Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1
THE OLYMPIC LEGACY
The
2004 Olympics
can take much of the credit for getting Athens back on the map and
regenerating the city's infrastructure. Successful as they were in many ways, however, the
legacy of the Games is a bitter one. In the rush to be ready on time many of the works went
disastrously over budget, while inadequate planning means that few of the costly stadia have
found any purpose in life since the Games finished. These decaying white elephants are a
potent symbol of Greece's economic crisis and of the crazed rush to spend money that,
ultimately, Greece never had.
Four centuries of Ottoman occupation followed until, in 1821, the Greeks of Athens
rose and joined the
rebellion sweeping the country
. They occupied the Turkish quarters
of the lower town - the current Pláka - and laid siege to the Acropolis. The Turks
withdrew, but five years later were back to reoccupy the Acropolis fortifications, while
the Greeks evacuated to the countryside. When the Ottoman garrison finally left in
1834, and the Bavarian architects of the new German-born monarch moved in,
Athens, with a population of only 5000, was at its nadir.
Modern Athens
Athens was not the first-choice
capital
of modern Greece: that honour went instead to
Náfplio in the Peloponnese. In 1834, though, the new king Otto transferred the capital
and court to Athens. The reasoning was almost purely symbolic: Athens was not only
insignificant in terms of population and physical extent but was then at the edge of the
territories of the new Greek state. Soon, while the archeologists stripped away all the
Turkish and Frankish embellishments from the Acropolis, a city began to take shape:
the grand Neoclassical plan was for processional avenues radiating out from great
squares, a plan that can still be made out on maps but has long ago been subverted by
the realities of daily life.
Pireás
, meanwhile, grew into a significant port again.
The first mass expansion of both municipalities came suddenly, in 1923, as the result
of the tragic Greek-Turkish war in
Asia Minor
(see p.778). A million and a half “Greek”
Christians arrived in Greece as refugees, and over half of them settled in Athens and
Pireás, changing at a stroke the whole make-up of the capital. Their integration and
survival is one of the great events of the city's history.
Athens was hit hard by German occupation in World War II: during the winter of
1941-42 there were an estimated two thousand deaths from starvation each day. In late
1944, when the Germans finally left, the capital saw the first skirmishes of
civil war
,
and from 1946 to 1949 Athens was a virtual island, with road approaches to the
Peloponnese and the north only tenuously kept open.
During the 1950s, the city again started to expand rapidly thanks to the growth of
industry and massive
immigration
from the war-torn, impoverished countryside. By the
late 1960s, Greater Athens covered a continuous area from the slopes of mounts
Pendéli and Párnitha down to Pireás. Much of this development is unremittingly ugly,
since old buildings were demolished wholesale in the name of a quick buck,
particularly during the colonels' junta of 1967-74 (see p.782). Financial incentives
encouraged homeowners to demolish their houses and replace them with apartment
blocks up to six storeys high; almost everyone took advantage, and as a result most
central streets seem like narrow canyons between these ugly, concrete blocks.
Unrestrained industrial development on the outskirts was equally rampant.
Growth in recent decades has been much slower, but it's only in the last twenty years
that much effort has gone in to improving the city's environment. Although Athens
still lags far behind Paris or London in terms of open space, the evidence of recent
efforts is apparent. What's left of the city's architectural heritage has been extensively
restored; there's clean public transportation; new building is controlled and there's
some interesting, radical modern architecture.
