Athenscope -<_
Project Title:
Expressions of Fear of the Former Ministry of Border
and Coast Guard
The Ministry of Border and Coast Guard (MBCG) of the People's Republic of Greece was a source of fear and terror
for fishermen. A strictly controlled three-mile exclusion zone regulated the maximum allowed distance a boat or ship could maintain from the coastline. Officially, this measure was intended to protect the fishing population from the number one enemy of the state – NATO members Crete and Cyprus,
as well as Turkey. In reality, however, this absurd and strict regulation served to prevent mass exodus. Nearly everyone
in Greece owns a boat, and by the late 1950s, there was a mass escape from the People's Republic of Greece, which could only be contained through intervention by the Soviet Navy. This eventually led to a ban on boat ownership a few years later.
During this period, the ministry was also established with the goal of erasing the sea—its most beloved child—from the
consciousness of the Greeks and to defame it as something
Research Investigations and Presentations: Steffen Seidel
Photographs: Ioannis Savvidis
"evil." The first headquarters of the MBCG was located
in Piraeus and was intended as a provisional solution.It was not coincidental that in 1983 it was moved to the southern end of Lenin Avenue, where this major thoroughfare reaches the sea at Faliron. The building thus forms a visual barrier between Athens and the sea. Symbolically, Athenians were meant to "fall into the arms" of the ministry rather than turn toward the sea.
This recapitulation of the recent architectural and urban planning history of socialist Greece—and the perhaps most absurd endeavor ever undertaken by a government—namely removing the sea from the consciousness of Athenians through architecture—was commissioned by the Ministry for the reunification with Crete and the Dodecanese, which now claims these premises of the former Ministry of Border Protection for itself.