Athens: The Creation of a Royal Capital, 1834–1914

Abstract

Although a number of books have been written about the recent history of Athens, focusing in particular on its artrchitectural heritage, its role as a royal capital has attracted surprisingly little attention from scholars. Between 1834 and 1914 Athens underwent a dramatic transformation. At the start of that eighty-year period, the city was just beginning to recover from the destruction visited upon it during the Greek War of Independence. At the end, it stood on an equal footing with most of the smaller capitals of Europe. The first two kings of Greece, Otho and George I, whose reigns coincide almost exactly with this period, played a central role in the transformation by encouraging, both publicly and privately, talented Greek and western European architects, engineers, artists and craftsmen. Furthermore, their dynastic connections, and the courts and royal pageantry over which they presided, endowed Athens with elegance and sophistication. Despite the existence of a wide body of historical evidence, up to the present time there has been no attempt to relate the physical and social transformation of Athens to its role as a royal city. This paper is intended as a first step towards filling the gap.