Between the peaceful streets of Papagos and the many cul-de-sacs leading to gardens and gates, I discovered that special suburban atmosphere that was cultivated as an urban heritage around 1960, a little earlier, a little later. Those who have experience in Papagu, as well as in other suburbs, will understand me. There is an emotional depth, in the understanding of the great Athens, which affects many generations, already from the 30s and still reaches. The suburbs are mythologized in the imagination and in the land of memories.

I would be the last to speak of the suburb of Papagos, but I was completely open to accepting this invisible heritage in secret osmosis with its air. But I felt it at every step, near the house of Alekos Fazianos on Bizaniou Street, which drew me to a beautiful suburb. Narrow semi-circular orbits, full of green mansions and modernist tenements, opened onto large streets full of light and sky.

With an indefinite craving that time had given up, I had a desire to find these remnants of a once happy life on the streets of Papagos. Not in order, of course, to highlight something sad, but in order to feel the cyclical nature of time and the inevitability of change. I was drawn to that all-pervading faith in life that I encountered at every step. And abandoned houses, lost among the well-groomed greenery and bourgeois balconies, were an exception, but a dramatic, theatrical exception, full of tension and poetry.

It was also that extraordinary contradiction that flamboyant modernism offers you. This modernism of the Athenian suburbs, conceived as an affirmation of a fast-paced life open to everything that might suggest tomorrow, exudes a knot of emotions.

Modernism, which has become history, is a state experienced by the past decades. But in our years, which undoubtedly bear the shadow of the teaching of our experience, the historicity of this modernism gives rise to thoughts about our own life, once directed towards the future.

The time will come when the brilliance of the middle class of the Athenian suburbs, because it was there in those “golden” 30 years (1950-1980s) that what I call vibrant modernism flourished, will be studied both as an aesthetic phenomenon and as a phenomenon. a phenomenon that explains relationships, clothing, reading, travel, and family experiences. This is the whole world.

And this world I worshiped in front of the closed mansions of Papagos, some of which will eventually become luxurious apartments. I liked the aura of these houses, some of them one-story, with stairs and verandahs around the perimeter in large gardens, once planted with lawns and garden arbors. I said goodbye to this urban heritage. There I saw the shadows, there I saw the call coming from afar.

The urban culture of the middle-class Athenian suburbs is a chapter with many clues to the interpretation of Athens itself. It affects all of us in one way or another, directly or indirectly. In Papagu, photographic records of its post-war heyday bring these houses to our minds as a common source of references and memories.