Buildings are not just made of building materials. They include other materials, usually intangible, such as the speech and feelings of the people who designed, constructed, inhabited, and abandoned them.
“Buildings are stories,” says MONUMENTA which gathers oral testimonies about them. Having already collected many such testimonies, in the context of recording, documentation and highlighting buildings of the 19th and 20th century in Athenswhich the urban non-profit company prepared from 2013 to 2020, with the sole donor being the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (ISN), the goal now is to expand this collection.
«Buildings are not just made of building materials. They include other materials, usually intangible, such as the speech and feelings of the people who designed, constructed, inhabited, and abandoned them. It is up to us to look for them so that all the stories and short stories about the “life” of the buildings, their owners, and even the cities themselves emerge in a vivid and revealing way.“, States the APE-MPE Irini Gratsia coordinator of MONUMENTA, which for eight years records and studies the buildings of the 19th and first half of the 20th century in cities and settlements of Greece, gathering all the above.
Systematic methodological tool in the process of recording buildings and their histories, with the ultimate goal of documenting, protecting and highlighting them, were the oral testimonies. «To date, more than 300 organized videotaped interviews or interview interviews have been conducted. The material collected is unique and rare. No other source could attribute it, as the literature is limited and archives are scarce, especially for buildings that were not designed by well-known architects and are the largest architectural stock of cities.“, Adds the Irini Gratsiagiving a typical example: The apartment building at 4 Kifissias Avenue began to be built in 1936. The building, in its initial phase, included the ground floor, in which the “Parthenon” cafe operated, the first floor and basement, in which a war shelter had been formed. At a later time, two more floors were added to the building. In the cafe “Parthenon” of Andreas Glentzakis was signed, on April 27, 1941, the treaty of surrender of Athens and Piraeus to the Germans, 21 days after the entry of the German troops in Greece“, Points out the coordinator of MONUMENTA regarding the information provided by her interview Maria Glentzaki.
In addition to interviewsHowever, the personal files that were found and researched are also very important, such as the archive of the architect Georgios Diamantopoulos who designed many hospitals, banks and houses in the interwar period in Athens and in other areas – such as the building in the contribution of 15 Loukianou and Charitos streets, one of the earliest examples of the modern movement, which was built in 1929. The information from the archive of the construction company “Contractor” – whose classification and maintenance has been undertaken by MONUMENTA – is invaluable. created by the civil engineer, Moschos Diamantopoulosbrother of George, for whom the famous architect designed many buildings.
A special questionnaire was prepared for the interviews with five main topics: CVs, building / building history, neighborhood and infrastructure information, city information and natural building information. Mostly people over the age of 65 were sought, ie those who lived in cities and villages before the extensive demolition of the post-war period due to reconstruction and the phenomenon of compensation, which radically changed the form of most Greek cities.
The interviews, which until today concern her buildings Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Kalamata, Psychiko, Filothei, New Philadelphia, Kalamos (Attica), Skiathos, Naxos and Syros, have been registered in the MONUMENTA Archive and a significant part of them has been recorded. Excerpts from the interviews can be heard or read by visitors to the new MONUMENTA website, which is under construction. Their small presentations have been resurrected on the blog https://monumentakatagrafi.wordpress.com.
