Delusional Athens
Few ancient cities flaunt, obsess over but also degrade their antiquity like Athens. An Italian traveller sighting it in the seventeenth century, hailed the ancient city clustering around ‘the most beautiful piece of antiquity remaining in the world’, the Acropolis. But by the early 1800s, armies, Western aesthetes and looters fighting over its legend had already reduced its appearance so much that English Poet Lord Byron described it as ‘the most injured, most celebrated of cities’.
Today, tonnes of concrete cover most of the city Byron witnessed. Contemporary arrivals encounter Athens in four ways. Drivers must plough through several kilometres of seaside industrial facilities or haphazardly-constructed inland residential districts before encountering anything reminiscent of an Instagram feed. Ferry passengers steam into a smoggy harbour replete with vintage dock machinery, crowded with apartment blocks, and dominated by the hulk of a skyscraper built, then abandoned, during the 1967-74 Colonels’ dictatorship. Trains deliver their passengers straight to a downtown of dense, poor and multicultural neighbourhoods a world apart from the neoclassical villas scattered around the Acropolis’ Arcadian foothills. Finally, air-travellers descend over the glittering waters and wind-turbine-studded islets of the ‘Athens Riviera’ (perhaps the only Riviera to have already been overbuilt and environmentally-degraded before being proclaimed as one) gliding over automobile and villa-sprawl into the modern airport constructed for the 2004 Olympics. An

underground metro and a privately-operated highway winding through a forested mountain further shield new arrivals from the concrete organism splaying across the Attic Plain.
At first sight, visitors gasp at the informal urbanism and grasp for references. Some are struck by how dry, chaotic and Middle Eastern the city’s energy appears. Others describe it as a Soviet-looking town of cement blocks transposed to a Mediterranean climate. Its strongly Modernist architectural traditions, developed along narrow, grid-patterned, motorcycle-strewn streets, reference districts of Damascus and Belgrade. But Athens’ past is even more cemented-over, and its ancient buildings, streams and rivers subsumed under interminable rows of twentieth and early twenty-first century apartment buildings that scarcely evoke Europe. Even its glass-and-steel contemporary buildings look more like an approximation of the West encountered in Fujayrah than the City of London.
No two cities are the same and nothing we see today transpired accidentally. But contemporary Athens’ layering, versatility and resonant absences manifest themselves through a procession of mostly misapplied ideologies: the Muslims, Jews, Armenians and a healthy multiculturalism became the victims to a state invested in promoting a homogenizing Greek narrative that implicitly excluded them; the old architecture is gone because, unlike Romans or Parisians, Athenians’ craving of the modern leaves little space for respect and preservation of the old; and a singular lack of institutions insulate the city from political storms and instability, because the political culture remains clannish rather than national, consisting of groups that install and replace loyalists as they shift in and out of power.
Athens’ nineteenth century revival from parochial post-Ottoman backwater into European wannabe was driven by a pro-Westernism containing an incipient contempt for its eastern identity and Ottoman past, and impelled forward by a speculative opportunism. The city of ‘flat roofs intermingled with cypresses, ruins, isolated columns, the domes of the mosques crowned by huge storks’ nests… each house with its garden planted with orange and fig trees’ witnessed by Chateaubriand in 1805, was judged too backward to survive.
I was born in the late 1970s, long after Athens’ expansion had brought it up against its encircling mountains, and spent my first fifteen years in a dusty under-construction suburb adjoining the brutalist new university campus, before we moved to a central neighbourhood famed for being a Sixties intellectual haunt. The following two decades were spent abroad in cities to Athens’ West and East, which gifted me some essential perspective on my frantic, lackadaisical and inscrutable birthplace. As I adjusted to life in London, Damascus, Cairo, Paris, Tehran, Istanbul, Kabul, Libya’s Tripoli, Tunis and Boston, I was increasingly preoccupied by the perplexing differences and unexpected similarities encountered daily. What I’d been brought to believe was normal while growing-up proved elsewhere to have been at best an exception, at worse perverse. But I also discovered striking cultural similarities in the most frowned-upon places (usually to Athens’ East). It all made me wonder how the habits, infrastructure, layout and traditions of a weak and often bankrupt state’s capital could be moulded by the waves of history sweeping across it more than by its own inhabitants.
As we mark the 200-year anniversary of the Greek Revolution in 2021, it’s worth pausing to reflect on the ideologies whose misapplications most defined Athens’ complete transformation from low-rise and poor, post-antique Ottoman backwater into midrise and over touristed investment-destination. Through it all, it remains one of the world’s most exquisite cities, boasting intriguing corners and evocative sceneries, splendidly situated between mountain and sea, and bathed in the purest of Attic light.
Using a camera or drone I sought to best contextualise each location’s significance within the city, identifying the buildings, districts and spaces that best tell the story of how it formed at each separate ideological stage, and providing the visual evidence of how Athens evolved under the pressure of narratives just as much as circumstances.
Classicism: an antidote to the Ottomans

The joint English, French and Russian fleet regime-changed Ottoman rule in Greece and ended an inconclusive conflict fought for years among a shifting alignments of Greek and Albanian revolutionaries and mercenaries, Ottoman and Egyptian militaries, and French and English philhellenes. When the smoke cleared, the Great Powers agreed that the best person to shepherd the fledgling country that might be viewed as the South Sudan or Kosovo of its era to maturity, was the King of Bavaria’s underage son. A Bavarian guard took over the Acropolis from the Ottomans in a symbolic ceremony marking the transfer of control over Greece from Ottomans to Great Power guarantors, and inaugurating a two-century attachment to the West that only started shifting back Eastwards over the past decade.


By 1830, Athens had shrunk to about 4,000 inhabitants and wasn’t even the obvious first choice for capital. One popular idea among many Greeks was that – along with other cities – it could perhaps be a temporary, rotating capital, at least pending Istanbul’s conquest, since many felt that only a revived Constantinople could be Hellenism’s true capital. Finally, a German newspaper, Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, announced that ‘the Capital of Greece must be Athens … because of its mild climate, its fertile soil and excellent harbour as well as its magnificent monuments’.
The King of Bavaria was the father of Greece’s appointed king and a great admirer of antiquity who purchased the marble reliefs of Aegina’s Temple of Aphaia to display in the neoclassically-inspired Glyptothek museum he commissioned for Munich. In Athens, he appointed a team of architects to design a neoclassical city of palazzos, squares and boulevards, bestowing on the city an architecture inspired from its past, but developed in Paris and Munich then exported ‘back’ to Athens in a reverse compliment loaded with significance.
The result was a city largely purified of Frankish, Byzantine and Ottoman accretions intended to express its past splendour in digestible, Europeanised form. Neoclassical Athens’ construction marked a season of destruction not just for all previous periods of its history (Ottoman, Frankish, Byzantine, even classical), but for its Christian heritage too, with 120 Byzantine churches and chapels being demolished during the 1840s to make way for the rising city, 72 of which were destroyed merely to provide building materials for the ambitious cathedral.
But angry landowners refused to sell up, real-estate prices rose, and a resulting lack of funds resulted in the city never quite looking as intended. This was not necessarily bad, given one German architect’s scheme to emulate the practices of past conquerors by building the King’s palace inside the Parthenon in neoclassical style. Ultimately, Otto’s ‘immense marble palace’ was still criticised by French historian Jean Alexandre-Buchon for a grandiosity inappropriate to a town where ‘two years ago scarcely a stone house existed, in a nation whose people had so recently been raised to being their own masters and where princes slept out of doors wrapped in their cloaks’.
The University of Athens, presented in a neoclassical triptych inaugurated in 1837, is the most striking example of the grandiose neoclassicism envisaged by Athens’ revivalists. Upon seeing it, one of the aged heroes of the simpler, less pretentious revolutionary period, Theodoros Kolokotronis, correctly predicted that ‘this house will eat up that house’, meaning that western-style education would result in the monarchy’s abolition.
Against the East
Before evolving a state identity, Greek-speaking Christians inhabited each of the Mediterranean’s three shores as polyglot trading minorities. Much like the Jews, the creation of a nation-state resulted in the shrivelling of their cosmopolitan communities, not just because they finally had a country to call their own, but because the transition from empires to nations resulted in their port-cities being integrated into countries, each with its own nationalistic founding myth that failed to include them.

As the imperial era transitioned to the nation-state, successive waves of Greeks ‘repatriated’ to a country they had never visited. Although the majority had lived in Arabic and Turkish-speaking countries, the social climate they encountered in Athens was contemptuous, ignorant and fearful of their nuanced and exotic backgrounds. One of the unspoken conditions of assimilation was to leave their acquired languages at the door, effectively amputating a cultural skill that could have aided Greece had it decided to situate itself less squarely in the West. The same was happening in neighbouring Turkey, where Kemalist efforts to fashion a nation-state out of a collapsed empire resulted in all minorities being urged to speak only Turkish, and Arabic and Persian words cleansed from Turkish to be replaced by French derivatives.
While Athens was always measuring itself against Paris and Vienna, it was closer or inferior in functionality to Alexandria, Smyrna and Tunis, all modernising Mediterranean cities boasting large Greek minorities. In post-Independence Athens, luxuries were so scarce that an American missionary’s home was renowned for containing a rocking-chair. By the 1880s, Athens may have lacked paved, lit streets and residents still queued at public fountains for water, but donkeys deposited bejewelled ladies and gentlemen decked out in evening dress before a brand new opera house, occasionally also interrupting performances with their braying. Even as late as the 1970s, Greeks living in Shah-era Tehran looked down on Athens as undeveloped.
A bourgeois elite developed in Athens, much of it springing from strategic marriages between old Athenian and Phanariot families freshly-arrived from Istanbul, Wallachia or Odessa, where they had spent centuries serving international business and the Ottoman Sultan. The new urban aristocracy sidelined the mostly illiterate revolutionary heroes, dismissed bawdy, embarrassing customs derived from the countryside, and had a fear of the proletariat that expressed itself in efforts to reform them, both through efforts to eradicate illiteracy and through new forms of entertainment. Europeanised locals preferred the so-called cafés-chantants, featuring French songs and foreign dancers (marking a revolution in local sexual mores) to the cafés-aman where mostly-male musical groups played traditional melodies that sprung from common Turkish, Arabic and Persian musical cultures.
The cultural confrontation escalated when pro-fascist dictator Ioannis Metaxas banned rembetika, a type of music arising from the region’s main ports – Thessaloniki, Istanbul and Smyrna – developed by refugees from Asia Minor settling in Athens’ working-class districts. Already spatial social separations had been established as the bourgeois settled in freshly-built neoclassical villas and manors, while their builders, workers and servants clustered around the wealthy, planned districts or occupying marginal areas next to quarries and factories. During the Civil War, these invisible divisions became bullet-riddled frontlines between Communists and Royalists. Even today, machinegun-armed riot police guard the separation point between the traditionally working-class and leftist Exarheia neighourhood and aristocratic Kolonaki.
The popular press, radio and television were the main drivers of a Westernising narrative that was contemptuous of the customs, minorities and ways of life of old Greece while promoting a narrative of reunifying all lands where Greek-speaking Christians dwelt.
Athens’ palm trees became another cultural battleground. Dozens were ripped up in intensely westernising periods of the city’s history, like the immediate post-Ottoman period, the developmental 1920s, and the 1967-74 Junta years. The cull was allegedly made to deny the city an eastern look. In the 2000s, ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympics, hundreds were replanted to boost its exoticism in the eyes of visitors. Today, palm-trees exist in escapist parts of the city: the so-called Athens Riviera and the pedestrianised part of the centre earmarked for tourism, hotels and Golden Visa investors.
From the 1990s onwards, the westernising tendency accelerated through the introduction of private television stations and lifestyle magazines instructing their readers how to dress, speak and act, which restaurants and clubs to eat and be seen in, islands to holidays in, and universities in the West to send their children too. The founder of one of these magazines once famously boasted that he was largely responsible for ‘depeasantifiying’ Greeks.
In Athens, the Westernising tendency manifested itself in American-style urban sprawl, as new and unregulated suburbs arose upon agricultural or recently-burned forest land. Life became heavily dependent on cars, public transport was chronically underinvested in, and the environment degraded by a patronage-based political system that placed industries too close to the city and intentionally failed to regulate them. The damage was completed by annual arson seasons intended to clear land for more construction, and wanton pollution of the sea through oil-spills and direct dumping of sewage.
As Athens expanded to cover most of Attica, social segregation grew. Greeks abandoned the city center, and first-generation migrants seeking cheap rents and willing to work hard at jobs that Greeks now considered beneath them repopulated it. Once-bourgeois downtown districts first became marginalised in the Nineties and Noughts, then developed in the 2010s and 2020s as vibrant, multicultural hubs attracting artists producing popular and award-winning cultural production.
Megaloideatism: reviving Byzantium and the refugee backlash

As time wore on and Greece won more Ottoman territory at the expense of other Balkan claimants, it sought to implement its Megali Idea (Great Idea): conquer all Byzantine territories claimed by the Turks until the fifteenth century and become a regional power astride two continents and five seas.
Egged on by the victorious but exhausted Allies in the immediate aftermath of World War One, Greece’s charismatic Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos dispatched an army to invade an Ottoman Empire under occupation by three European armies and riven by internal political crises. The British, whose putative control over Mosul’s oil reserves had been questioned by Turkey’s dynamic military leader Kemal Ataturk, were particularly supportive of the Greek intervention. Three years of fighting later, the defeated Greek army withdrew, setting the stage for the burning of Smyrna and triggering the million-strong exodus of Greek-speaking Christians to Greece. A 1922 population exchange treaty between Greece and Turkey became Hellenism’s tombstone in Asia Minor, ending a three-thousand year Greek presence there. Around 100,000 refugees were added to Athens’ 300,000 population, resulting in the construction of several new neighbourhoods for the refugees, many of which are rented out today to more recent Middle Eastern migrants and refugees by the descendants of the original families.
The geopolitical repercussions of the Great Idea project turned Piraeus, the Agora, and even the entrance to the Palace into squalid refugee camps filled with petitioners disbelieving that the upstart new country which had so cavalierly represented their dreams, mishandled its military campaign to the point of squandering everything. The wartime rhetoric of unity evaporated as the locals expressed hostility to refugee newcomers also seen as a threat for generally being more skilled, multilingual and integrated into the global economy. Their arrival gave a distinctively eastern feel to a city constructed as a western derivative, and further weaponised the C20th’s domestic culture wars.

The Capitalist City
With Communism banished, and British influence waning, Greece passed into US custody. It entered NATO in 1952, devalued its currency against the dollar to bring itself into line with Bretton Woods requirements, and initiated a construction boom whereby new highways, coastal entertainment zones and business districts extended the city along model capitalist grooves. The new consumer lifestyle was captured in the period’s lavish movie production, much of it filmed inside new beach-clubs, office buildings, cabarets and five-star hotels.


Mass tourism commenced against a political backdrop of right-wing governments, internal repression of leftists, and a hefty troop and air force contribution to the US war against Communist China in Korea. Air-hostesses wearing haute-couture uniforms worked for the Onassis-owned Olympic Airways out of one of the starchitect-designed Ellinikon airport, apartment buildings built of cement churned out by the Hercules factory in Piraeus went up, and coal-miners descended into the shafts of the Kalogreza mines humming catchy tunes recorded at the sprawling Columbia Records recording-studio complex. Today, that highliving period of Athens’ history is as dead as the half-demolished or vandalised facilities encapsulating Greece’s industrial moment, and products once produced in Greece are imported cheaper from China through Athens’ Chinese-owned port.
Aside from being a model capitalist city, Athens also played a key military role in the Cold War: the US Sixth Fleet regularly visited Piraeus, half the international airport acted as a US military airbase, and an entire local economy developed around American sailors’ entertainment needs. To symbolise Greece’s binding to the West, a statue of US President Harry Truman was erected within eyesight of the Hilton, promptly becoming Greece’s most vandalised public monument.
Athens’ and Istanbul’s geopolitical positions turned both these cities into Cold War stages for intelligence operations, assassinations and intrigue. From 1968 onwards, Athens airport figured in dozens of terrorist incidents and airplane hijackings, especially after Beirut erupted into civil war.
No building captures that era better than the Hilton Hotel, opened to great fanfare in 1963 as a symbol of the purchasable American way of life. Its architect boldly suggested that the marble-coated cement slab rising opposite the Parthenon had been modelled on the temple itself. The Hilton marked the first international hotel chain to open in Athens and became a favourite for frolicking starlets, businessmen and politicians.
In his novel Lost Spring, Greek novelist Stratis Tsirkas’ character, an unrepentant leftist returning to Athens after twenty years of exile in Budapest, experiences shock when first catching sight of the huge building towering over the city: ‘A monster, hubris, a gigantic chunk of cement provocatively erected between (Mount) Hymettus’s eyebrow and the Acropolis’ smile,’ the character thinks to himself as he rides in the taxi from the port. ‘When I first caught sight of it, I felt within me the shattering of that violet vision of an open-hearted, friendly Athens which I’d been carrying and nurturing over the exile years.’


The neoliberal dividend
Greece was over touristed long before the term was invented. A traveller arriving in Athens in 1810, a decade before Greeks revolted against the Ottomans, found it full of foreign socialites and artists cheerfully vandalizing the city’s ancient monuments for mementoes or purchasing them ready-severed from the locals, carving their names on ancient walls, and attending whirling dervishes spectacles in the Tower of Winds. Accommodation was scarce: the well-connected, would stay as guests of their country’s consuls, the rest lodged at the monastery run by the Capuchin monks.
Until Covid-19 stilled the world’s airports, tourism was the city’s only growth business, with buildings cleared of residents and rubble to reopen as hotels. A lucrative Golden Visa program saw non-EU residents, especially Chinese, Russians, Israelis and Turks, purchasing the right to live in Europe. Athens was transforming into a theme-park, with a newly-pedestrianised centre and design tweaks intended to evoke a halogen-lit, 1960s city-centre filled with cruising chrome-finned Chevrolets, humming high-rise emporiums, and an Omonoia Square dominated by a gushing, multicoloured fountain.
But change in the early twentieth also came from unexpected quarters. China appropriated a part of the port, intending to turn it into the ‘head of the dragon’ of its trans-Asian Belt and Road initiative. As Greece’s negative demographic growth increased, more and more refugees from Asia and Africa were granted asylum and settled in the seedier parts

of the city centre’s once-bourgeois neighbourhoods, from where Athens’ social revival or demise would issue. Imperceptibly at first, but following time-honoured tradition, Greece was shifting direction towards where power lay, this time Eastwards.
So how did these ideologies impact Athens on the whole? Undoubtedly they helped a city that had declined as much as the Empire it once belonged to, grow into the thrusting hub of business, industry and political corruption that it is today, reminding us that a country created by a narrative runs the risk of always remaining short of economic viability and prey to the interests of others. Without a tradition in institutions and a conservation ethic, the repeated waves of development and destruction left behind little recognizable of the city of 1940, let alone 1820: 90% of the buildings constructed between 1850 and 1940 no longer exist, turning a neoclassical urban jewel into a pulsating, polluted concrete jungle.
Athens forfeited other things that it failed to sufficiently defend: its Jewish community during the Nazi occupation, the accumulated experiences of Greeks moving to Athens from Arabic, Farsi, Georgian, Russian and Turkish-speaking communities of the greater Mediterranean and Middle East regions, and half a million of its youngest, most skilled and polyglot citizens, surrendered to an austerity-enhanced brain-drain. Despite being ideally placed to benefit from the talents of those arriving before, during and after the 2015 refugee crisis, Athens’ universities and private sector didn’t invest in attracting the best of the region for study and work, and so its squares and neighbourhoods, instead of nourishing a new generation of talented city-dwellers, became merely their resting-places in the long corridor leading to Europe.
The small minority of asylum-seekers who stayed behind of their own will rather than because they were trapped by the EU’s containment moat, knew full-well that the system would offer them no material goods. Mostly they tended to be poetic souls: there’s the melancholy Iranian saaz-maker living in a basement off Victoria Square who carried his instrument with him across several Balkan borders, the Kurdish painter nourishing himself with rembetika, or the Iranian director of Pari (2020), whose long years in the city allowed him to produce possibly the moodiest and most mystical reading of the city committed to film. Perhaps the city’s jaded and long-complaining residents cannot discern the city’s insistent buzz; only those purified by years of trauma and a modern, trans-Continental pilgrimage undertaken across inhospitable geographies can perceive Athens’ centuries-deep energetic accumulations. Perhaps that energy – impervious to all ideologies – is what elevates this mongrel of a city into still being one of humanity’s profoundest.
Citations
For more on the history and development of Athens see: Homer Thompson & R E Wycherley, The Agora of Athens, The History, Shape and Uses of an Ancient City Center, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1972; William Miller, ‘The Centenary of Athens as Capital’, The Journal of the Historical Association, Volume 19, Issue 75, 1934; Ahmed M Ameen, The Kucuk Camii of Athens, Turcica, Volume 47, pp 73-95, 2016; and Molly Mackenzie, Turkish Athens, The Forgotten Centuries, 1456-1832, Ithaca Press, New York, 1999
See also: Ilay Romain Ors, Diaspora of the City: Stories of Cosmopolitanism from Istanbul and Athens, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2017; William St Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence, Oxford University Press, 1972; and Maria Kaika, City of Flows, Modernity, Nature and the City, Routledge, London, 2005