many. On the corner of Akadimias and Harilaou Trikoupis, the dingy office building from the 50s always reminds me of griffins in furousias, which at that time had a two-story building with a pediment. And then, barely visible in Faydee, the Hellenic Conservatory. Now in a metal tire. Stories are pouring from within, spilling out into the street, floating in the air…