Seeing another exquisite door from Mesopolemos, at 15 Dimitrakopoulou Street, in Koukaki, my first thought was whether a new person born in the 21st century understands the word Mesopolemos in the same way. And if he nevertheless understands it after explaining the term, he will feel it completely differently than previous generations who lived in their own shoes before and after. After all, post-war Athens grew on the city of the interwar period, and it is those that have survived since then that give us today a touch of urban atmosphere.

In Koukaki, when everything new appears around, the building with all the equipment of early modernism catches the eye. The front door that stopped my step was special and belonged to that attractive Art Deco embossed fan that can be seen in all parts of Athens in a thousand and two variations. The concrete door at 15 Dimitrakopoulou Street (near Petmeza) was the most interesting element of the two-story building, along with the stairwell skylights, which form a glass column of ten rows of skylights. I noticed patterns on the front door. Spirals and asymmetrical geometry, mailbox, canopy and marble steps. Time capsule from 1930s to 2020s. How touching will this aesthetic heritage be in 20, 40, 60 years? Here is the question that stuck in my head. By the middle of our century, there will be 100 years left until the 1950s, and all the filters of interpretation and evaluation will be different. That is why we are in awe of what the imaginative, bold and elegant decade of the 1930s left us, and Athens is full of this aesthetic, echoing so many parameters, social, technological, economic… The variety of motives is enormous. and these doors, both in the tenement houses of the big city and in the provincial houses of the 1920s and 1930s, are a huge mural of design craftsmanship. What a shame to see this ancestral property vandalized, abandoned, abandoned…

In old photographs, Veikou and Dimitrakopoulou, the main streets of Kukaki, form facades with neoclassical houses (many with courtyards or gardens), and some with two- and three-story interwar buildings. In the same way, all the narrow streets gave that compact urban atmosphere of the old districts of Athens, so characteristic, with scale and views consistent with the width of the streets, the climate and the lighting of the place.

This local economy, which combined with craftsmanship, new apartment layouts, the cycles of the seasons, and semi-open living in courtyards, dirt roads and sidewalks, found its way into what remained of the pre-war era. Even the “modern” ones of the 1930s, scattered along the streets and lanes, were born in different conditions, which required renewal and development, but not mass. Massiveness was not yet a necessity.

I was more moved by the relativity of the “new”. The innovations of the 1930s are now an urban archeology, a patina heritage, a landscape of shared references. It would be possible to draw up a complete map of all the patterns on the wrought iron doors of the interwar period, and then we would have a “bible” in our hands.