Listening to a story about a classmate who lived many years ago in an old house on Trypodon Street, at some point I found myself at his doorstep. It was a cinematic scene, for while I felt footsteps coming up and down the outside stairs from the courtyard to the house, the ruins were in front of me, closed and abandoned. There was silence. Air blew through the holes, the sun gilding the peeling ocher. Such is the fate of many houses in which there were happy moments. But there, on Tripodon Street, the oldest street in Athens, in Plaka, the old house seemed to sink into its own silence.

I have heard this simple story since the days when the Theater of Dionysus was open and accessible even for children’s games and fuss. For those who grew up “on the city outskirts of Plaka, on its banks towards Amalia”, the Gates of Hadrian and the Pillars of Olympian Zeus were part of their daily lives. But they also had the streets of Plaka, because they were “inland areas, living space.” The embrace of the Acropolis was an eternal nurturer, Ioanna Tsatsu also writes when she talks about the ancestral home of the Seferiadids on Kidafinaion Street, built after 1930.

But in Trypodon Street, at the monument to Lysicrates, with invisible, like ribbons in the wind, memories of Lord Byron and the Capuchins, in the shadow of those ruins where shops were located next to neoclassical houses and Byzantine churches, one feels the antiquity of experience. . It stretches back to primordial time, but somewhere one wants to stand in this influx of chaotic emptiness. The appearance of the houses, so Athenian that they have stood there since the time of Otho, and at least until 1900, is like the unsalted rocks of the Zeidor spring.

There are memories of sketches, photographs, half-words and thousands of stories told, but nothing can compare with the memory that goes back to childhood and adolescence. “We had friends and classmates all over the Plaka area, in which at that time a whole part of Greek society lived together in direct contact and communication,” an old and respected Athenian writes to me. Trypodon Street stands out among his stories. “Since then, I remember with special emotion this house on Trypodon Street, where my brother’s classmate lived in an excellent exemplary elementary school on Kallisperi Street, a house we often went to.” I photographed him as he is today. It is located opposite the Hellenic Company building. “It was a fine example of a screen era townhouse, around 1850 I think. The entrance from the street was into a good paved courtyard, from where a wooden staircase led to a bright, wide, glazed vestibule, into which the rooms opened, from the living room overlooking the Tripodon, where there was a balcony. But the rest of the residence functioned in the light and tranquility of the courtyard.” I watch him and see his calm majesty. Nearby, at number 27, a high wall half hides the neighboring old house with a loggia. This is one of those “ancient” semi-open houses that Aris Konstantinides included in his classic work Old Athenian Houses (1950).

But the neoclassical two-story building at number 25 is tall, albeit shabby. According to an old Athenian, this house stood until the 80s. “Since then it has fallen into disrepair, and now I’m watching it gradually fall into disrepair. Soon it will probably start to fall apart.”