“How is it possible that humans have landed on the moon, but a machine hasn’t been invented to carry our groceries up the stairs?” comments a middle-aged woman from Ano Syros, known locally as an “Anosyriani.” She is standing with her husband under a canopy, bags in hand. They are taking a break before climbing the whitewashed Calvary to their home, laden with shopping.
“Is that the problem? Or is it that we have to go all the way to Ermoupoli to buy our daily necessities?” he responds stoically. We were walking the labyrinthine streets of Ano Syros with Iosif Stefanou, an architect, urban planner and professor at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), when we passed the couple. “He’s right.
When I was growing up here after the war, this place was teeming with children and shops; it was self-sufficient. Now it only has bars. In summer, it’s crowded with people; in winter, it’s dead,” he says about the windswept hill where the first – Catholic – residential nucleus was formed in the 13th century, long before Ermoupoli came into being in the 19th century.
Educated in France, Stefanou has been early concerned with protecting the traditional Cycladic architecture of his birthplace, Ano Syros, as well as Ermoupoli, the neoclassical capital of the Cyclades. He was the key figure in ensuring that relevant state decrees were issued from the 1970s, which remain in force to this day. This came at great personal cost, as he emphasizes: “Establi.