A CENTURY OF ATHENS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 7, 9 January 1935, Page 6

A CENTURY OF ATHENS.

Athens is celebrating its centenary, and at first sight that seems a rather peculiar thing for Athens to do (says the "Manchester Guardian"). It 'has a humorous ring about ;t—the idea that the city of Pericles should be following so close on the heels of Melbourne, that lusty hundred-year-old infant on the other side of' the world, in the matter of civic rejoicings over a well-spent youth. •But actually there is no city of Pericles left except for a few fragments, and the Athens of Zaimis (and Venizelos) is a rather more juvenile place than Melbourne. A hundred years ago, when a Turkish village was once again proclaimed the capital of Greece, ite handful of hovels was probably somewhat less impressive and certainly less comfortable than the- huts that English and Scottish whalers vvero erecting about the same time along the shores of New Zealand. Athens has had nothing of the continuous historical importance of Rome. For three centuries after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks she disappeared from the sight of Western civilisation almost as completely as if she had been dropped into the middle of an Amazonian jungle. The incidents of her rediscovery in the eighteenth century and the long fight for Greek independence are recent history. Modern Athens—the Athens of before the last war —was the creation of the Bavarian Otho the First and his successors and of Herr Schaubert, a German architect who "town-planned" the place after the best taste of the 'eighties and 'nineties. The population rose and continued to rise. By 1870 there were 44,000 inhabitants; to-day there are nearly half a million. Athens is facing with, confidence a second ceutrry if its rejuvenation.