Athens in the 19th century: The neighbourhood of Metaxourgeion¹

Section of F. Aldenhoven’s map of Athens in 1837; marked are the four abandoned building plots on Millerou street, the road intersection at the Dipylon and the fortification wall of Haseki.

This paper is discussing the mechanisms that command the evolution of a neighbourhood of Athens, named “Metaxourgeion”, focusing on the dialectical relationship between a large building and its environs, as well as on the articulation of individual/conjunctural actions and structural trends.

The large building, in our case, is the silkmill (“metaxourgeion”) of the “Silk company of Athens Athanassios Douroutis & Co”, after which the neighbourhood was named. This area lay outside the historic city of Athens , but in direct propinquity to it. It was a rural area, with orchards and fields, and had two additional features, which somehow predisposed the area to a certain type of development. Firstly, to the south of it lay the area of the Dipylon (nowadays the archaeological site of Keramikos), with an important junction where the roads from Eleusis (Iera Odos), Piraeus (branch of the main road to Piraeus, which terminated further south, at the “Dragon Gate”), and Sepolia converged². From this crossroads³that can be clearly seen on Aldenhoven’s 1837 map (fig. 1), a central road led to the Moria-Gate of Haseki’s fortification wall. Secondly, right beside the Moria-Gate (on present-day Sarri street), “gypsy blacksmiths’ had settled, for which reason it was also called “Gypsy-Gate”⁴. Consequently, transport-communication functions and industry were already present in the vicinity of our area, named at that time “Chezolitharo”, before Athens became capital of the state.

The earliest depiction (1835) of the commercial centre, under construction, and the Cantacuzenos residence (From: Fr. Stademann, Panorama von Athen).

When Athens was declared capital and the area was included in the plans of the new city, prospects opened of its urbanization⁵. At that moment, the possible directions its development could take were naturally many. A temporary decision charted the first direction, and this was the initial plans of Kleanthis-Schaubert and Klenze for building the king’s palace in the nearby areas of Omonoia and Dipylon respectively. The prospect of becoming a central urban area mobilized purchases of land in the area and attracted the significant investment of Prince George Cantacuzenos in a large urban property that would operate as a shopping centre. At the same time, other wealthy immigrants began to build their large residences.⁶ (fig. 2).

But this temporary decision was changed, and the final decision in 1836 to locate the palace at the opposite edge of the city, upset the balance of social evaluation and “froze” developments at Chezolitharo, whose orientations once again became vague.  The Cantacuzenos complex remained unfinished, since there was no more interest in building a shopping centre in this area, now off-centre⁷. And indeed, demand for urban land turned towards the northern and northeastern suburban zones, which were the first to be built⁸. Nevertheless, the houses which had already gone up or were finished a little later, even though most of them had been abandoned by their original (wealthy) owners, kept open for a while the prospect of the area’s designation as a residential zone⁹. This prospect remained open for about twenty years, and the last living witness of it is the Provelengios residence, still standing at the corner of Kerameikou and Milerrou street.
From a French map of 1854 (fig. 3) it is evident that over the twenty-year interval land occupation in the area had remained at the level of 1837. Both maps show four occupied plots, while in 1854, as can be clearly seen, the orchard of the silkmill had been added. It is also evident on the map, that Millerou street constituted the first pole of settlement in the area, because the new layout at this point followed the earlier road axis.

Section of a French map of Athens in 1853-1854 (Dépôt de la Guerre). Marked are the four abandoned building plots and the orchard of the silkmill on Millerou (then Kerameikou) street, the old road to Sepolia and the road intersection at the Dipylon (From: L. & R. Matton, Athènes et ses monuments du XVIIe s. à nos jours, Athens 1963).

So when “Wrampe & Co” decided to buy the complex and turn it into a silkmill (1852), the area had not yet been incorporated in the urban web. Obviously, the company chose the specific building because no buildings of analogous size, that were suitable for industrial uses, existed in Athens at this time. Moreover, the intended new use did not conflict with the still unformed character of the area, one with rather poor prospects on the outskirts of the city.

This second (conjunctural) intervention was to have a long-term impact on the area’s future, an impact of much greater longevity that the silkmill itself, since in reality it concurred with the long-tem trends that had already been inscribed in the city’s structure. These trends were reinforced by the establishment of the silkmill: they involved the area’s incorporation in the industrial zone of the capital and the crystallization of the city’s basic dichotomy –maintained to this day- between the high-standard bourgeois residential zones in the east and the popular neighbourhoods with housing and workplaces to the west.

Photograph of the western part of Athens in 1869; to the left the Theseum and in the background the silkmill, outside the city and behind the Provelengios residence (From: L. & R. Matton, Athènes et ses monuments du XVIIe s. à nos jours, Athens 1963, photograph by Rumine, Paris).

The pace of this development was slow at first, but accelerated, together with the more general pace of urbanization, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the first phase, the silkmill itself, which developed into a factory complex of diverse uses, stemmed the westward extension of the residential zone. In the early 1860s it was still outside the city; it constituted a marginal point of settlement on the 1862 map (fig. 5), which shows that building had just begun to extend to the west of Omonoia Square. Even in 1875 (fig. 6), when this part had been incorporated fully in the urban web, the silkmill complex with its orchard forms a kind of barrier, a limit on the west side.

Section of a map of Athens in 1862, by the German officer C. von Stranz. The Omonoia area is already built up. The plot of the silkmill is shown here united with the adjacent one to the southeast. At the corner of Millerou and Piraeus streets, the building of the the Chatzikostas Orphanage and, further south, on Piraeus strret, the gasworks (Gazi).

During the interval that separates the two maps, of 1854 and 1862, two further events contributed decisively to crystallizing the area’s character. The first was the installation there of the Chatzikostas Orphanage in 1856, originally in the rented N. Kyklos residence (presumably abandoned) on Kerameikou street, and subsequently in the Vranis residence, which was conceded to it, at the corner of Millerou and Piraeus streets¹⁰. Following the philanthropists’ strategy for the “social integration of the poor children”¹¹the Orphanage set up workshops in which its inmates could learn a trade: at first tailoring and shoe-making, and later blacksmithing. The forge developed into a factory which was let to a businessmans and employed 50 workers in 1884¹². The second event was the installation of the gasworks, in 1859-1861, on the south side of the road junction mentioned above. The Gazi, as it became known, was the first step in transforming the Athens-Piraeus road into the major industrial axis it still was until recently.

Section of J.A.Kaupert’s map of Athens in 1875. Marked are the manufacturing zone of the city (on the basis of a contemporary guidebook), the Chatzikostas Orphanage and the silkmill, in the ‘vanguard’ of the westwards expansion of the zone.

This complex, the axis of Millerou street with the silkmill and the Orphanage workshops on the one hand, and the gasworks on the other, constituted the first pole of attraction for the industrial activities on the west side of Athens. These were directed there through the process of successive lateral shifts that typifies the mobility and adaptability of land uses in the city. These actitivies were asphyxiating in their historic hearth which occupied the same site for centuries, since the Bazaar of the Ottoman era was established on the remains of the Roman agora and Hadrian’s Library¹³. During the Ottoman era the shops and workshops of Athens developed in a south-north direction along the axis of present-day Panos street and radially along the vertical axes of Iphaistou, Pandrosou, and Adrianou streets. Iphaistou street in particular, extending (via Astingos and Leokoriou streets) as far as the Moria-Gate, was the focus of forges and saddlers, while on the east side of Pandrosou street were textile workshops (ambatzidika). So since the Ottoman period, the structure of the city was already characterized by a segregation of activities into “polite” and “polluting”, the latter located in its western sector¹⁴.

When the streets Ermou, Aiolou, and Athinas were opened, the industrial zone was reconctituted upon these new axes. It should be noted here that, contrary to familiar stereotypes concerning its “parasitic” character, Athens was and remained an industrious city: but even in the industrial period it remained a city of small shops producing a wide range of consumer goods (from necessities to luxuries). Shops and workshops now developed mainly from east to west, with Ermou street as the central axis, eventually occupying the entire area between Monastiraki and the western edge of Adrianou street, the neighbourhood of Psyrri and the triangle bounded by Ermou – Athinas – Evripidou streets (today’s shopping centre), maintaining local enclaves of specialization.

But the expansion of the industrial zone northwards and eastwards was prevented by the “good” areas of Omonoia and Syntagma respectively. The eastern part of Ermou street hosted the best shops and coffee shops, terminating at the hotels, patisseries and mansions in Syntagma square. To the north, the Boukoura Theatre (1840), the Varvakeion High School (1857) and the head office of the National Bank delimited the ambit of Omonoia square¹⁵.

Consequently the west side of the city was the only possible outlet for the industrial zone. On this side, where, as we have seen, the more important workshops were located, the old communication node was widening its scope. Aghion Asomaton square was now the terminus for carriages and all kinds of land transport arriving with ever increasing frequency from Piraeus; the installation of the railway station here in 1869further burdened the node with the activities of loading and unloading. The entire area from Aghiou Philippou square, the pitch of the Maltese porters, to the outskirts of Eleftherias (Koumoundourou) square, was filled with facilities serving transport needs: the older pack-saddle-makers, fodder-chandlers etc. and the newer carriage-makers’, carpenters’ and metal workshops.

It was these carriage-makers’ workshops that pioneered the expansion of the industrial zone to the west. Thew first to migrate to the west of Piraeus street, to open up next to the silkmill, was the “Greek carriage-shop of Mr Galliani”¹⁶, the existence of which is attested from at least 1862. Three years later, in 1865, the newly-crowned George I visited to Dourouti silkmill and the carriage-shop “lying adjacent to it”, and awarded a medal to both owners¹⁷. Ten years later, in 1875, most of the carriage makers (14 of the 15 recorded in a guide to Athens) were still crowded in Adrianou street, Asomaton square and Sarri street, while in the immediate vicinity of the silkmill a workshop for iron structures is recorded¹⁸. In the meanwhile, a section of the silkmill itself, now in decline, was let to an independent businessman.
In 1875 the silkmill finally closed and its area was once more at a crossroads. However, ther was now a pressing and mass demand for housing; The capital had entered the orbit of rapid expansion and its population soared: from 44.250 inhabitants in 1870, it reached 63.374 in 1879 (increase of 42%) and 107.251 in 1889 (increase of 69%). So within the decade 1875-1885 the entire area, as far as the outskirts of the gasworks to the south and Kyklovoros stream to the west, was settled and incorporated in the city. Its identity as a low-class area, as well as the nature of the new demand (mass migration on an unprecedented scale from the countryside and the provincial towns), contributed to the formation of a popular neighbourhood with humble houses for artisans, journeymen and all sorts of small tradesmen and manufacturers, mainly from the Peloponnese but also from the islands¹⁹.

Even so this mass invasion of housing did not stall the penetration of productive activities in the area of the silkmill (Metaxourgeion)²⁰. On the contrary, the cg=haracter of the new incomers facilitated this mixture. Always with Millerou street as the principal pole and carriage-making as the dominant activity, workplaces began infiltrating the neighbourhood. By 1900 most of the carriage-shops had moved from Adrianou street westwards to Asomaton, Leokoriou and Sarri streets, while four had crossed Piraeus street to be installed in Millerou street. At least two of these, the carriage-shop of Rossi brothers and that of Loranzo Mamos, were large workshops employing several people and constructing all kinds of carriages and vehicles: indeed a contemporary guide mentions the “silkmill” as the address of the first.²¹.

Section of a French map of Athens in 1896 (Guide Joannes, Hachette et Cie); marked are the zone of wheelwrights’ workshops in Asomaton, Lefkoriou and Sarri streets, and the four wheelwrights’ workshops in Millerou street (1900).

In the same period metal workshops had also moved into the area. Two of the most important machine-shops in Athens, of the Konteka Bros (“Hephaistos”) and of “Vlachanis, Petropoulos & Co”, were located in Kolokynthous and Lenorman streets respectively. The second, at the corner of Konstantinoupoleos and Lenorman streets, where the Peloponesian railway track defined the new boundary of the city (fig. 7), developed into an important factory (BIO), which continued in existence until the 1960s. With these plants, and possibly other smaller ones not recorded in the guides of the period, the neighbourhood of Metaxourgeion had already formed by the turn of the 19th century the basic traits of its character, which its subsequent evolution was to reinforce: a popular-petit bourgeois neighbourhood with moxed uses (housing, trade and industry) diffused through its web²².
This physiognomy is recorded clearly thirty years later, on the 1930 map (fig. 8), which indicates, on the basis of a detailed guide of that year²³, all the industrial uses (primary and ancillary) in the area delimited by Piraeus street, Iera Odos, Konstantinoupoleos, Lenorman, Achilleos and Deliyorgi streets. This area included some 1900 addresses (numbered entrances)²⁴, about 680 of which belong to all other uses except residential (trade, industry, leisure services); that is, roughly one in three houses in the area were (or included in the ground floor) workshops or shops.
The census and mapping of these uses shows the basic characteristics of the neighbourhood. Firstly, its popular character; in comparison to what happens in the entire city, there are, for example, very few clothing-footwear shops in Metaxourgeion, but a high percentage of tailors, shoemakers, and alterations-repairs workshops; there is just one restaurant, yet a host of cook-shops and coffee shops. Secondly, the large number of shops and the variety of uses (among them health services, education and leisure) point toa neighbourhood which within the fifty or so years since it began to be settled had acquired a fully urban character. Lastly, the different density of the various uses in individual parts of the neighbourhoods bears witness of the mechanisms of attraction-repulsion of like-opposite activities that create contexts and attribute identities to sectors of the urban web. For example, commercial and industrial uses are crowded in the central zone of the neighbourhood and on the peripheral axes, while in its inrterior and particularly its western part there are mainly residential pockets, from which however food shops are not missing, dispersed throughout the web on virtually every corner; northeast, on the outskirts of Omonoia (beyond Kolokynthous street), a greater concentration of services and professions is observed.

Manufacturing installations in the neighbourhood of Metaxourgeion in 1930.

However, the most important feature of the neighbourhood of Metaxourgeion, that which is of prime interest here, is the high concentration of industrial plants, and indeed of those which in a rudimentary classification could be designated “heavy”: metal workshops, timber yards, building materials and printers, 141 units in all (fig. 8). Indeed particularly striking is the density of these units in Millerou street which, 75 years after the founding of the silkmill, remained the paramount street of workshops and small factories, while in contrast neighbouring Thermopylon street amassed more “light” workshops (clothing, footwear, box-making etc.).
Even more revealing for the resilience of the historical parameters in forming the neighborhood’s physiognomy, is the ascertainment that it retains its specialization in servicing transport; but the carriage-shops. It is these workshops servicing the motor vehicle: car-body workshops, car upholstery and springs, engine shops, paint shops and parking lots, as well as spare-parts shops. It is these workshops that will slowly give way to the garages of the post-war-period, when all possibility of establishing a Greek automobile industry has been finally wiped out. The 1930 Guide records a transitional period in which, despite the invention of the ‘production line’ in the Ford factories, the production of the automobile still remained to large degree labour intensive, thus allowing the parceling out of parts production and mainly of assembly tasks, to smaller units. The small transport industry in Athens adapted to the developments and showed remarkable flexibility and durability to time²⁵.

«Automobile Factory» (in 1997 a garage) at 54, Millerou street: living proof of a long and forgotten history.

Lateral shifts and absorptions, forces of attraction exercised by strong poles (large properties, atypical functions), readjustments of productive uses within the limits of wider families, are some of the formative mechanisms of the urban web in its historical course that the history of the neighborhood of Metaxourgeion enhances. The formation process was not so linear. The physiognomy of the neighborhood emerged from the synthesis of opposing trends that various times appeared to predominate temporarily (industrial zone - residential zone) and from the articulation of individual (conjunctural) actions and structural propensities of the development of the city. The large building  of the siklmill played a leading role in this tug-of-war. First it opened  the way for the expansion of the productive zone to the west of the city; later ‘it was beseiged’ by housing; but the influence it had already exerted on its environment withstood the test of the time more effectively than the building itself. The productive functions, with central axis Millerou street, infiltrated the newly settled area to form an inextricable mesh of housing-workplaces, an urban neighborhood with a distinctive identity.