Few people are aware that shortly after 1456, when Athens yielded
without fighting to the bitter end, she had become one of the
bigger Balkan towns within the Ottoman Empire. The limited area
confined within the boundaries of the late Roman fortification
walls soon developed into a town of thirty-six mahalles. A thorough
analysis of the town/country relationship within the Ottoman feudal
system of production in general, and as related to Athens in
particular, reveals the dynamic conditions of urban development.
Athens shared many of the characteristics of prosperity based on
specific modes of appropriation of surpluses and patterns of
division of labour between town and countryside. Strange though it
might seem, it was only after the middle of the 17th century, when
land-tenure conditions changed and Athens was heading towards
decline, that an 'Ottoman' character as such could be detected in
its built environment, although Christians still strongly
outnumbered Muslim citizens. That being so, the presence at that
time in Athens of representatives of the European Enlightenment,
hypnotized by the myth of its artistic and cultural treasures, did
not affect the general conditions of development. In the 1830s,
Athens, by that time a provincial town of secondary importance, was
'ordered' to stride from feudalism to capitalism, to transform
itself into a modern capital city of a new-born state. The shift
from a small town under Ottoman rule to the modern city of the
Hellenic Kingdom implied the quick transformation of belonging to a
community (understood in terms of sharing common cultural
characteristics) to a sense of being a member of a society
(understood as an institution, as an externality demanding
obedience). The amorphous masses of the medieval quarters that had
arranged themselves so that unity within variety was established,
where each particular architectural entity retained its meaning in
so far as it was experienced as part of the whole urban fabric, had
to give way to the early 19th-century planning environment,
conceived more or less as a series of autonomous architectural
identities understood only within a specific urban complex. It was
not easy for Athens to cross the 'line' in 1834. The rejection of
the first plan should not be naively understood as an urban
restructuring triggering the virulent dissent of those Athenian
landowners who detected threats to their vested interests. A
violent break with the past was necessary so that new compositional
stratagems could be implemented. But ever since Athens became a
capital city, the pendulum of its history swung dramatically
between tradition and modernism, not least because nationalism kept
propagating an idealistic vision of an historical continuum that
ran from the glorious ancient past down to the euphoria of the
modern Greek state. Although Athens did make steady steps towards
becoming a 'modern', 'European-like' city, comprehensive planning
and centralized control of public works, as they had been essayed
in central and western European cities in the second half of the
19th century, were totally incompatible with the
build-as-you-please practice foisted on the capital city of Greece.
Architectural and urban analysis of Athens between 1456 and 1920
discloses the metamorphosis of a town to a city, experienced as an
invigorating adventure through the meandering routes of history.
This is what this book is about.
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