That small domed church sitting in the middle of Ermou Street is Kapnikarea, and the street splits and goes around it on both sides. Look along its sides and you can see the seams, because it's really three buildings stitched together: the domed main church in the middle, a separate little chapel stuck onto the north side, and a porch added across the front later still. Look at the ground, too. The church sits lower than the sidewalk around it, in its own little sunken square. It hasn't sunk. Athens has risen. The church was built around the middle of the eleventh century, and the city has been piling up around its knees ever since.
By rights, it shouldn't be here at all. When Athens became the capital in the eighteen thirties, a Bavarian architect named Leo von Klenze was brought in to sort out the plans for the new city. Ermou was going to be a grand straight avenue, running west from the new royal palace. This church stood squarely in the way, so it was marked for demolition.
What
saved it was a letter from Munich.
The young king of Greece, Otto, was Bavarian, and his father was Ludwig the First, the King of Bavaria. Ludwig was obsessed with ancient Greece. Before Greece was even a country, he had bought the carved sculptures off an entire Greek temple, from the island of Aegina, and shipped them home. He built a museum in Munich to show them off, wrote poems about Greek
