ancient cities

48 Athens, Greece
life to archaeological excavations and the plundering
of Hellas’s past. The Acropolis remained a
contested monument of collective memory with
unceasing conflicts over “property” and appropriation.
The Parthenon marbles—all pediments,
friezes, metopes, and even more—were smuggled
to England in 1805 by Lord Elgin and are now
standing at the British Museum.
Conspicuous neoclassical monuments and civic
architecture in the midst of unpaved streets and
rudimentary infrastructure revealed the contradictions
of urban development. The monumentalization
of Athens and the revival of the Olympic
Games in 1896 came up three years after the
national bankruptcy in 1893 and just before a
humiliating defeat in 1897 by the Ottoman Empire.
As in other nineteenth-century cities, pomp and
monumentalization in Athens in the midst of
decline counteracted it on the symbolic level.
Interwar Athens
Interwar Athens during the 1920s and the 1930s
became a prototype of Mediterranean rapid
urbanization after the arrival of refugees from
Asia Minor in 1922, and since then it has been
restructured to a major agglomeration and a
typical Mediterranean metropolitan center growing
by urbanization without industrialization.
Informal work and informal housing, afthereta,
built on the urban periphery by migrants and the
poor on land where it was illegal to build, became
one of the major issues (if not the dominant one)
in public policy (non)responses and urban social
movements. From 1922 until the 1970s, urban
poverty went in parallel with precarious owneroccupation
in illegal self-built shacks, which
improved as the family income grew. These were
finally controlled by the dictatorial government
(1967–1974) by force (demolitions) and consent
(legalizations). Meanwhile, it had solved the
housing problem for many internal migrants,
workers, and the poor.
First the refugee arrival and then rural–urban
migrants to Athens have established the basic axes
of spatial segregation since the 1920s: Inside/
outside the official city plan was a duality also
echoed in inner city/outskirts, but also east/west of
the agglomeration, concentrating middle/working
classes, respectively. Spontaneous urban development
and social segregation created a cityscape antithetical
to the Anglo-American one, that is, an
inverse-Burgess model. Already in the 1920s a
southwest–northeast axis emerged in the Athens
agglomeration, defining the contrast between the
elegant architecture of bourgeois buildings proliferating
around the center and the sector to the
northeast, on the one hand, and the shacks and
lack of adequate urban infrastructure, especially
along the western ring of the city, on the other.
A central feature of the mode of housing production
in bourgeois and popular suburbs was
“self-building” (aftostegasi), under the responsibility
and the supervision of each family. The inner
city, by contrast, was built to be very compact by
middle- and upper-class land plot owners and
entrepreneurs in a piecemeal manner: Multistory
apartment buildings, polykatoikies, were produced
by a system of exchange arrangements (antiparochi)
on land provided by the landowning family in
exchange for some flats. The overheated construction
sector and speculation on land demolished
pieces of neoclassical architecture and urban heritage
and erased several layers of urban history.
Only the “Athenian trilogy” stood in the center,
and of course the sacred rock of the Acropolis
remained a focal point for the city in the midst of
increasing urban densities.
In 1933 Athens became the cradle of modernism,
hosting the pioneers of modernity in architecture
and town planning, which was discursively
established with the Congrès International
d’Architecture Moderne ([CIAM]; International
Congress of Modern Architecture) manifesto: The
Charter of Athens, written by Le Corbusier and his
colleagues, was drafted during the CIAM conference
in Athens. Modern architects also admired the
Acropolis and the archaeological sites. These were
landscaped after the war and remained the object
of clashing narratives and power conflicts over
property and appropriation, as in the nineteenth
century. The Acropolis has been as much a
European, or rather global, construction as a Greek
monument, and it became the symbol of appropriation
and conquest of the city itself. The
Germans flew the Swastika flag on the Acropolis
when they occupied Athens, and the same flag was
taken down and destroyed in a notorious act of
resistance by Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas
on May 31, 1941.