An open wound
Greek society has fallen in love with inertia and misery. Even obvious issues take endless discussions and verbal skirmishing before they are settled. In a way, we are a bad copy of France, where endless discussions have failed to rescue its increasingly overdrawn social welfare system. Each day I drive along Alexandras Avenue my eyes inevitably fall on that contemporary monument of misery and inertia – the refugee apartment blocks across the road from the now-defunct Panathinaikos football ground. A section of Athens’s bourgeois left has made cause of maintaining these buildings. Without doubt these apartments carry their own historic importance. But their dilapidated state barely honors that history. No one – neither the state nor their owners – maintains them for their historic value. Moreover, the current tenants bear nor relation to the 1922 refugees. Many of the residents are migrants or refugees with different needs of today, and the state ought to look after them. In 2007, the blocks are an open wound on a main Athens thoroughfare. If we decide that they must be preserved, then the state must come up with funds to alter their current facade. If we decide that they must be knocked down so a park can be established in this area, then let’s keep one building as a monument and end this story. Even diehard Bauhaus fans won’t be too sorry to see these buildings come down. The sorry state of the refugee blocks shows that when we get caught up in abstract talk problems remain. No one is saying that we should travel back to the 1950s, when significant buildings were destroyed out of haste. But perpetuating an open wound of misery just because some people make a hobby out of it is too much – even by Greek standards.
