Photograph: EAHN

Quer durch Athen: Eine Reise von Piräus nach Kifisia
Petros Markaris (transl. Michaela Prinzinger)

Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2010, 176 pp., 24 b/w maps, € 14.90
ISBN: 978-446-23560-1

In his latest book the Greek author Petros Markaris does not send his detective Kostas Charitos through the streets of modern Athens, but wanders himself through hidden places and faded neighbourhoods—in twenty-four chapters, named after the twenty-four stations of the Athens-Piraeus Electric Railways (ISAP). The line dates from 1869 and was completed in 1880; it has been instrumental in the development of metropolitan Athens, from its first run in the nineteenth century until now.

Markaris was born in Istanbul in 1937 to an Armenian father and a Greek mother. He is one of the most successful living Greek authors. After studying economics, Markaris went on to work as a screenplay writer. He has lived in Germany and Austria for several years and translated Goethe and Brecht into Greek. International fame came through his series of crime novels featuring the eccentric Athenian detective Kostas Haritos. Markaris lives in Athens and also co-writes film scripts with director Theo Angelopoulos.

Markaris has a love-hate relationship with the city where he has lived for over forty-five years. And he is sure to know that the railway is the best way to explore the city. On board its red and white metallic cars one can traverse the many neighbourhoods with their very different history, atmospheres, and social structures. One can also pause to admire stations such as Faliro, which were entirely renovated on the occasion of the Olympic games in 2004.

The whole trip from the harbour to the inland terminal takes about an hour, and for most of that time, the traveller is confronted with lots of concrete, glass, aluminium, and a lonely olive tree. But upon leaving the downtown station of Thiseio or the terminal in Kifisia, the traveller discovers the remains of nineteenth-century Athens. In 1833 Thiseio became the centre of the new capital of the newly established Greek kingdom. King Otto and his Bavarian retinue dreamed of a new Athens in neoclassical style. Many buildings are still there to be admired, thanks to a renovation campaign launched in the 1980s by the then minister of culture, Melina Mercouri. Yet Thiseio did not retain its status as a preferred neighbourhood for long. Because the nineteenth-century Athenian elite was highly connected with the royal family and depended on it for its existence, they moved with the king when he moved to his new palace on Syntagma Square (now the Greek parliament). This was the reason that from the 1840s onward new neoclassical ‘palaces’ sprang up in this area.

In 1871 King Georg I—not a Bavarian, as Markaris erroneously writes, but a prince from the House of Denmark—decided to build his summer residence Tatoi on the forested hills north of Athens, in the region now known as Kifisia. When in 1880 Kifisia became the terminal station of the railway, it also became, and still is, the most expensive suburb of Athens and home of the political and financial elite. Here one will find many summerhouses and grand–hotels in the exotic styles typical of the fin-de-siècle.

With his excellent knowledge of Athens Markaris takes us on a trip to well-known and, especially, less well-known areas. In addition to explaining the history and structure of the neighbourhoods around the stations, he also informs us about hidden parks and classical taverns, and tells us where multicultural Athens can best be found. What Markaris offers in this little book is a view—decidedly popular and consciously personal—of the social and urban history of the Greek capital. Thanks to him, we get a glimpse of the life that generated the façades. What he has to say we need to know. So read the book, then take the railway or a walk, and explore.

Henk Lemckert
Royal Library
The Hague