Ladies of the Athens Flea Market, Athens, Greece

In the previous post, we saw the Athens Flea Market in the early 1950s. Today, it is more refined, and most of the stores sell inexpensive new manufactured goods. Many even accept credit cards. But Sunday is still a good day to explore, and you never know what a vendor will produce from a bulging suitcase.

Monastiraki Metro station, Athens

The best way to reach the market is to take the metro to the Monastiraki Metro Station.

Turn right as you emerge from the station, and you see the old mosque with the Acropolis in the distance. The mosque was built in 1759 and now houses the modern pottery collection of the Museum of Greek Popular Art. This is one of the few buildings remaining from the Turkish era.

Turn right again and you will see the opening to Hephaestou Street. As the sign says, open every day.

I promised ladies, and here they are, complete with odd sweaters and underwear (or no underwear).

Do you prefer the tough lady look? Here is the military style

Or how about a Soviet babushka (ба́бушка)? I saw a surprising amount of old Soviet equipment, but nothing interesting like genuine military-issue watches or rocket launchers. 

Warning, warning: Greek Zombie attack. 

 And now the red riding look. The wolf might like her. 

To demonstrate equal opportunity, here are the gents of the Flea Market. Regardless of your tastes, there is plenty to see.

(If you would like to see some other lovely market ladies, come to the markets in old Kathmandu or Venice).

Most frames are from a Panasonic G1 digital camera (the first generation micro four thirds camera), some with an older Sony DSC-W7 compact camera.

The Athens Flea Market, 1951

In a previous post on the Pláka district of Athens, I described how the flea market has changed over the decades, becoming much more gentrified. The market is in the Monastiraki (Greek: Μοναστηράκι = little monastery) neighborhood just to the north of Pláka. To check if my memory was correct about the character of the flea market decades ago, I scanned some of the family's 1950s black and white film negatives.

In the early 1950s, Greece was just emerging from the brutal civil war, and the country was desperately poor. US aid was pouring in, but people were still impoverished (except for war profiteers - that is an especially ugly story).*  A flea market like this was the place to raise a bit of cash, barter some odd metal scrap for some clothing, or buy an old steel bedstead.

More treasures for sale. I recall that you often saw Greek men hanging around, seemingly without work. I also remember many crippled veterans in the post-war era.

This is a Kodachrome slide from 1953 converted to monochrome.

A tourist in the market. Notice, he is wearing a suit. Even at leisure in those days, gents often wore suits. Sixty years later, we have become a nation of swine.

This is the view of the Agora with the Theseion temple in the distance. The train below is the original metro, the Athens-Piraeus Electric Railway (Greek: Η.Σ.Α.Π. - Ηλεκτρικοί Σιδηρόδρομοι Αθηνών-Πειραιώς, Ilektrikoi Sidirodromoi Athinon - Pireos). The rail line from Piraeus to Theseion was inaugurated in February 1869 as a steam train. The route was extended to Omonoia Square and electrified in 1904, making this one of the world's oldest metros.

This may be the end of Athenas Street where it meets Omonoia Square. I remember policemen with their white gloves directing traffic from the round pedestals. Later, sometime in the 1950s, the municipal government installed traffic signals throughout Athens. 

1906 street scene, single panel from a stereo card

• Title: Street scene, Athens, Greece
• Creator(s): Keystone View Company., 
• Date Created/Published: Meadville, Pa. ; St. Louis, Mo. ; San Francisco, Cal. ; Toronto, Can. ; New York, N.Y. ; London, England : Keystone View Company, Manufacturers and Publishers, 1906. Copyright 1906
• Medium: 1 photograph : print on card mount ; mount 9 x 18 cm (stereograph format)
• Summary: Stereograph showing outdoor market with street vendors and their merchandise.
• Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-stereo-1s25683 (digital file from original) LC-USZ62-65909 (b&w film copy neg. of right half stereo)
• Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
  
• Call Number: STEREO FOREIGN GEOG FILE - Greece--Athens [item] [P&P]
• Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Back to the Pláka District: here is the Temple of the Winds. The 1800s houses were still authentic and unrestored then.

Finally, here is the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, on the south flanks of the Acropolis. Workmen are setting up chairs for a concert. The theater was built in 161 AD by a wealthy Athenian, Herodes Atticus, and is still in use for the annual Athens Festival. The seats are rock hard (really!) - take a cushion. Notice the view of the city in the background.  It looks like a village.

Technical note: Most of these negatives are Ansco Ultra Speed film. Fortunately, we saved them all these years. My dad exposed the film with his Canon rangefinder camera (possibly a model IIB) with a 50 mm ƒ/1.9 Serenar lens. This was a Japanese post-war replica of the German Leica IIIC camera and the Leica 5 cm ƒ/2 Summitar lens. The Serenar lens was not as good optically but still capable of fine work. The edges of the frames are a bit soft. The negatives were scratched and dirty, but I did not retouch. I scanned them on a Plustek 7600i 35mm scanner using Silverfast Ai software. A couple of the negatives were so thin, I would never have tried to print optically through an enlarger, but the Silverfast was able to extract a surprising amount of picture information. Black and white film is an amazingly archival storage material. Will we be able to read our digital files in 65 years?

* For a detailed description of the terrible World War II years, see:

Mazower, Mark, 1995.  Inside Hitler's Greece, The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 437 p.

Many of Greece's elite collaborated with the Nazis and became wealthy. And in Thessaloniki, many Greeks willingly let the Nazis deport Jewish merchants and profited by taking over their businesses and property. It was vile and shameful.
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For 2013 revisit to the Plaka area, please click here.
For a description of the Leica cameras that we used over the years, please click here.

Village in the city: Pláka, Athens, Greece

The Acropolis hill has been occupied since Neolithic times. For millennia, people lived around the base of the hill because it was blessed with natural springs. But when visiting Athens today, other than the Acropolis and various other classical remains such as the Agora, most of what we see is a modern city. The first post-Turkish-era king of the modern state, King Otto, brought in his Bavarian architects to design an elegant European capital city with a palace (now the Parliament), parks, and broad boulevards. Greece and Athens suffered terribly during World War II and in the brutal Civil War that followed. But much of what we see today was the result of frantic uncontrolled urban expansion that followed the end of the Civil War in 1949. Beautiful old mansions and municipal buildings were torn down and replaced with concrete boxes. Now they look like mass-produced, tired 1960s concrete boxes.

First some geography. The Acropolis is the limestone hill in the middle of the view. This is a photograph taken from Lycabettus Hill facing west at sunset. The port city of Piraeus is in the upper right, and ferry boats and container ships are in the roadstead off the port. The big temple on the Acropolis is the Parthenon.  Look at the base of the limestone bluff below the Parthenon, and you can see a cluster of small houses. This is known as the Pláka district (Greek: Πλάκα). The uppermost houses are the Ano Plaka or upper Plaka. This area has been inhabited for centuries, and this is all that remains of medieval Athens.

Now let's reverse positions.  This is the view east from the base of the Acropolis towards the Lycabettus hill. The post-World War II city fills the entire valley now.

This is the view from the Acropolis in 1900. The royal palace (now parliament building) is in the distance, and the city spreads out in the foreground. I scanned this from the left side of a stereo card. The only printed information stated, "Webster & Albee, Rochester, NY."

Walking in the warren of lanes in Ano Pláka, you almost think you are in a village (if you ignore the din of the traffic in the distance).  On a sunny day, the area has an island look.

Most of the houses have been restored since the 1960s, when this was a hippy haven and pretty grungy.

Cats love it up here, especially on a warm sunny day.

There is a lot more graffiti now, worse then I ever remember it. This is one consequence of the Greek economic crisis.

There is also widespread disgust with the priesthood, but, to its credit, the church runs many soup kitchens and helps the hungry and poor.  (The priest above is carrying a bag of Euros).

There are still some dilapidated lots in Pláka, just waiting for a rich American to bring funds and start restoring. Ever hear the term, "money pit?"

As you descend into the Kato (lower) Pláka, you enter the popular tourist area, rife with restaurants and souvenir shops.

This is the Temple of the Winds, in which a water clock once measured the time. The Acropolis is in the distance.

Finally, the Athens flea market is worth a visit. In the 1950s, I remember this being filled with vendors of car parts, mufflers, old clothes, toys, used tools, and junk in general. It has been gentrified, and many of the stores sell pseudo-designer clothes, souvenirs, and miscellaneous modern junk. I did find a music store with a good collection of Maria Callas CDs.  We will explore the flea market in more detail later.

The equally colorful Central Market is only a 10-minute walk away towards Omonia Square.

Best wishes for a prosperous 2013 to all readers!