What was it like walking around Gazochori many years ago? Between the Technopolis and the Benaki Museum on Piraeus Street, the old neighborhoods around Gazi and around Agios Vassilios on the roof, on the axis of Konstantinoupoleos Street and Ieras Odou, have gained new visibility over the past decades.

I have been methodically and reverently observing the changes since the 90s, when the first restaurants opened in Gazi. Small cubic houses with or without tiles, with narrow courtyards and scattered fruit trees, side by side with workshops and wastelands, and after 2000 with the first apartment buildings, the aesthetics of which went hand in hand with the post-industrial minimalism of the new urban mass culture. It all seems so far away for many years…

I see that the houses in Rufa and Gazi are mostly dilapidated. Some, a few, have been refurbished. Most of them are closed ruins and look like open excavations of urban archaeology. It is not unreasonably felt that the society that built these houses 100 and 120 years ago has evaporated, evaporated, or at least its later offshoots have long since merged into the nameless canvas of the sprawling city. A large map of genealogies and personal travels, with traces of the roads along which so many Greeks as refugees, workers, townspeople, small traders, artisans, day laborers, have walked, is now concentrated in these walks through the streets of these oldest districts.

I have seen the houses I have photographed melting alive, losing masonry and plaster, with a crumbling roof and a looted outer door, and themselves witnessing a shocking process of material decay, like a body sleeping in eternal sleep. There is such a house on Ikarion Street, little by little it fades into oblivion, like others that suddenly become patches of land, like the corner of Megalos Vassiliou and Dialeon. On Gefireon Street, 27, a medieval gatehouse has been preserved, as a fragment of a house, and further along the same street, at number 7, a half-erased commercial inscription can be seen, like a fragment of urban folklore. This is a hike through landscapes reminiscent of centums. Below, little Stratonikis, near the triangular square, enumerates, as if in a litany of the resurrected, his own collection of the ruins of evaporated life. Unexpected clearings from demolitions or collapses lead the eye to a dramatic set, from blurry floating chambers and battered roofs that could have been set design for Mama Courage.

The ruins of Rufa and Gazios are different from the ruins of Kerameikos and Metaxourgiou. They are drawn from a deep process associated with the whole culture of the working class and craftsmanship, the power of manual labor and everyday work. And surprisingly, this happened next to urban housing and household islands. The economy in the Athens quarter is another cultural quality that eludes time.

The ruins at Rufa and Ghazi look like a cemetery of houses burned, abandoned, swept away over the course of a century.