Beautiful City

Set in the first decades after the end of WWII and the civil war that ensued in Greece, Beautiful City follows Sonia and Aris, a middle class couple, who struggle to live with dignity and honesty in a country ravaged by traumatic political divisions, lawless development, nepotism and injustice. Sonia, a country girl, survivor of the two wars, has come to Athens with high hopes and a determination to succeed. Aris is an educated architect and engineer whose unwavering vision for a modern urban development of Athens brings him up against the prevailing attitudes of unregulated growth and the corruption and injustice supporting it. What brings them together is their shared sense of honesty, dignity and fairness which their world is lacking.  Between them comes Sonia’s distant cousin Menios, a shrewd left wing architect and political activist, in love with Sonia and antagonistic of Aris, ostensibly on ideological grounds, but in essence because he embodies everything Aris either hates or does not possess; from thriftiness and fanaticism to the ability to get away with everything, rationalise inconsistency, legitimise conceit, shine and win.  

Spanning a period of twenty five years, (1949- 1974), the story follows the tempestuous relationships between these three characters moving from love to deceit to betrayal and revenge and their gradual metamorphosis from innocent and unsuspecting youths to hardened and disillusioned adults, their personal trajectories reflecting much of the city’s metamorphosis from a humble pre-war neoclassical small town to the monstrous concrete sprawl of the late seventies. Against a background of political unrest, social instability and ideological confusion, with prosecutions, exiles -- internal and external -- and political oppression forming the everyday agenda, our heroes gradually change, and while their goals remain the same, their attitudes diverge. Sonia becomes  a fighter and survivor, Aris remains a dreamer and is shattered by reality, while Menios, when the opportunity arises, cashes in his political past to gain fame and power. 

The story is narrated many years later, in 1994, by their elder daughter Zina who – like her father – has become an architect and is assigned her first big project.  Working for the Olympic Games Installations - a job her father would have dreamt - Zina recalls how it all started, and she recounts the story of her parents - unseen and unacknowledged heroes of a humble but dignified life.