Power in the Greek capital, and consequently within Greece itself, traditionally has been concentrated in the corridor that connects the southwestern foothills of Mount Lycabettus to the Presidential Mansion, official residence of the head of state. Diane Shugart takes a stroll.
The area bounded by Leoforos Vassilissis Sofias and Leoforos Vassileos Konstantinou on the north and south and by Irodou Attikou and Rigillis on the east and west is the most anonymous section of Athens. This exclusively residential quarter is less flashy and certainly less easily penetrated than the chic Kolonaki district. It doesn’t have a name–perhaps deliberately so. Yet concentrated within these few blocks is the Greek capital’s most expensive real estate.
The Presidential Mansion and the Maximos Mansion, official residence of the prime minister, are appropriately located on Odos Irodou Attikou, which is named after Herod Atticus, a wealthy public benefactor and intellectual. (Formerly Odos Palaiou Stadiou, literally “old stadium” because it led to the Panathenaic arena, its name was changed by changed by the city council sought a more impressive title.) The apartment buildings–several of which are actually single-family residences–seem ordinary from outside, although this impression is clearly belied by their interior decor. Residents are as a mix of politicians, ship-owners, socialites, media moguls, and other captains of industry; celebrated couples from theater and cinema such as Aliki Vouyiouklaki and Dimitris Papamihail also lived here and provided grist for the Athens gossip mill with their frequent, and occasionally public, fights that frequently sent pedestrians scurrying for cover from vases and other items flung in fury through open windows.
Spousal spats notwithstanding, it’s a quiet neighborhood whose tranquility disturbed only by the official comings-and-goings at the Maximos Mansion and the occasional state visit when a red carpet is laid over the tarmac for the official welcoming ceremonies hosted by the President of the Republic. Located at the corner of Leoforos Vassileos Georgiou II and Irodou Attikou, the Maximos Mansion is the seat of political power in Greece today. Built in 1924, it was originally the residence of Dimitris Maximos, a noted Greek economist and central bank governor who served as an extraparliamentary premier in 1947 during the Civil War. The mansion was designed by Anastasios Helmis in the style of an urban palais, replete with columned portico used for greeting visitors. It was acquired by the Greek state in the early 1950s and was used to house visiting foreign dignitaries until 1982, when it was established as the official residence of the head of government. To date, no Greek head of government has actually resided at the Maximos Mansion, which is used mainly for business–that is, as the premier’s office as well as official banquets and receptions.
Next door, the Presidential Mansion has the air of a slightly neglected country estate–although this is being remedied by a renovation project. The building is set back from the street but the front lawn is only slightly screened by a tall iron railing and trees. The building was designed in 1890 by the noted German architect Ernst Ziller to serve as the new royal palace of Crown Prince Constantine, son of King George I, and his bride, Princess Sophia. Like several other public buildings in Athens, it too, bears the hallmarks of the architect’s Renaissance Revival style, which blends elements of Greek and Roman architecture into Renaissance grandeur. Known as the Royal Palace until the abolition of the monarchy by plebiscite in December 1974, it has since served as the official residence of the President of the Republic. The barracks of the Presidential Guard, colloquially known as evzones, are located in the National Gardens, just off the corner where Irodou Attikou intersects with Leoforos Vassilissis Sophias. During regular changing of the guard, the evzones leave these barracks to relieve those stationed at the Presidential Mansion and the Parliament, always following the path scuffed into the pavement as the scrape their tasseled slippers, or tsarouhia, with their metered stride.
Also known as tsoliades, the evzone corps dates back to the war of independence and as the official Presidential Guard symbolize the Greek army. Their uniform is based on the traditional male costume prevalent in the Peloponnese in the early 1800s but each garment has been carefully chosen–color, fabric, and cut–to represent elements of Greek history: the red of the cap symbolizes the blood spilled in conflicts; the kilts have 400 pleats, one for each year of Ottoman rule.
The evzones barracks are located in the National Gardens, which run the full length of the opposite side of Irodou Attikou. Created in the mid-1800s as the pet project of Queen Amalia, the gardens added a touch of greenery to the city’s rocky and virtually barren terrain.
Originally the Royal Gardens, it was intended as an extension of the grounds of King Othon’s palace, the present-day Parliament. Master-gardeners of the Bavarian court, among them Friedrich Schmidt, were commissioned to help with planning and experts such as the French landscape artist Francois Barrauld were subsequently enlisted to create the gardens. Plants, imported for the project, were arranged for effect in the best tradition of European gardening. In 1839, the first shipment of 15,000 decorative plants arrived by sea from Genoa and was transported from Piraeus to Athens on camels so planting could begin. But the most striking design is certainly the row of palms just inside the tall gates on Leoforos Amalias. The trees were brought from Delos by the young queen herself, and Costis Palamas, the celebrated Greek poet, was often seen strolling in their shade until his death in 1943. Other plants were set into the gardens for reasons that were not necessarily aesthetic: the tixilitha pines were brought from Sounion because of their extraordinarily strong roots able to penetrate crevices in the rocky subsoil.
The project was completed in 1854 but an earlier plan to expand the garden was subsequently overturned by the city planning commission. The poet and botanist Theodoros Orphanides also contributed several plants to the Gardens, including the hybrid red camellia he named Amalia after the young Greek queen. King George also tended to the gardens, adding plants from the French royal estates at Montpelier and Fontainebleau, included the delicate long-needled Chinese pines with their fan-shaped branches. In 1927, the Gardens were officially declared a public space, and has since been open daily from dawn to dusk.
Dirt paths wind through the National Gardens, which can be entered through gates on Leoforos Amalias, Leoforos Vassilissis Sophias, Odos Irodou Attikou, and Zappeion Park. The most popular gate is on Amalias, where kids like to gawk at the sundial between tossing crumbs to the pigeons and trying to pet one of the dozens of stray cats that live in the park. Enclosed within the gardens are two duck ponds, a playground and an ersatz zoo that recalls tales of the lion King George is said to have kept. Peacocks roamed freely through the gardens until the mid-1970s.
Antiquities discovered on the grounds include fragments from Hadrian’s Wall and remains of Roman baths. Mosaics from the baths can be seen in the garden’s southeastern section, near the bust of Ioannis Capodistrias, Greece’s first governor. Oddly, given Greeks’ propensity for installing busts and statues, there is little art within the gardens–except for busts of Greece’s first governor, Ioannis Capodistrias, the Swiss banker Jean Gabriel Eynard (a philhellene who raised funds to arm the Greek rebels), and the poets Aristotelis Valaoritis and Dionysis Solomos, who penned the Greek national anthem. Botany and statuary are merely backdrop for this urban park’s true mission as a meeting place for lovers. For decades, the National Gardens has offered shelter to courting couples, who exchange shy kisses (which quite frequently develop into far bolder expressions of affection) shielded by trees and shrubs. The park’s role as lovers’ sanctuary is enshrined in the tragic double suicide in 1893 of the star-crossed Mimicos and Mary, whose story became the subject of a book and a popular song.
The adjacent Zappeion Park is to families what the gardens are to lovers. On Sundays, Zappeion is crowded with young couples pushing strollers being trailed by kids on kick scooters as Athens residents rediscover the pleasures of the park. Since the late 1990s, Zappeion has quietly begun to regain the place at the center of Athenian life it held through the Sixties and Seventies. On weekdays, the shaded promenade is abandoned to pensioners who spontaneously assemble in the amorphous groups that comprise the “Mikri Vouli” (small parliament) near Leoforos Amalias to debate the political developments of the day. But as the sun sets, Zappeion slowly awakens; especially in summer, the park is jammed at night as Athens residents seek relief from the relentless heat. During the extended carnival season, which precedes Lent, young revelers in costume overrun the park.
Zappeion Park is built around the horseshoe shaped conference hall based on a design by Francois-Louis-Florimond Boulanger, who had won the Grand Prix of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in 1836. Boulanger’s plan was subsequently finalized by Theophilus Hansen. Construction was funded by an endowment created by brothers Evangelos and Constantinos Zappas in response to a request by the Greek government. Zappeion Hall was originally used to host national and international trade fairs. In recent years it has been as a press center during national elections, as well as the headquarters for the rotating European Union presidency and the city’s successful bid to host the 2004 Olympic Games.
Zappeion Park has a more formal structure. Paths are paved, benches neatly arranged and statues strategically placed to attract attention. Busts of the Zappas brothers frame the hall, while elsewhere strollers can scrutinize marble likenesses of the historian and writer Constantine Paparigopoulos, philanthropist Ioannis Varvakis, the satirical poet Georgos Souris, a monument dedicated to Hungarian volunteers killed in the 1821 war for independence from the Ottomans, and an elaborate statue of Lord Byron by the French sculptors Eric Chapu, whose work is on display at the Musee Luxembourg, and Alexandre Falguiere, whose works include the “Triumph of Democracy” at L’ Etoile in Paris.
The park’s popularity does not stem from this statuary, nor is it linked to Zappeion Hall’s use for various official functions. Its grounds have been used for public entertainment, from variety shows to film screenings. The cafes evolved from a refreshment stand run by the Skiadas family dairy at the southeastern edge of Zappeion near the bottom of Irodou Attikou, roughly where Mihail Tombros’s enormous statue of the revolutionary hero Georgios Karaiskakis now stands. The dairy was so large–and so popular–that the area quickly became known as Agelades or cows. The dairy was later forced to close because its proximity to the Royal Palace was believed by the royals to downgrade the neighborhood. The Agelades Cafe, however, continued to operate until the start of World War II, when it was closed because the noise from the variety show disturbed the royal family.
The first-open air screening of a film was held at the Zappeion Cafe in 1907. Dozens of non-paying bystanders crowded round the tables with the paying customers to catch a glimpse of the French feature, Ten Women for One Man. Also popular were the Oasis and Aigli, where kids sucked on watery strawberry ices as they watched the parade of dancers and acrobats across the stage. These variety shows remained popular through the early Seventies and then stopped. Aigli–which in Greek means glamour–lost both its allure and its patrons for over a decade but is now enjoying something of a revival, as a open-air cinema, bar and restaurant. A sign of how the times are changing: Aigli has taken a definite turn upmarket.