The interwar period in Athens and Piraeus can take you deep into the urban hinterland. In the understanding of the city. TO Nightingale I met those fragments of the first cycles of his urban life, from the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, when all the districts of Western Attica were gradually integrated into the life of the capital. The inestimable richness of this urban folk culture has left some traces…

On the residential streets around Agios Georgios in Korydallos, you see a different city. Calm and clear, it was like meeting something familiar and reassuring. With pages of past lives. There, on the streets around, Korai, Averof, Asklipion, Metsovo, Pontos, everyday life gives a measure. Meanwhile, a few preserved old houses answer questions about the miracle that is called the urban renaissance of the interwar period. And faith in expectation.

In areas such as Korydallos, relatively far from the center of Athens (but brought closer by the metro), you can see pre-war houses wedged between apartment buildings or three-story houses. And what impressed me was the little gardens in some of the old houses, the gardens are as touching as the little gardens, not the usual courtyards.

At the corner of Pontos and Asklepiou streets, there is a notice board about the new building. However, there is still preserved the front door leading to the secret garden. An off-white neoclassical wooden front door stands on the seafront. From the opening you can see the hall with doors to the rooms. The same view of an abandoned and half-closed garden and the same feeling of a forgotten paradise at another stop on the route, on Malagardi street near Coray… Yards, gardeners, birds, cats, orange trees, eucalyptus trees, closed windows…

All around, the preserved old houses carry the culture that is already buried in the boxes of memory, has faded and largely depreciated. The houses of Korydallos that I saw in this area of ​​Agios Georgios, popular and urban, turned out to be authentic and characteristic of the lifestyle and spirit of coexistence. Little remains, scattered islands of urban civilization that has been swept away.

Many have memories and experiences of the old days when Korydallos was a small town, a suburb, a settlement with its own special rules, with its own cinemas and parishes, with sports and unions, bakeries and schools, with everything that makes up the identity of the place. Walking through the narrow streets, I stopped at these footprints, the doors of the Middle Ages, the exquisite works of carpentry and metal work, in the stonework, in the battlements, in the door windows of touching craftsmanship. These are the few that remain.

But there is an atmosphere. I always mentally compose fragments of the period of the 1920-1940s that I see in quarters and districts, and each time the conviction grows stronger that within the city life at our feet there is a rare treasure of folk culture.

Korydallos, like neighboring Nicaea (it’s an “island” and not a district, as an old resident told me), has a charmingly authentic inventory that quickly disappears. Just as we have lost popular neoclassicism, we are losing before our eyes in all areas what the interwar period left us in the vicinity of Athens and Piraeus.