Under the Ottomans, whose most significant cities remained Constantinople and Thessaloniki, as they had been for the Byzantines, Athens metamorphosed into a provincial Turkish village. Otto and his Bavarian architects set out to rebuild it-few houses were left standing after the years of the War of Independence, so they had a remarkably blank canvas, in a dilapidated Turkish town with hardly an important public building. They set about to reinvent the city, and turned Athens into the Munich of the Mediterranean, the domestic scale of the neoclassicism they inspired is endearing-these villas can take so many tones and responses toward classical architecture, witty, tender, mocking, silly affectionate.
Patricia Storace, “dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece”, 1996
Photo: R. Kennedy Stephen
