One of the most pleasant and majestic streets of the city of Athens, September 3rd could also be perceived as a boulevard, if it did not have such a unifying element of residential buildings and small shops that held the neighborhood together. I like to think of the parallel avenues, Patision, September 3rd, Aristotle, Acharnon, as four levels of Greek urbanism. Further Mavrommation and Drosopoulos, a complex of depth and beauty.

I was walking around Victoria in the direction of one of the pretty tenements on Averoff Street, just below September 3rd. I knew that at every step and at every hook of sight on facades, balconies and porches I would meet those who would call me in the cavity of memory, in the grooves of the inner homeland, invisible and scattered like ribbons of steam. This homeland was synonymous with growing up, personal and collective. The sooty facades of 1955-60 reminded me of stills from a film with Vasilis Logothedis and Ilya Livikov, but personally they reminded me of now forgotten magazine pages and meetings in the cinema during the day. A little later, from the balcony of the penthouse of a well-maintained 60-year-old apartment building, I looked across Patisia towards the Polytechnic University. I have walked in those ancient Athenian lairs, in Juliana and Epirus, on the altars of medieval rise.

The Rue Averoff I was on reminds me of the library of an interwar apartment, with leather-covered books and table lamps lit, even when the light from outside flooded the street. There, in the half-days of conversations and exchanges of spiritual hardships that have flown in time, the smell of an Athenian tenement house returns, as if yesterday, the coolness in the stairwell in summer, with a mixture of cooked food and a scratched pencil, ready to fill notebooks for copying and spelling.

When I walked on September 3, again seeing the entrances of apartment buildings, as if I were seeing them for the first time (as in rooms 43, 45, 61, 69, 88, 90 and many others), I felt this special microclimate. I was trying to convey to a Philhellene fellow traveler the climate of urban renaissance in the area between 1910 and 1970, and I think that this pervasive aura that we felt crystallized in the few mansions that lived next to the atmospheric tenements helped a lot. On Iulianu Street there is a beautiful old tenement house at number 26, the work of Vassilis Cagris, but a little further, at Iulianu Street 32, a two-story noble residence from the interwar period reminds those who want to remember or know that this area is the capital of the architectural transition from classicism to modernism. This once fashion house of interwar innovation was one of the suggestions. And also a large mansion at number 66 dated September 3, which I saw closed and abandoned. Outstanding stylistic elements from the period 1925-1932 were exhibited behind the acacia bushes.

This treasure trove of urban memory combines contemporary Athens experience with visions for the future. At the corner of Politehnou and September 3rd, the former Foteinos Clinic, where many years later Dimitris Papaioannou’s Soil Group invited the world to a mystical sensory experience, rises like a many-leafed flower. Further on, on Polytechnicou Street, the ruins of the Athenian Bauhaus relics and the eclectic forms of the two-story relics represented a ritual of emotions. The step is slow, the gaze is tense.