Athens

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ATHENS

In 1789 Athens was neither the city that it was in antiquity nor the one it would become in modern times. Instead it was only a modest provincial town. Home to a mixed population of a few thousand souls consisting of Orthodox Greeks, Muslims, and a smattering of foreigners, it served as the capital of an Ottoman province and as a regional market for central Greece. Under the iron-fisted governorship of Hadji Ali Haseki (r. 1775–1795), the town grew in prominence and received an enceinte wall and a sizeable Ottoman garrison. The Acropolis was occupied exclusively by Muslims and the Parthenon served as a mosque. The lower town was divided into thirty-nine districts and its center was dominated by the market, the public baths, and the governor's residence. According to foreign observers in the early nineteenth century, Athens was a dirty, dusty, provincial backwater, noteworthy only for its antiquities.

During the Greek War of Independence (1821–1829), Athens was the scene of constant fighting as both sides vied for control of the Acropolis; at war's end, the town was a ruin. Its fortunes changed irrevocably when Greece's first monarch, Otto I (r. 1832–1862), decided that because of its antiquities and its ancient pedigree, Athens was the ideal site for the nation's capital. Even before the king relocated there in 1834, construction and in-migration had begun. During this growth phase, Athens expanded through the movement of wealthy Greeks from abroad, political office holders and functionaries, bureaucrats, and those members of the lower social orders needed to provide services to them. Athens became a small, bourgeois city replete with neoclassical public buildings and western-style townhouses, but with few other amenities.

A second, and far more profound, period of urban expansion began during the 1860s and then took off during the 1870s and 1880s. Between 1870 and 1890, Athens grew by 271 percent and manifested annual growth rates of an astonishingly high 5.17 percent. The flow of people into the city would continue, albeit at a slightly lower rate, until 1914. Unlike the earlier growth phase, the movement of peasants and workers fueled this second spurt. Land shortages and an overabundance of labor created such a tense rural situation that only a massive exodus could relieve it. Simultaneously, the Industrial Revolution slowly came to Greece and investors built factories in Athens and Piraeus. The latter developed as the port for the burgeoning conurbation. Jobs beckoned and rural migrants responded.

The result of this new movement was that alongside bourgeois Athens another city developed. This one was home to the lower classes. Housing shortages rose to crisis levels during the 1870s and 1880s as ten of thousands of people poured into Athens and Piraeus. Some migrants threw together shacks to house their families. Others built multiple dwelling houses with an eye to renting one or more of them to newcomers at very steep rates. The central core of bourgeois and "respectable" Athens became ringed with poorer neighborhoods and working-class slums.

As Athens and Piraeus grew in size and complexity, the usual social problems that accompanied nineteenth century urbanization developed. The crime rate, for example, soared. During the period of peak in-migration, the greater Athens area experienced a profound increase in homicides. During the years from 1888 to 1891, when the homicide rates in cities

such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam were less than two killings for every hundred thousand people, Athens recorded the extraordinary rate of 107. The overwhelmingly young male migrants brought with them the propensity to violence inculcated during their rural upbringing, except that circumstances in the city brought their violent tendencies more frequently to the fore.

Along with violence, other public order issues emerged. Street crimes such as robbery and larceny became a constant problem in Athens. Beggary, infant abandonment, vagabondage, and prostitution also became issues of social and political importance, as did a variety of environmental issues such as the need to supply water, build sewers, provide streetlights and pavement, and regulate traffic. All of these issues required direct state intervention.

Spurred on by events such as the Olympics of 1896 and the "unofficial" Olympics of 1906, both of which Athens hosted, the national government and private benefactors gave the city a face-lift. New public buildings were constructed, along with a public transportation system and new roads. The sewerage and water system was expanded to include some of the poorer neighborhoods. The initiative to transform Athens into a "western" city continued to the extent that by the eve of World War I it could be truly said that Athens had taken its place as a major European city.

See alsoCities and Towns; Greece.