Doors

Piraeus, judging by a couple of old sepia coloured photos hanging in our stairwell, used to be a town of single storey housing and villas; houses (even the plain ones) with ornate doors and window-shutters with horizontal slats. Even today there are big houses with red tiles peeking over the edge of the roof and some of the more elaborate ones have ornate gutterings and curly bits crowning the roof corners.

Bring a port town Piraeus took a bit of a pasting during the second world war (by both sides – there are no heroes in the destruction of homes).  The civil war didn’t help either and further destruction was wrought before things started to get better.

Getting better is a subjective concept.  The rebuild was not the restoration of grand old villas, it was (not unlike many key European cities targeted for rapid rebuild after the destruction of war) a bit soul-less by comparison; but it housed people.  And it housed them in homes with electricity, running water, and connection to sewage infrastructure (among other things).

1970’s, we are told, saw a huge influx of people moving to Athens and Piraeus from islands all about Greece.  Our neighbours speak to us of family on islands in every corner of Greece.  They were encouraged to come and the government (whether local or national) responded to their housing needs by incentivizing owners of old houses in places like Piraeus to give those old houses up for redevelopment into apartments in return for apartment accommodation in the new development.

It took a few decades of this process before a rising sentiment that the city was losing its architectural heritage gathered enough potency to put a stop to the redevelopment of old villas, and those that remained got slapped with what in English I guess we would call a ‘preservation order’.

Pendulums swing, and sometimes too far before they settle on a suitable balance.  Old villas, roofs caved in, floors rotted away, shutters flaking, doors chained and padlocked shut, flaking their grandeur with their paint and crumbing plaster, some with trees growing straight up through the middle – sit forlorn and unloved.  Families can’t afford to restore them, can’t sell them, can’t modernize them, and few wish to continue to live with all the inconvenience of ‘old’. 

So Piraeus continues to lose it built heritage.

The world has moved on. We all deserve to live in warm, dry, well insulated, well ventilated, easy to clean homes – if we want to.  Some of us prefer the style of the ‘old’ and would seek to combine ways of modernizing ‘sympathetically’ within the framework of something from an earlier age.

This isn’t a campaign just a tale related to us by our friendly taxi driver, and backed up by various friends, one or two of whom have connections to old family homes, abandoned, locked-up and crumbling, for combinations of the reasons described above.

There is a small street very close to where we live that appears largely to have been by-passed by the redevelopment phase and went straight to its own kind of lock-down. There are one or two ‘fancy’ houses.  About half appear to be still lived in, and most are fairly plain unadorned 1 or 2 storied structures with concrete or plastered front walls, no balconies, and blind windows.

We deviated along it this morning on the way to work (to avoid a dog).  

It’s the doors that catch your eye:

 

Sorry about this one - I'll make her photograph it again

And just for completeness - our modern, plastic door: