The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments

The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
bloomberg.com

It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille without its top. That's the effect of all those balconies and floors stacked on top of each other in houses stuck next to each other, 6 to a building square.

In the summer, all this concrete makes the heat of an already pretty hot place unberable. At the same time, the city is at its best in the height of summer, the 15th of August (δεκαπενταύγουστος, dekapentavgoustos), when most Athenians take their holidays to coincide with the national holiday of the Dormition of Mary (Jesus' mother) by the Orthodox calendar. Those days, the bustling life described in the article disappears and the streets are deserted of people and cars both, so much so that when I found myself in Athens on the dekapentavgoustos, I would casually walk in the middle of the largest streets of the city, without fear of being run over.

But most of the year, Athens is an ugly, unbearable shithole. I appreciate what the article says, about the constant, but not overwhelming, presence of people, about the constant activity that makes the city look alive, etc. And the summer evenings are magickal. But it's also a city of grey concrete covered in a yellow-brown soup of smog, where there is never a quiet place that the noise of cars stuck in kilomter-long traffic jams or the Ilektrikos (the overground metro) doesn't reach, where trash bins overflow (even more when the binmen are on strike) where the air smells of burned fuel and dust, where black dust covers every surface inside a home unless one dusts and brooms and slops every single day.

So, I miss it, yeah :) But it's an awful place to live and nothing makes it more obvious than travelling a bit around Europe and seeing the cities and towns of the Europeans, most of whom have preserved their beautiful architecture, like our neoclassica, instead of replacing it with boxy concrete monstrosities. When I was growing up in Athens, I thought everyone, in all the world, lived in polykatoikies. Turns out, they don't.