The usual everyday traffic around the square: shopkeepers, hawkers, potential buyers of various kinds of legality, workers and tourists. her world Omonia it passes there mostly in passing, but occasionally returns. The labor force that used to fill the square in search of day jobs, or the drab buildings on its outskirts that are now empty, are giving way to foreign visitors for whom the market is transforming.

Enterprises that survived sharp alternation of boom and bust seasons area, are currently forced to look for a new roof, as the use of buildings in the area is changing. However, the few family-owned wholesale and retail stores that have recorded Omonia’s commercial history on their books remain unmoved and bring back few people who have traditionally sought out the finer details of their day-to-day life in the city centre.

“20-25 years ago you couldn’t walk here, it was hell.” OUR Kostas Rufos, owner of a travel goods shop since 1927;, describes in “K” the crowd in Lycurgou street and its surroundings as he remembers it as a child growing up in a shop opened by his grandfather. Back when everything was bought in the square. “You took out plastic dolls, handbags and sold them. You took used paper glue and sold it. By the 1990s, the road was in full development. The world you see now existed only at four in the morning,” he says, pointing to a dozen passers-by who will soon disappear towards Aeolus or Athena.

From trade to hospitality

Lykourgou street, almost quiet today, a stone’s throw from the square, came to the fore again when age-old toy store “Damigos” publicized his forced displacement, as the building in which he lived this was supposed to be a hotel. WITH adjoining pilaster of Moschonas (founded in 1926) and a pharmacy on the first floor of the building, eventually managed to find a new home in other areas of the wider part of the center.

“You mentally imagined “what I want” and said that I would go to the center of Athens to find it. You wouldn’t think of going anywhere else,” he tells K. Christos Vassiliou, one of the owners of the Dodoni cheese factory (founded in 1972) which resists frozen puffs and infuses Lycurgus with the smells of fresh food. “Whatever you want; you can want a belt, make shoes, eat something, find something. You would find it here. Now it doesn’t exist. Too many stores have closed, only service providers remain,” he says.

From my shop at the end of Lykourgou street, at the crossroads with Socrates, Kyriakos Lalos seems to agree: “Experience has shown that a store that closes does not open again. Or open something else. As long as this street maintains its commercial value, people in the area are showing interest,” says the shop owner, whose family is a wholesaler. at the same headquarters, since the 1950s..

Face fields

The Omonia area has gone through stages of abandonment over the years. Offices with hundreds of employees and shops of all kinds closed during the crisis, but degradation it started earlier. The owners of the old businesses saw how the square was empty of visitors and passers-by, and increased their reputation in the eyes of the public. offense. “It is preferred by people involved in illegal activities. Now why, don’t ask me ‘talks about Kostas Rufos.

Today, everyone admits that things are better, but Omonia has not managed to completely shed the appearance of margin. “In recent years, with the development of tourism, it is moving to other places, and Omonia is being modernized,” adds the travel goods seller. “If all this had not happened, hotels would never have been built in the center of Athens. Let’s say someone took advantage of the crisis, let’s not say that it was organized,” says Mr. Christ Vasiliou conveying the feeling of many shopkeepers that the degradation is paving the way for forced tourism-branded gentrification.

However, hotels have never been absent from Omonia. According to a study by the Greek Literary and Historical Archives, 37 hotels operated in the area from 1830 until World War II. Among those that were closed in later years are “Alexander the Great” and “Bagion”, two of Chiller’s neoclassical buildings that make up the “Propylaea” on Aiolou Street. They will return to their original use, which was discontinued in the 1970s and 1990s respectively. “The city is changing 100% with tourists in mind. But this is also correct. I mean, we have to do it anyway. We cannot allow the center of the capital to be in this mess,” he says. Christos Vasiliou from “Dodoni”which is easier than others to find a new pool of clients in tourists, compensating for losses from changes in the traditional human geography of its range.

Those who have their own roof can endure

Staying on Lykourgou street in the direction of Socrates, “gun shop” at the junction with Aiolo, which remains open since 1925, adds another touch to commercial stories from the depths of the last century. This is luck, but also the more pragmatic condition that has allowed these businesses to survive: ownership.

The Damigos toy store and the Moschona hat factory could not (due to the incidents of the building they were in) buy their office space. Other store owners, when things didn’t go well, couldn’t handle the high rents for stores in the area, whose owners seem to prefer keeping them closed rather than renting them out at a lower price. Some, however, placed their professional activities in private premises, so even in the gallery, lost in the dim light of the square, enterprises such as “Haris” ouzo And book and stationery shop “Hydrogeios” they can and still retain their vitality.

“Lately, we call the gallery “Hydrogeio,” says Fr. Haris Moskhovos. He runs his father’s coffee shop since 1962 and specializes in grilling octopus, creating a sea breeze in an urban gallery of little architectural interest. On the first floor of the portico with the conditional name “Lycurgus 14-16 – Piraeus 1”editions of “Hydrogeios” belong to his two sons. Thanasis Marutawho founded the business in 1973. But in the basement, Thanasis Marutas, 72, still runs the Hydrogei wholesale store with his wife, Dionysios. “I was lucky – misfortune – whatever one may say – in 1964 to come here to the Lodge. It was full of people. Think about it, it was a time when even here, in the basements, we paid for air to get a store, ”he tells K.

“Air” was a commission given to anyone who rented out a store, which was hard to come by at the time. In the gallery of Lykourgou Street today everything is closed and abandoned. Anything fresh lettering some shop windows testify to its transformation into Movie set. Some of the filming of the films “Happiness” and “Ascent” – biographies of the ancient and modern heroes of Athens – took place here. Thanasis Marautas, who started out as an itinerant seller of stationery, stationery and fairy tales, lived in slot machine great glory until the 1990s: “There used to be 52 stores here in the basement,” he says. “There were 104 people with androgynes alone. Well, won’t they have one employee? Other 52. Wouldn’t every store have a couple of customers a day?… They were very busy! But unfortunately, I don’t know why the gallery was downgraded,” he says as if he knows.

Man holding the globe

How long about Thanasis Marautas he packs images of saints and talks about past times, in the gallery he shares a piece of the past of the city. Hidden at the end of it, he says, is an Omoniya power line passage that some contractor closed to build a small shop. He points in the opposite direction, at the dark and dirty shops where the clerk once worked for his own glory. Nikos Kemtzis. Known for killing three at the “Fairy of Athens” center on the occasion of an order, Kemtzis returns to the conversations of old people in the neighborhood with sympathy and tenderness for the violence he received even in this gallery from the repressive tools of his time.

People from all walks of life are entangled in Omonia and its dungeons. Thanasis Marautas recalls with emotion this vanishing world and probably feels that of those who represent it, he is the oldest. And maybe that’s why he is not afraid of changing the city center. As an example, he cites Frankfurt, which he came to know by visiting his trade fair for 36 years, visiting the small and cheap shops of his simple world. “When we entered the EEC and everyone told me: “Trusts will come to close your store, I was a little worried,” he recalls. “But when I went to Frankfurt again last year — Germany joined the EEC long before us — and I saw that the stores I knew were still there, I said: ‘What nonsense, they tell me that the trusts are going close me.” ? And I was not afraid at all and plucked up courage. Here is my bag, I know my business,” he says. “That’s how I started, in a kiosk, in a store, in a bookstore, taking out change. Same thing now. If we are shut down, I will do the same.”

So far, no one has succeeded in shutting down Thanasis Maruta’s business. In a song written for himThe lyrics of Christos Kanellopoulos describe the desert through the presence of a pushy stationer. “On his shoulders in this deserted dungeon / the man you see holds the Earth.” Like the other Atlas, it holds from the bowels of Omonia the micro-commercial status of the square, which no tourist will remember.