I happened to re-read the book by Nikos Dimos “From Michael Voda to Syros”, published by Nefeli, published in 1994, many years later. And I say it happened because the look sometimes becomes autonomous and focuses on the spines of books that seem to be sleeping in the land of the read and forgotten. But then memories from the childhood, adolescence and youth of Nikos Dimos again flooded in to awaken the need to reunite.

I mentally again passed under the green canopy formed by acacias in Mikhailovskoye water, as an arch for his once urban world, the one who lived in the front houses of 1910 and 1920 or in modern ones built after the 1930s, as one who lived in the years occupation, and then the family of Nikos Dimos. At number 143, he says, the house stood out among the neoclassical ones, which since then, almost one by one, have fallen and become tenement houses.

The house is rented, but the “house”, if not as charming as the old three-story and two-story mansions that housed the old world, the one that gradually retired until 1960. In this house, on the first floor, Nikos lived as a child Municipality, from 1939 to 1947, at 143 Mikhail Voda, in a house that still stands, rather “ugly”, as he writes, concrete, with “gray- brown artificial” facade.

It’s hard to imagine that old world, urban, still “Victorian” mores, with fathers who often wanted you to speak to them in the plural, with hypochondriacal and overprotective mothers, with slightly flighty aunts. , with revelers uncles, with ubiquitous neighbors.

But there were also those alcoves of the viscounts, in the mansions that stood at the parades of Michael Voda or Acharnon, today a figment of the imagination, swept along with the traces of their people, with the outlines of frames on the walls, with uncomfortable dining rooms and always cold bedrooms in winter.

But there, in these niches of the old city life, as in the mansion on Parasiou Street (the continuation of Derynia below Acharnon), a world with a different system of values ​​still breathed. Nikos Dimos recalls Madame Vivier, “an elderly plump woman with white to indigo hair,” who gave him private French lessons. Grammar was never a strong attraction in these courses, more so than a large library “which covered entire rooms like a tapestry.” On Parasiou Street, below Acharnon, shortly after the war.

This world, which was swept away like everything in the world, still radiates the vapors of its existence through testimonies and memories. It was a more solid world, maybe more strict, maybe more hypocritical, but with no small imprint. Vapors of another world still hover on Mikhail Vody Street.