VRYSAKI: A Neighborhood Lost in Search of the Athenian Agora by Sylvie Dumont (review)

The character of this book is well represented by the photo gracing its cover. One cannot just glance at this image; it draws the eye, demanding a careful scrutiny of its every detail—whether gathered children, dilapidated vendors' carts, recognizable antiquities, official protective fencing, drying laundry, shuttered windows, or tangled roof lines. It sets the tone for an eminently readable and fact-filled account of a neighbourhood now lost to modern Athens—in the words of the famous historian of Athens, Dimitrios Kambouroglou, "the renowned Vrysaki." The author¹ describes her objective as follows: "Using the Archives of the Agora Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens … and its extensive photographic collection, the goal of this volume is to reconstruct a neighbourhood erased from the memory of contemporary Athenians and reveal it as it was before the excavations [of the ancient Agora] began." (2) From this remarkable archival collection of some 1000 photographs, the author has assembled a riveting array of upward of 350 images, which capture our attention on page after page of this work. Whether the photographer was focusing on a single empty structure after it had been expropriated (such as the large and impressive neoclassical "House of 1 Eponymon Street" in Figure 109, 109) or capturing a panoramic view of the complete neighbourhood as a living whole prior to expropriation (such as the "View of Thissio Square from the National Observatory of Athens," Figure 65, 81), each image holds a special place in the visual tale to be told here.

And in the telling, Dumont's volume offers a useful resource for research in any number of different areas: the history of Athenian archaeology, the politics of expropriation, the sociology of the neighbourhood, nineteenth-century Hellenic domestic architecture, to name a few. In the text of this volume the author incorporates a myriad of fascinating, singular details about aspects of the challenging life and premature death of this nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Athenian community. Moreover, she includes a record of the accumulated results of her own research upon which this book is based in a catalogue, which is as complete as possible, of all the properties formerly in Vrysaki (see "Appendix B," 226–238) with owners' names, street addresses, lot sizes, and archaeological sections where they were found in the Agora excavation.² She concludes her work with these words: "It was this material that I set out to make available to a wider audience in the hope of paying tribute to the people of Vrysaki" (221).

The book comprises 15 chapters and an epilogue. After a brief introduction (Chapter 1), Chapters 2 to 4 constitute a primer to the neighbourhood—defining its extent, setting it in the context of the Athens that welcomed King Otto in 1834, and identifying the earliest efforts at excavation within its boundaries. Chapters 5 to 7 comprise a brief account of the often convoluted³ process through which the neighbourhood ultimately began to reveal the ancient Agora. With maps (old and new) and selected excavation images from the American School's photographic archives, she outlines the negotiations (both between the School and its donor, and between the School and the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education) through which the expropriation of properties in Vrysaki was accomplished. She paints the political background against which the work of the American School played out in the Agora, introduces the reader to key players in this drama whose diplomacy, or lack thereof, helped to shape the process as it rolled or stumbled or lurched along to its completion, and reprises on the stage of her book key moments that mark the problems faced and the solutions found through the series of difficult issues which confronted the inhabitants of the neighbourhood...