The long, low house on Tholou Street, with its wooden upper floor jutting out over the lane and heavy stone walls underneath, is one of the oldest houses in Plaka. In eighteen thirty-seven Greece's first university opened in it, in somebody's home, with lectures in the living rooms. It moved out after a few years and grew into the largest university in Greece, and the house is its museum now. That's the plaque version. The better story is above the roof. Look up at the rock of the Acropolis, because in the eighteen thirties a very famous architect wanted to put the king's palace up there.
The house belonged to two young architects, a Greek named Stamatios Kleanthis and his German friend Eduard Schaubert. They'd trained together in Berlin, come to Athens after the war, bought this battered old house and repaired it themselves. When Athens became the capital, they drew the first plan for the new city.
Their old teacher back in Berlin was Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the most celebrated arc
hitect in Prussia. Schinkel had rebuilt half of central Berlin in a grand Greek style, with columns and porticoes and a great museum fronted by a long colonnade, and he knew everything about ancient Greek architecture that could be learned from books. Schinkel had never been to Athens. He had never seen the Acropolis, except in other people's drawings. In eighteen thirty-four, he sent the new king
