The whole world is in a rush. The blocks between the Polytechnic Institute and Kaningos Square, with buildings from the entire 20th century, also cover the end of Solonos Street. It is a dense and incomprehensible web, ancient and with sporadic traces of the 19th century, a multi-wave and contradictory web, with a deep and well-woven stratigraphy of memory. Abandoned and neglected buildings side by side with pages of architectural history. Shops, signs, air conditioners. But also a special atmosphere, distinctly Athenian.

I got to Solomou Street, since this street starts from Exarcheion Square and reaches Marni Street. Solomou Street is noteworthy as it used to be a middle class residential street, with surrounding buildings said in the 1900s and synchronized apartments said in the 1930s.

I stopped at the corner of Solomonovaya 31 and Georgievskaya to look around the corner of a pre-war apartment building. I often wonder if these intersections in historical time will work for future generations. Today, they retain their meaning, at least for everyone who grew up with the word “war” meaning World War II. Therefore, in previous years, we called these tenement houses of the 1930s “pre-war”, we did not talk about modernism, it was something so new historically. Part of everyday life.

I was touched by the line of this apartment building, a study of 1936, its elegance, its proportions. There were others around who are now 85 and 90 years old, everything is fine, although they are old. However, there was something special about this apartment building on the corner of Solomon and George Streets. I imagine it newly built as a future-proof, among two-story neoclassical buildings of 1890-1910, with tiled roofs, and further down other modern tenements with elements of art deco and Bauhaus, in the spirit of pre-war modernism.

In Solomou, if you walk around, you will see many buildings. Pre-war apartment buildings, as in rooms 27 (with an atmospheric marquee on the ground floor), 48 downstairs and 18 upstairs. The whole world, revived even from fragments or small areas. The atmosphere is getting thicker.

But on the misunderstood Solonos Street, at its end towards the Botasi bend, on the border of Naples and Exarchia and in the surrounding streets, a row of interwar buildings testifies to how much the area was in demand for the upper middle class in the 1930s. Themistokleous and Koletti, a narrow tenement building from 1937 At Solonos 142, the famous residential building of Kyprianos Biri, also built in 1937. How modern it still looks today… At Solonos 120 and Emm Benaki, a residential building with portholes, the work of Alexandros Metaksas, 1934 . And how many more, small or large, fans of urban taste…

Near the building at 136 Solonos I stood for a minute. You won’t see anything special. This building was built around 1980. Faceless and visibly dilapidated. His appearance always reminds me of an article by Eleni Vlahos in Kathimerini, late 70s. It depicted an abandoned, then exquisitely harmonious, large neoclassical house that existed in this exact location. It was ready for demolition, Solonos 136. There were garbage cans ahead. What about the title? “A beautiful Athenian door”… How many stories can be told by streets like Solonos or Solomou, streets steeped in urban history that should gradually arouse interest. Move…