The long low house on Tholou Street is the one with the wooden upper storey jutting out over the lane and huge rough stone walls at the base. It's the oldest surviving house in this neighbourhood, and it's the first university Greece ever had. Same building.
It's seventeenth century, which makes it older than the country it stands in. And the men who saved it were the same men who had drawn up the plan to demolish everything around it.
In eighteen thirty-one, two young architects arrived in a liberated Athens that had just been shelled to pieces. Stamatios Kleanthis was Greek. Eduard Schaubert was from Silesia. They had trained together in Berlin under the most celebrated architect in Prussia, and they came south together. The first thing they did in Athens was buy this wreck of a house, up on the highest lane in the old town, and start repairing the walls and the vaulted cellars themselves.
Then Greece made its capital here and handed the two of them the job of designing it.
Their
plan was a proper nineteenth-century European city plan — grand avenues, public squares, an axis running from a new palace, everything straight. And the tangle of lanes below their own front door — centuries of houses and courtyards piled up the hillside — was in the way of all of it. On paper, the old town went.
And they were the moderate option. Their old teacher in Berlin, Karl Friedrich Schi
