It is one of the few surviving industrial buildings in the city of Karditsa, it is the old Electric. It was built in 1910, opposite the municipal market (the original building had started to be built in 1904), reinforcing an important urban pole opposite the central square, according to the cultural guide of the Municipality of Karditsa, DETAK & City Museum of the Municipality of Karditsa, 2008, Dr. Fotini Lekka, scientist in charge of the City Museum of the Municipality of Karditsa.
The factory complex consists of two rectangular buildings, with windows framed by solid bricks, a gabled roof with a circular skylight and gabled roofs. The ground floor stone building housed the engine room and the two-storey building, the other facilities and the director’s residence. The offices were housed in an adjacent low building.
The well-known industrialist of Volos, Meletios Stamatopoulos, had undertaken the electric lighting of Karditsa with a fifty-year contract. The factory operated until 1957 and from 1965 came to the municipality of Karditsa. The mayor of Karditsa, Vassilis Tsiakos, made statements to the Athenian-Macedonian News Agency about the efforts to renovate it in order to use it for cultural purposes, emphasizing: “The old Electricity is intertwined with the history of Karditsa. It is a building in which the first electric factory in the area operated for almost half a century, changing the then data for the development of the city. The building in its long history has gone through many phases. In the last years before it was completely abandoned, it functioned as an art space as part of it had been given to the art group. There were painting exhibitions and in general there was cultural activity “.
Speaking about its utilization, Mr. Tsiakos notes:
“The beginning for the utilization of the old electricity started after a relative interest of the Brakatsoula family which donated to the municipality of Karditsa a study for the utilization of the building. The Municipal Authority matured all the procedures on its part and the Region of Thessaly, based on the relevant study, undertook to finance the renovation of the building and its conversion into a cultural space. The project is expected to start in the near future and with its completion will change the image of the whole area. I must emphasize for those who do not know exactly the spatial planning, that the old electricity is in fact adjacent to the building of the Municipal Market, which is also historic and of particular importance for Karditsa. So we estimate that with its completion we will have a space that will combine culture with the tradition of the region “. Also speaking to APE-MPE, Ms. Lekka emphasizes: “Both the” old Electric “and the Municipal Market of Karditsa are two buildings very important for the economic and social life of the city over a century. Their coexistence in the interwar period marks the formation of the character of a city with distinct and located commercial and industrial functions in the urban fabric “.
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