To begin with, Athens was never meant to be the capital of Greece at all, having ceased to be a settlement of any importance for several centuries. By the time of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, it had been reduced to a ramshackle village of around 4,000 inhabitants. Consequently, the Greek revolutionaries had selected the busy port town of Nafplio to be the capital of their new state.
But the Western powers, such as France and Britain, who had provided financial and military support to Greece during the war, insisted on Athens as the capital. Motivated by a romanticised idealism of ancient Greece, they sent a team of architects to Athens with the goal of reviving the classical Greek architectural model. The most notable of these were Danish architect Theophil Hansen, Saxon Ernst Ziller and Greek Stamatis Kleanthis.
In the ensuing decades, Athens was largely stripped of its Ottoman, Frankish and even Byzantine trappings. The meandering streets were replaced by orthogonal grids, while existing buildings were torn down and replaced by grand, Neoclassical edifices intended to express the continuity of ancient Athens in architectural form.
The vivid fantasy that the west had imposed on Athens bore little relation to the Greece of the 19th Century. However, the Greeks gradually came to adopt it as their own. Long after the foreign architects had returned home, they continued to build themselves Neoclassical houses, often adding unique structural and stylistic elements. The result was a uniquely ‘Greek’ style of Neoclassicism that was noticeably different from elsewhere in Europe.
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In the first half of the 20th Century, Greece was hit by three successive catastrophes. The first was the Greek-Turkish population exchange (1922-23) that saw 1.5 million Greek refugees leave Turkey and settle in Greece. Roughly a quarter were settled in Athens, raising the population of the city from 200,000 to more than 500,000 in a few months. Then, the Axis Occupation of Greece (1941-45) saw the almost total destruction of Greece’s industry, agriculture and infrastructure, while the ensuing Greek Civil War (1946-49) left the country bitterly divided along political, social and economic lines. By the time the civil war was over, Greece was in very bad shape.
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That radical solution came not from above, but from below; from a unique system known as antiparochi. Antiparochi – which has no exact translation in English but can roughly be defined as ‘mutual exchange’ – would become the defining feature of Athens’ urban landscape. To put it simply, antiparochi is why Athens looks like Athens.
Here’s how it worked: a contractor would approach the owner of a house and offer him a deal. He would knock down his house, and build a block of flats in its place. In return, the homeowner would be given a certain number of flats (usually two or three), while the contractor would then make his money by selling the remaining flats to Greeks who were seeking accommodation. Generally, no money was exchanged and no contracts were signed.
What’s so incredible about antiparochi is that it emerged spontaneously out of the housing crisis in Athens. “There was no specific law which told people ‘OK now you have the right to collaborate and build whatever you like’. It was the people themselves that found out this possibility,” says Panos Dragonas, professor of Architecture at the University of Patras.
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In short, everybody was making money, everybody was getting homes and everybody was, theoretically, able to escape the grinding poverty of the countryside, and start a new life in the city. The luxury of preserving Neoclassical architecture simply never entered into the equation.
A further 680,000 internal migrants arrived in Athens during the 1960s, with the city’s population reaching 2 million by the mid-1970s. By this point, Neoclassical Athens had almost entirely vanished. In its place, a sea of ugly, low-rise concrete apartment blocks stretching as far as the eye could see.
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