After the creation of the independent Greek state in 1830, towns changed at varying rates from their Ottoman form. One of the faster transformations was in what scholars refer to as “polite architecture.” The wealthier classes, who had previously emulated the Ottoman International style in their town houses and rural mansions, turned their heads “Westwards” and also “backwards in time” by adopting Neoclassical designs. These could result in entirely new constructions, but also might be applied as new fayades to existing homes. For a while in the nineteenth century, the port of Ermoupolis on the island of Syros was a key commercial port, and it was a flourishing center for Neoclassical commissions from its prosperous merchant class (Kartas 1982, Agriantoni et al. 1999).
On a piecemeal basis, town plans were altered, also to conform to “Western” and “Classical” logic (Yerolympos 1996). The Greek government formally announced that straight, grid-plan communication lines were to be preferred to the twisting, narrow lanes of Ottoman towns, the latter to be removed as they “so explicitly reflected the character of their former rulers” (quoted in Sigalos 2004). Towns such as Navplion, Kalamata, Tripolis, Patras, and Athens were in part redesigned, or expanded, according to regular Western urban planning principles. In the expanding Early Modern town of Livadheia, the Old Town retained its cramped and picturesque character well into the late twentieth century, but to the north and east vast new suburbs arose on a grid-plan, with large open spaces at major intersections. Lining these new prestige streets arose ranks of Neoclassical mansions for the prospering middle classes (Bintliff et al. 1999, Sigalos 2004). In contrast the other major town of Boeotia, Thebes, had its original center replanned along gridline streets during the nineteenth century, destroying a more multifocal plan of winding small lanes linking religious foci which had characterized the Ottoman town.
When, after some experimentation and debate on alternatives, Athens was chosen in 1833 as the
Figure 22.3 Neoclassical Main Building of Athens University, late nineteenth century. Wikipedia image.
Permanent capital of the new Kingdom of Greece, the Bavarian rulers brought in foreign architects to ornament the city with appropriate public buildings for its role. Naturally the Neoclassical style was adopted, reflecting the intention of reconnecting the new state with the finest moments of its past. Today along Panepistimiou Street, the central complex of the Academy, the University, and the National Library are impressive achievements in this style of the 1850s to 1880s (Figure 22.3), and still attract attention within their surrounding modern concrete higher-rise shopping and apartment blocks. It was a natural counterpoise that Kapodistrias, the first President of Greece, ordered the demolition of traditional overhang rooms (sahnisia) as reminiscent of the hated Turks (Sigalos 2004). Fortunately for everyone, a scheme by the German Neoclassical architect Schinkel to construct a new royal palace-citadel-museum on the Acropolis for the imported Bavarian King Otto, was not approved (Etienne and Etienne 1992, Hamilakis and Yalouris 1996).
The pace of regular planning but also increasingly, unplanned expansive urban sprawl, increased considerably with the arrival in the 1920s of a vast army of refugees and population exchange communities, resulting from the disastrous outcome of the war with Turkey. These incomers were accommodated all over the Greek towns and also in new rural settlements, since they included town-dwellers and villagers from what is today European and Anatolian Turkey. A classic analysis of the effect of this on the city of Athens has been made by Bastea (1999). For the rise of Athens from 1833 and its escape from an early attempt at formal planning by the Bavarians see Ante (1988).
But we should not exaggerate the scale of change. There was indeed a proliferation throughout the Aegean of new street plans, Neoclassical and later “Modernist” homes for the wealthy, and “worker cottages” for a small proletariat. But there was also, perhaps still dominant, the continuing survival alongside these new forms of life of traditional narrow winding streets and Ottoman-style house plans in towns for the lower middle classes, and agricultural-style single-and one-and-a-half-story longhouses for the poorer classes both in urban suburbs and in rural settlements. Descriptions and photographs till the mid-twentieth century and the widespread survival of such architecture even today (if ruined or en route to demolition in the near future) confirm this picture. In provincial towns with a few thousand inhabitants, the norm till the mid-twentieth century, life was very internalized, and out-marriage was atypical (Caftanzoglou 1994), whilst such market-centers were not strongly interconnected so as to create an integrated urban system for Greece (Dertilis 1992, Katochianou 1992). As for the appearance of the townscapes, the town of Argos for example, was largely destroyed in the War of Independence, which led to a new town plan which expanded on the old irregular settlement with new regular suburbs. Yet it remained essentially a low-rise townscape until the first tower-block appeared in 1962, followed in the 1970s by hundreds more for apartments and stores (Pierart and Touchais 1996).
All this gives a material basis to the view often expressed that Modern Greeks have a strong sense of identity, but in two contrasted senses (Leigh Fermor 1966). One is to their recreated Classical Greek past, of which they are rightly proud, the other however is to the qualities of Greek life and sensibility inherited from Greek mentalities common in Medieval and Ottoman times (Romaiosyne). As we saw above, in contemporary villages three generations of a single family can view a discordant time-perspective on their own property. This can include three-story Modernist or even Postmodernist luxury concrete housing, with all the latest furniture and electronic fixtures, surviving alongside a single-story longhouse with minimal furniture and retaining simple fittings from the early twentieth or even late nineteenth century, and a plan which may descend from several centuries earlier.
However, as noted for rural settlements, the owners of both traditional and modernizing houses became keen to follow Western bourgeois patterns in the internal definition of space. A multiplication of rooms and their subdivisions became typical, to mark out spaces for distinct activities, whether functional or social.
World History
