At a very close distance from Syngrou Avenue, at the height of Fix and EMST, the small streets of Kukaki seem to take on a life of their own. I often stand in a burnt-out house on Falirou and Tousa Botsari Street, an elegant piece of art that looks like a ransacked palace, but everything around has a narrative power. The stories of the city… The inhabitants of Athens, who live again thanks to what was left in the newspapers of the time, in classified ads, on social networks and in police reports, have left their shadows on the facades that we pass by. .

Behind closed doors, often looted today, there were dramas and suicide attempts (romantic reasons, they wrote), engagements were announced, relatives and friends were treated to celebrations and anniversaries, the dead were kept awake. Athens is like a small city.

On Odyssea Androutsou Street, three silent doors in a row at 19 and 21 streets seem to carry a heavy weight. Are these forgotten stories or the indifferent glances that pass them by? The double gray doors of the semi-detached house at number 19 and the lone red door at number 21 are like the petrified daughters of Athens, unblemished but present. They have the tombstone charm of headstones for city boys and girls who left early, and remain desirable sculptures surrounded by angels and marble ivy. These doors of Athens are 100 years old. Not very old, if you look at them in the perspective of time and a number of generations, but ancient, ancient, if you look at them through the illusory mirror of the 21st century.

I am compelled to converse with what they bring and what they testify to. Athens, with her gifts scattered over thresholds, terraces, kennels and window sills, like withered wild flowers, short-lived, but surprisingly with a sense of timeless sadness and broken beauty. Will the day come when the door, so carved by master carpenters, so favored by blacksmiths, will cause such awe that its destruction will be like sacrilege, blasphemy?

We are talking about a very wide and rich deposit, a mine of the folk culture of the homeless. Can we call it the original urban culture? Should we talk about bourgeois property owners, about the petty bourgeoisie who believed in tomorrow, about Athenian craftsmanship, about the long and complex chain of knowledge, tradition and technology that made material poetry and poetry a necessity?

Should all this be discarded and rejected from the scale of values ​​of our time? In the future, there may be generations appreciating the material, urban culture of the 20th century, when Athens came of age, when they created their social mix and gave a new interpretation to Athenianism itself. Yes, a neologism, emotionally fertilized, giving weight to the spirit of the word. The Odyssea Androutsou door is one of many. But each of these doors is a unit, a value in itself, a mosaic of an urban tapestry, a development like a gigantic fresco.

The red door is imprinted in memory with a glance. Even after she is gone, she will be there, a part of who she was, who she is, and who she will be. City transformation.