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I'm not even sure that it's fair to say that Athens failed to preserve it's architecture and replaced it with the concrete monstrosities. Athens grew so dramati

I'm not even sure that it's fair to say that Athens failed to preserve it's architecture and replaced it with the concrete monstrosities. Athens grew so dramatically that there simply wasn't much of a city to preserve: in 1822 it had a population of ~5000 families, in the 1907 census it had a population of 167k, by the 1928 census (after the Treaty of Lausanne) it had a population of 802k. So we went from a few thousand houses to 800,000 people in a century. There is really no way to preserve much with that level of growth, and it's not like those 4000 houses would have been worth keeping anyway.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
You're right that Athens grew a lot and it grew fast. However, the same is true for many European cities- many larger than Athens, and many of them have preserved their older architecture much better and to a greater extent than we have. They have also built a lot of modern stuff, but in pretty much every French or Italian city I've visited in the last 15 years or so (I travel by train a lot) there is always a part of town, usually the town center, where buildings are at least a century old (I'm not an expert in architecture so I wouldn't really be able to say exactly - but for example, when I step out of the station at Gare De Lyon in Paris, the majority of buildings look positively gothic to me). In Athens, there is Plaka, of course- but even under the Acropolis you can find a mix of new and old that I haven't seen, e.g. in Bruges, or in Amsterdam, in Rouen, or certainly Venice and even Paris itself. Even London, that prides itself for its modernism, has large regions covered with older buildings. I live in a town outside of London and the house I stay in is probably from the Georgian era. etc.