Power in the Greek capital has been concentrated in the swathe of real estate streaming from Mount Lycabettus’s southwestern foothills to the Presidential Mansion. Once solely the province of the city’s elite, Kolonaki has seen commerce dull its sheen of exclusivity, although the cachet of a Kolonaki address is still unrivalled, writes Diane Shugart.
I remember Kolonaki when it was just a neighborhood. But nowhere are the changes that the Greek capital–indeed, Greece itself–has undergone in the last three decades more evident than in Kolonaki.
Change has been material and social. The economic boom that followed Greece’s entry into the European Union has altered both the city’s structure and social fabric. Invisible boundaries that once existed between neighborhoods have been leveled by the mobility provided by taxis and cars: singles and young couples, especially, will travel to the far ends of metropolitan Athens for the light refreshment or meal their parents were content to enjoy in their own neighborhood. And the discernible boundaries between social groups have been leveled by the purchasing power provided by credit cards and the spread of branding.
Kolonaki is certainly not the capital’s oldest district. It was developed as an extension of the plans for the new city of Athens drawn by Stamatis Kleanthes and Eduard Schaubert in 1832, and had begun to take shape by the 1860s. The district was quickly settled by members of the emerging
professional class–doctors, civil servants in the employ of the young state, prosperous merchants relocating to the new capital. Affluent, in terms of the general populace, these ambitious young professionals were drawn to Kolonaki by the opulence surrounding the elegant mansions of the Kazoulis, Rallis, Stathatos, and Kalligas families along the broad Vassilissis Sophias boulevard–much like the city’s thirty- and fortysomethings today shop Kolonaki boutiques and patronize Kolonaki cafes in hopes of experiencing, however vicariously, the lifestyle of the rich and famous. For some of the district’s early settlers, the attraction was different: one merchant opted for Kolonaki when moving from the provinces because the slopes of Lycabettus recalled the grazing slopes of his natal village.
Kolonaki Square is the focal point of the district’s activity. Strictly speaking, it is the small rectangular plaza at the junction of Kanari, Koumbari, Kapsali, and Patriarchou Ioakeim streets. Yet this no more than an concrete traffic island, a resting spot for strays and pigeons and short cut for those too rushed or too impatient to circle it.
More properly known as Plateia Filikis Etairias after the secret “Friends’ Society” formed in Odessa by Greek patriots who led the 1821 revolt against the Ottoman Turks, the square’s colloquial name was inspired by the section of an ancient marble column discreetly placed at its southwestern end. This marker was moved to its present site in 1938 from the nearby Plateia Dexamenis, although both its history and existence has long been truncated from the patois of the self-styled terminally cool who hang out at the cafes crammed on the broad pavement opposite its northwestern end. Only the uninitiated spell out Plateia Kolonakiou as their destination; those in the know simply head for the “plateia”. There is no need to specify further: only the square don’t which square isn’t the square.
Kolonaki’s gradual transformation since the 1960s from an exclusive residential area to a fashionable shopping district began from the plateia. Popular zaharoplasteia such as the Ellinikon, where local matrons took their afternoon coffee while nibbling on a slice of gateau orange with its delicately flavored icing, are continually being squeezed by fast food chains, cafes, and boutiques. Ellinikon has clung to the plateia, despite being
forced out of its original locale at the corner of Patriarchou Ioakeim to much smaller premises on the southwestern side, near Koumbari. Other establishments, like Bokolas, have disappeared completely. Da Capo, the most fashionable cafe on the square, now occupies its former space, at the corner of Odos Tsakalof. The cafe’s patrons now opt for cappuccino instead of Bokolas’s loukoumades, deep-fried balls of airy dough drizzled with warm, runny honey and cinnamon.
The cafes extended their sprawl to accommodate the exponentially increasing number of patrons, especially along Milioni and the length of Skoufa. Elbow room is at premium at the bar and tables are tightly packed together, further boosting the density of Prada and DKNY per occupied centimeter. Canopies and plastic windguards put up by cafe owners to protect against the elements have denied the square simple sensory pleasures, like feeling the warmth of the sun’s rays against your skin on a sunny afternoon in mid-winter. Seated inside the cocoon, the only way to tell one season from the other is by how people are dressed.
Pedestrians on the northern of the plateia have two choices: squeeze through the tables or follow the strip of free pavement that runs parallel to curbside iron barriers that prevent human traffic from spilling into the street. Negotiating the cafe tables is integral to Kolonaki convention: one’s social value is set according to how many faces you greet and by how many heads nod in recognition as you sashay past.
The plateia dwarfs, in both reputation and traffic, the district’s other squares, most notably Dexameni, a couple of blocks north. Serene and shaded by elms, it sits a top a reservoir (dexameni) originally constructed by Hadrian but used as late as the mid-1800s when it was restored for use by the then-newly established Greek capital. The favorite haunt of writers like Alexandros Papadiamantis and Costas Varnalis in the 1930s, Dexameni attracted the Kolonaki counterculture–those denizens who considered themselves more cerebral than Cerruti.
Fanning out from the Kolonaki Square are streets named after the heroes of the Greek revolution who made up the Filiki Etairia: Nikolaos Skoufas, Athanasios Tsakalof, Emanuel Xanthos, Panayiotis Anagnostopoulos, Georgos Sekeris, Kyriakos Koumbaris, Georgos Leventis. The Benaki Museum, housed in a fabulous neoclassical residence designed by Anastasios Metaxas (who also restored the Panathenaic Stadium), is at the corner of Odos Koumbari and Leoforos Vassilissis Sophias, while just off another offshoot of the plateia is the Museum of Cycladic Art. The presence of these two institutions adds a touch of culture to the preoccupation with couture.
Shopping is as much part of Kolonaki’s identity as its cafes. Shopping is concentrated in the area loosely bounded on the square’s north by Anagnostopoulou and Haritos streets, on its east by Ploutarchou, on its south by Kapsali and Kanari and on its west by Dimokritou. Above Anagnostopoulou and Spefsippou, the district is almost entirely residential, except for a few art galleries off Dexameni. Maritsa’s, a meze restaurant near the corner of Fokylidou and Voukourestiou streets, and Filipou’s, a modest taverna on Odos Xenophontos off Odos Ploutarchou, reflect the more subdued character of this section.
Change is evident here too. Exclusivity, from which the boutiques along Odos Tsakalof derived their glitter, is being supplanted by the egalitarianism of franchising. Chain stores, which have sprouted like weeds among the boutiques on Kolonaki streets over the past few years, are a sign of the changing times: their sameness provides consumers with comfort and continuity, their swanky address lends chic. Haute couture has beaten a retreat from Odos Tsakalof to Odos Kanari, where several Greek designers opened boutiques. But the flight from the center prompted by a combination of strikes and demonstrations that often leave downtown Athens inaccessible and shroud it in unpleasantness has affected Kolonaki too. A number of stores and boutiques are fleeing to the new shopping malls rising in peripheral areas like Maroussi and Ayios Dimitrios, abandoning Kolonaki mainly to the foodies. But cafes and shops was always a symbiotic relationship. Can the neighborhood of chic survive without its mix of shopping and socializing or will it return to being just a neighborhood?