How many 19th century houses are left in Athens 2023? Apparently, they are very few, and almost all of them are concentrated in old Athens, in the most ancient regions around the Acropolis and the Ancient Agora. What dwellings have remained from the 19th century in newer areas are now few and most often unrecognizable due to wear and tear or interventions. If we could walk along the same streets in 1960, we would see many houses built in 1870 or 1890, and these would be city houses and people’s houses, two-story or one-story. Yards would exist in everything, even if they were invisible from the street. That is why I stand with excitement in front of what is clearly inherited from the 19th century even in Plaka, where many old houses have been reshaped with new use or have undergone additions and not always perfect restoration.

The ruins are more authentic. He doesn’t betray you. Its scale, color, building materials are irrefutable witnesses. You can stand in front of such a house and feel its authenticity, feel the poetry of its material. One of these dilapidated houses is a two-storey house on the corner of Lysikratus and Aishinos streets, a monument of simplicity and nobility. It is in a very bad condition, perhaps sooner or later it will be restored. Its corner location, in close proximity to Hadrian’s Gate and the monument to Lysicrates, gives it extra grace, and it’s really amazing how so many ruins still survive on the Plaka. But even so, this house is a witness to old Athens in its purest and authentic form. On Lysikratus Street, opposite the sidewalk, there is a tall two-story mansion with a marble slab on which the year of construction “1881” is indicated. It is one of the few examples from the 19th century in the area where new houses were built between 1900-1940, as well as many new buildings in the post-war tourist period.

The house on the corner of Lysikratous and Aeschinos streets, with its simple neoclassical morphology, toothless row of cornices, Doric pilasters and the oldest original German shutters, is reminiscent of other Athenian houses lost over time. However, it resembles in antiquity and morphology another old house in Plaka, preserved at the corner of Kiristos and Erechtheos streets, also with German shutters, with Corinthian-style pilasters and with a beautiful balcony, simple and Doric, typical of the Othonic period.

And the other day, passing by the house of Napoleon Lapatiotis in Exarchia, at the corner of Oikonomou and Kuntouriotu streets, I saw a dilapidated neoclassical house left in such a state. And when I once again looked around it with my eyes, I saw the same German shutters, crowned with a semicircle of socles, as in the small dilapidated house of Plaka, Aeschines and Lysicrates.

And it is this kinship between Athenian houses that forms these invisible webs, usually webs, one end of which leads you to the other. And you are led to dig into the bowels of the old city, into the mines of memory and into the caves of this timeless reserve.