GREECE
Saturday, August 29, 2009
From Here to There and Back again with Diddilydeedot : Blog
Ano Kaisariani
The area was once used for farmland and forests dominated its reach.
The area was of mixed farming including pastures, vegetables, and
groves.
In the mid-20th century, suburban housing development from
Athens spread across and eliminated farmland, leaving empty space to
the southeast.
The forests are situated in the east, making up Mount Hymettus' largest forest, and the forested area also contains a valley with a road linking Athens' nearby communication tower.
The University of Athens is to the northeast, mainly in Zografou,
while the rest of the area is made up of residential buildings.
Kaisariani has a hill in the centre, and much of the land in the east
is rocky terrain and forests of Hymettus; the municipality is about 85 square kilometres, of which 75 square kilometres are mountainous and also forested.
The Kaisariani Monastery
can be found to the southeast in the Hymettus mountain, while the
eastern bypass of Athens lies in the east.
The town also has its own Greek A2 League basketball team, named Near East Kaisariani, which was founded in 1927. The team plays in the Kaisariani Stadium.
It was not always a pleasant place to be, during the war the history books show unhappy times.
The town was founded in 1922 as a refugee camp for refugees driven
from Asia Minor. Most of whom coming from Smyrna. The municipality was
created in 1934, out of a former subdivision of the city of Athens.
A dark part of the modern history of Greece was written at the Rifle Range of Kessariani, where hundreds of Greek people were prosecuted by the Nazi occupiers. There, on the May 1st, 1944,
200 Greek political activists were prosecuted, as a revenge for the
death of a German general, who was killed during a battle with
guerrillas, in Molai, Sparti.
The early hours of June 17, 1944, 10 men of the Youth revolutionary organization EPON and guerillas of the National Liberation Front were killed, when trapped by the Nazi forces at the Monastery of Kessariani, where they had been hiding.
