Closed supermarkets that have stood empty for years, old clothing workshops, tavernas, former sailcloth-cleaning businesses, contractors’ offices, detached houses, and apartments in postwar apartment buildings have, in recent years, become the unlikely homes of a large part of Greece’s contemporary art scene in Kypseli.
Yet the downtown neighborhood’s connection with literature and the arts is far from a new phenomenon. In previous decades, Kypseli was home to an extraordinary range of cultural figures, from poets Odysseas Elytis and Nikos Gatsos, and painter-poet Nikos Engonopoulos, to theater director Karolos Koun, composer Iannis Xenakis, and art critic Toni Spiteris.
Even the mythology surrounding the pedestrian street of Fokionos Negri, together with the area’s architectural heritage – with its richness and its aesthetic influences, from neoclassicism to postwar modernism – is enough to explain the new “spring” Kypseli is experiencing. Many of the artists we spoke with refer to the neighborhood’s architecture and history; others struggle to define the elusive “something” that keeps them attached to a place that began as a suburban retreat and evolved into one of Athens’ most densely built and multicultural districts. Yet they all return to the same qualities: the calm and sense of familiarity that define this part of Athens – or at least defined it when they first arrived.
