2 - Cities of silence: Athens and Piraeus in the early twentieth century

Summary

Urbanism in Italy is not purely nor ‘especially’, a phenomenon of capitalistic development or of that of big industry … Yet in these medieval-type cities too, there exist strong nuclei of populations of a modern urban type; but what is their relative position? They are submerged, oppressed, crushed by the other part, which is not of a modern type, and constitutes the great majority. Paradox of the ‘cities of silence’.

Antonio Gramsci (1971 edn: 91)

The Mediterranean world was emerging from a period of war and revolution during the early nineteenth century. Before this, Spain and Italy were still under French control, and Greece, along with the Balkans, was under Ottoman rule. Greece was formally declared independent by the London Protocol of 3 February 1830 and Athens was declared the capital of Greece in 1834. The glorious city of antiquity entered the mid-nineteenth century as a deserted village in ruins, destroyed by four centuries of Ottoman rule. Piraeus, its port, was nothing more than a wild coastline at this time, with no inhabitants and no name (Stassinopoulos 1973: 370-1). A fact rarely acknowledged is that both Athens and Piraeus were rebuilt as new cities: there is a wistful longing for continuity with ancient times. ‘In Greece, the past will always detract from the present’ (About 1855: 6). In the 1830s the two towns started to develop interdependently and grew rapidly, especially as a result of the centralism of the Greek State: Athens and Piraeus, comprador city and its port, unproductive and productive, bourgeois and proletarian cities.