I am more and more drawn to the seemingly ordinary aspects of Athens. As well as some streets of Ampelokipi or other densely populated areas. In places where there are no monuments and other attractions, according to the guides, one can understand the qualities of the city, which require a warm, emotional attitude to history and people. Particularly in Ampelokipi, where entire neighborhoods were completely rebuilt between 1958 and 1980, the cycles of time gave the streets a patina that unexpectedly enveloped me and which I greeted with gratitude. In Ampelokipi, the 20th century… I was walking down Sevastoupoleos Street. Great road, perhaps underrated. The sun always caresses it from one side, it is a wide road, it breathes. I wanted to see up close the house that I had only glimpsed. At number 68, a one-story individual house, probably built shortly after the war, has been preserved. This is cubism with a special grace. Two windows all face the street, with a cornice, but the front door is impressive. This refers to the entrance to a large mansion. It is wrought and intricate, with an Art Deco flavor. It may be a pre-war building, but the house looks like it was in the 1950s. I watched the game. There was something majestic and mysterious about it, like an entrance to a world accessible to the few. This house was closed, and I hoped to myself that it would not be demolished. The area changed dramatically after 1960. The scientist Ampelokipi, Nikos Paradeisis, left us in his invaluable books a complete human geography of streets, houses, temples, hospitals, squares. I was more moved by the people he saved, the old-timers of the interwar single-family houses, most of which were demolished after the war.

But as I walked along the streets of Arcadia, Ilidos, Hestias, Messinia, Daskalaki, I got a clearer feeling that the housing stock around me had value, it had an atmosphere, it had an imprint of the march of people through time who left after the trace of the route. I saw it scattered, crystallized in the windows and balcony doors, in the entrances of the 60s, in the three-story buildings of the 50s, in scattered interwar houses. Unexpectedly, I came across a well in the courtyard of an abandoned house at the end of the block, at 27 Messinias Street. Number 26 is a beautiful house from the 1930s, with an Art Deco door, but also closed, with an inscription reminiscent of: “Orpheus Conservatory” . Messinia and Sevastopoleos, a small apartment building from the early 50s reminds us of the scale of the area 70 years ago. Further down, Ilidos 9 and Sevastoupoleos, the pride of the area, an apartment building with covered balconies from 1955 designed by the architect Per. N. Georgakopoulos. But besides the fact that the eye easily highlights, there is a scattering of beauty, visible by choice. However, on Arcadia Street, on the corner of the beautiful Daskalaki Street, stands – paradoxically – a two-story house from the 1920s that everyone will like. It is uninhabited. And on the other corner with Daskalaki stood such a house, perhaps even more beautiful. What has been preserved stands apart, bearing equipment that is disproportionate to the cubic symbolism. The gaze fixes on it, it fixes it as an image…