Mediterranean Sky Shipwreck

(Drone photo credit: Marialena Karatza)

Morning, Chums! It's really not my style to open a blog post with someone else's photo, but I think we can all see why I did. The awesomeness of this shipwreck can't really be done justice on ground level. It was drone footage that made me want to see it with my own eyes. Nevertheless, when I told people that I planned on swimming out to a capsized cruise ship, I had the usual response that I get whenever I plan on doing something bonkers. People either didn't think I was actually going to do it, or they tried to persuade me not to. But they're competing against the voice in my head that tells me that someday I'll be 90-ish, and reminiscing about the days when I could make it to the toilet on time. They have no power here. Let's have some crazy adventures now, while I can.

There was just one problem, and that's that I'm actually terrified of water. My earliest memory is nearly dying in a swimming pool as a child, and it's left a bit of an impression. But the shipwreck is only a mere hundred metres from the shore. I can do that, right? Well just to make sure, in the weeks leading up to my flight I visited my local swimming pool regularly to do a few laps and learn how to swim. Sure enough, I soon found out that I sucked. But I think the hardest part of any new activity is powering through being shit, and once I got over my initial anxiety, swimming was kinda fun. I kept at it and I got better. People told me that my new hobby of swimming wasn't as interesting as my old hobby of exploring abandoned things and trying not to die. They're the same hobby, fools! Let's get on with the show!

Just look at it! Isn't it cute? It is submerged to just over half of its width which, given that the ship is 22 metres wide, indicates that the sea itself is just over eleven metres deep.

But nevertheless, this is pretty dangerous in a sort of predictable, clear-cut and obvious consequences kinda way. Maybe someday 90-year-old me will be regaling his poor carer with tales of derring-do, or perhaps my derring-do is derring-done.

The swim was actually quite refreshing. I almost didn't want to get out. I was definitely going to take a more purposeless, relaxing dip once I was finished clambering all over this massive hunk of glorious sea litter. 

 

So despite its sunny setting, the story of this ship begins in the soggy UK, where it was constructed in 1953. A shipping company called Ellerman wanted to have a fleet of luxury liners going from London to South Africa, and so created a quartet of fancy ships. They had promenade decks, lounges, cafes, a sports deck and a dance venue overlooking the swimming pool. The first of the Quartet was the "City of Port Elizabeth," who had its maiden voyage from London to Beira in January 1953. The second ship, The City of Exeter, followed on its own maiden voyage in May, and then this ship, The City of York, set sail in November. The fourth ship, City of Durban, wouldn't set off until May the following year.

Ellerman had quite a hefty number of ships named with the "City of" prefix, (and a cargo ship named "SS Lesbian" sunk by a German U-Boat, but that's another story) but these four tend to get lumped together as "sister ships" for their shared London-Beira route and similar fates in Greece.

 

And thanks to the internet, we can see how this ship looked back in its City of York days.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

Completely fucking different. Could the internet be lying to me? 

No, this really is it. It had extensive alterations to its superstructure later on in life, increasing its capacity, making it a bit top-heavy, and also upsetting a few purists who liked the original design better.

The four ships could make the journey from the UK to South Africa in fifteen days, which was actually quite an impressive speed in the 1950s. As well as going between London and South Africa, they'd also call at Hull, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. So it's safe to say that for a while they were a pretty big hit. Unfortunately for them, a whole new crazy method of transport was taking off, both figuratively and literally, and that was commercial aircraft! By the end of the 1960s, Ellerman was starting to feel the pinch, and soon The City of York and its siblings were rotting away in a port in the Netherlands, awaiting a buyer. 

 

But as you might have guessed, the four ships weren't just left rotting in the Netherlands forever. Greece was going through a post-war pre-oil-crisis shipping boom, with companies snapping up second-hand ships from all over the world, and in 1971 a chap called Michael A Karageorgis nabbed these four, intent on converting them all into modern luxury cruise ships. Keeping with the theme of them all having similar names, each ship had "Mediterranean" as a prefix.

 

 

And now here we are casually sat on the funnel of the last surviving of the four, The former City of York. Although "Surviving" is a term I use loosely. This is the only one that you can still physically go and see, but it's never going to sail again. I'm actually quite surprised that the life boats are still here. The ship might be sunk, but the lifeboats are presumably still functional. Wouldn't it be more practical and less costly to repurpose them on other ships? 

Over on the right, just before the big pole, is a window underneath a sticky-outy bit. Through there it's possible to see the ships bridge.

 

 

It's not the best image, and I've seen older photos that show it still with control panels, which seem to have fallen down into the water now. I'm sure a better shot could be taken from the actual water if one had camera that could survive getting wet. Alas, I did not. For now, we stick to the parts we can do.

 

 

The ship is on a slight slope, with the back of it being in deeper water than the front of it. The back of it is also considerably more decayed, which makes it a bit more dangerous. Down there, past the big square bit that was once the ships restaurant, there are a couple of swimming pools. I'll include an older aerial image of the ship that shows where they are in relation to where I am. 

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

 

So for context, I'm stood on the upper deck next to the life boat, and the pools are in the little crescent area, now totally submerged. So after all these years of abandonment, the pools are still full! 

What a terrible joke.

 

Time to check out the promenade deck before we all die laughing!

 

It's all a bit weird. I did wrestle with the idea of rotating my images to show the perspective as the passengers would have once seen, but then the sea was annoying me in the background, being this big vertical wall of wetness. So the ship is shown as I saw it. My floor is the ships wall, and the ships floor is my wall.

 

 

At the end of the deck is a set of stairs going upwards, and I've actually managed to find a shot from 1977 of people standing on here, with their inflatable life preservers, waiting for the life boats to be lowered down. 

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

I'm actually not sure what's going on here. The ship didn't go down in 1977, and I can't imagine someone stopping to take photos if it did. Perhaps it's a drill. 

 

Of the four Mediterranean ships, only two of them would ever actually be used. City of Durban, renamed Mediterranean Dolphin, sat in limbo for a while, as the good folk of Karageorgis pondered what to do with it, before concluding that they didn't really need it at all. It was destroyed in 1974. City of Port Elizabeth took a similar route. Initially named Mediterranean Island, the corporate bigwigs couldn't decide what to do with it, and as such it sat idle for years. In 1975, things seemed to be looking up when they renamed it "Mediterranean Sun," as if they finally had a plan for it, but then they changed their mind and scrapped it in 1980. 

That left the City of York and the City of Exeter, who each underwent extensive transformations into the Mediterranean Sky and the Mediterranean Sea. They were still identical, but now virtually unrecognisable from their former identities.

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

Here's the ship I know and love, enjoying its glory days, floating about all garishly yellow like a big buoyant cheese. And it's very strange for me to look at it here, knowing that I've walked along its hull, and jumped off its funnel.

 

Believe it or not, the ugly yellow hulls were actually pretty good selling points, because they made the ship stand out in a crowd. For a while, they had bright careers taking passengers from Patras in Greece, to Ancona in Italy. Here's a couple of old brochures:

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

(Image not mine, obviously)

This one is in German, advertising the two ships as a duo. I guess it didn't matter which one a customer ended up on, just as long as they ended up on one. The money all went to the same place. There's a big emphasis on car transport here, because the ships cargo holds had been turned into car decks, with the selling point being that people could get to Greece from Italy without having to drive. 

The Mediterranean Sky was 541 feet in length and 22 metres wide. It was said to have capacity for around 800 people and 470 vehicles, and as well as connecting Patras to Ancona, it was also the first cruise ship to connect Patras with Venice, and it also did little treks around the Aegean sea, connecting it to Turkey.

 

 

The name of the ship is printed onto the life boats. That's kinda cool.

 

 

So obviously I can't go up the stairs. But I can climb the railing! Of course, it has been decaying for over twenty years and was never built to support an adult humans body weight, so this could all go horribly wrong, but if it holds then it would enable me to walk on the ships hull. Totally worth the risk.

 

For all my preparation, learning how to swim comfortably and without risk of cardiac arrest from being so unfit, I'd failed to take into consideration that a big hunk of metal lying in the sun would be fucking hot! I'd left my shoes on the shore and now it was like walking on a frying pan.

But the pain in my poor too-ugly-for-onlyfans feet aside, isn't this amazing? Words couldn't express how giddy I was to be stood on this thing. I've been doing this whole "forbidden tourism" thing for over a decade now, but I've never done anything quite like this. The UK does have a few shipwrecks but nothing of this magnitude, and nothing in water I'd be comfortable swimming in. And also in the UK the urbex scene is a tiny bit stale. It all tends to move in a herd. That's not a dig at anyone. I'm guilty of following the crowd too. But it feels good to get out, leave it all behind, and have an authentic adventure. And if I'm being completely honest, it feels great to challenge myself, and do something that takes a little bit of effort and preparation followed by throwing myself out of my comfort zone with reckless abandon. Let's do more of that.

 

Down below on the ships funnel, it's still possible to see the faint red diamond insignia with the MK logo that I assume stands for Michael Karageorgis. This can be seen in older photos of the ship. I've managed to find one which shows people standing under it, albeit on the side that's been dunked under water.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

I'm quite happy with the above image because it gives us a sense of scale. My images alone don't really drive home just how big this ship is, because there's no frame of reference. Sometimes, and I never thought I'd say this, humans are useful.

 

 

But what's interesting about the red diamond logo is that even though it pops up in all the classic shots of this ship in its heyday, it wasn't in its most recent paint job.  

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

This image was taken in the final years of the ships life. It had a fresh new paint job which I personally think looks better than the bright yellow hull. The logo has been painted over by a new one, that being the company that owned it briefly in the late 1990s. So what we're seeing now is this paint job degrading, revealing the original paint job underneath. That's pretty awesome.

 

 

There was a bit of a shipping recession in the later decades of the 20th Century, but the Mediterranean Sky still got out there and went on some zany adventures. Firstly, in a twist I was not expecting, it got involved with Zionism. As the Soviet Union sputtered towards its final days, a lot of Soviet Jews fancied getting out of there. The Soviet Union wasn't exactly big on letting people leave, and even had the Jewish emigration movements leader, Antoly Sharansky, thrown into a labour camp for "treason." Times were messy, but as the Soviet era came to a close, the Zionist Gustav Scheller and his wife Elsa worked to facilitate the emigration of numerous Jews from Soviet territory to Israel. And to do that, they ended up getting their hands on the Mediterranean Sky. 

In 1992 the cruise ship did a number of trips to Odessa, which is now part of Ukraine, and transported around 1,400 Jews from the newly-collapsed Soviet Union to Haifa in Israel. Each trip took about four days, which seemed a little unbelievable at first, but when I looked at google maps I realised that they actually aren't too far apart. The Mediterranean Sky left Odessa, crossed the Black Sea, and entered the Aegean and Mediterranean via Istanbul. 

There was a veil of secrecy on the whole thing. A lot of Jewish attempts at emigration from Soviet territory had gone pretty badly. On the same week that the Mediterranean Sky made its first journey to Israel, a bomb in Budapest had just missed a bus full of Jews, and killed their escorting police officer. So the media in Israel was kept totally in the dark out of fear of any coverage leading to a terror attack on the cruise ship.

 

And here we have a shot of the Mediterranean Sky parked up at Israel. 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

The Mediterranean Sky saw some action again in 1993 when British troops used it for accommodation while they were stationed in Somalia. When US troops pulled out of Somalia, the ship was used to transport them from Mogadishu, the Somalian capital, to Mombasa in Kenya.

And then in 1994, the Mediterranean Sky headed over to Cuba, where it ended up parked at Guantanamo Bay as accommodation for US troops during the Haitian Refugee Crisis. 

 

Here it is, parked at Guantanamo Bay next to a hospital ship called "The Comfort."

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

And it seems that it was around this time that it lost the yellow, although it does still have the red MK logo on the funnel. 

But isn't this amazing? Before coming there, I had no idea it had any of this rich history. The ship has had a pretty impressive career.

 

 

Here we are right at the very back of the ship. As I mentioned earlier, the rear is significantly more decayed and crumbling away. The metal surface was a bit more dangerous to walk on. 

 

 

So the story goes that the Mediterranean Sky ceased operating while in the ownership of Michael Karageorgis, but in actual fact it was sold on to one other company following Michael's death in 1995. It was around this time that the Mediterranean Sky and its sister ship, the Mediterranean Sea, parted ways, no longer under the same ownership. Like the Mediterranean Sky, the sister ship had also been serving as an accommodation ship for the military, in Angola. It ended up in the hands of a company in Istanbul who renamed it Tutki and then did nothing with it. It was then renamed Alice, but once again, nothing happened. She was dropped off in Turkey in 1998 and then destroyed. 

And I happen to have found an image of it during its demolition.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

I'm adding it purely to show just how identical it is to the Mediterranean Sky, albeit by the end of its life it had a widely different paint job, with "Istanbul" written on the side in big friendly letters. But there's no mistaking that semicircular funnel and weird hooded bridge. 

 

Of the four "City of" Mediterranean-Something ships, only the Mediterranean Sky remained. Its new owners put a brand new logo on the funnel, which as we've seen, hasn't aged well. The ship made a few trips to Italy, its last journey being from Brindisi to Patras. But with the company having financial issues, the ship was arrested in Patras in 1997 for having unpaid port fees. This meant that it couldn't leave by order of a court. It sat in Patras until 1999, when the port authorities got sick of looking at it and had it towed home.

 

Here it is rotting away in the harbour.

(Photo not mine, obviously)

It's starting to look a teeny bit wrecked, but still showing a few signs of its former majesty. But alas, with nobody maintaining it, it eventually started to leak. It took on sufficient water that it was noticeably lopsided, so rather than wait for it to sink in the harbour, in 2002 a decision was made to tow it to shallow water and abandon it there. 

And here it is, in its final resting place. It's said that in 2003 it just rolled over onto its side. That must have made quite an impressive sight for anyone who happened to be visiting the sea that day.

One cool thing about the Mediterranean Sky is it's still possible to look in through the cabin windows.

 

So to make sense of the perspective, we're looking straight down. The cabin door is the floor. Theoretically it would be possible to jump down there and crawl down the old hallways, but then I'd probably be trapped.

 

 

In this cabin, the mattress has fallen across the doorway.

 

Somehow miraculously the bedding in this cabin is still on the bed.

 

The better cabins are in the ships upper decks and towards the front.

 

 

Check it out! Again, the perspective here is looking down, so that soggy mattress there is on the new ground. The lamps are similarly reflecting the direction of gravity. The furniture is, of course, bolted to the floor. The reason seems pretty obvious. In choppy waters, passengers don't want everything sliding around their cabin. And because of that, we get to see these rooms in roughly their authentic layout despite the fact that they've been tilted ninety degrees. Isn't that great?

But the really cool thing about this particular cabin is there's still a radio there in the bedside table! It's impossible to get to without a rope, but it's also nicely shielded from the elements. I wonder if it still works.

 

 

Here the drawers have fallen down into the cabin entrance, but in others, they're still attached to the cabin floor. 

 

 

Here's another one that still retains its bedding and has a radio in the bedside drawer. It's remarkable that when the ship stopped being used, the owners made no effort to remove anything that could be repurposed. Everything that was from this ship stayed with this ship. It's almost as if they expected to be able to sail it again someday.

 

And that appears to be that. I honestly think that this is one of my favourite locations. I absolutely loved it here and didn't want to leave. Of course, now that I have an underwater camera I am pretty eager to return and see what nooks can be found from sea level. I have no doubt at all that things like the bridge, and the restaurant in the upper decks can be photographed. I just need a camera that I don't mind getting splashed. 

 

In 2009 it was announced that this area would be getting cleaned up. It was something of a ship graveyard by that point, with about eighteen abandoned ships in the area. But over a decade later, the other ships have gone and the Mediterranean Sky is still here, the last member of the original City-Of quartet. It's got a proud history. It's been all over the world and has quite an impressive legacy. In a way it's sad to see it like this, but at the same time, it is still being enjoyed. It's a bit of an obscure tourist attraction for those who know about it and fancy something a little unusual that doesn't require an admission fee. Swimmers come here to dive off the ship. Free-runners come here to practice parkour. I've even seen videos of people using its sloped hull to do water-skiing stunts. More famously, in 2017 a graffiti group called the "1up Crew" came out here and painted a huge blue "1up" on the ships hull, which was visible on Google Earth, although it hasn't aged well. It's just far enough from the city that getting here makes for a nice day out, but not too far that it's a faff to get to.

And I fucking love it. I rarely say this because return journeys always make me a bit sad, but I would totally come here again and again. It's like a great big playground sticking out of the sea. 

Having said that, I also wouldn't mind doing other shipwrecks. The Mediterranean Sky is a gateway drug. 

But that's all I've got for today! 

And look, I don't want anyone to die from an awesomeness overdose, so my next two blogs will be some rather mellow locations in the UK, like a house and a college or something. It will all be pretty chilled. I still have a few more Greek locations to do, but I'll get around to those later.

In the meantime, to stay updated on my shitty blog thing, follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Vero, and Reddit. I'm also on Twitter and Threads but let's be honest, nobody would notice if I suddenly wasn't. Including me.

Thanks for reading! Stay Sexy!

Villa Levidis

 

It's finally time to talk about Greece! After not even half an hour in the country, I was heading out for the first thing on my to-do list, the former home of a chap called Dimitris Levidis. 

 

The villas best days are far, far behind it, and now it exists purely for wall scrawlers, urban explorers and allegedly (everybody roll your eyes together now) Satan worshipers. But before this it enjoyed a period of time as a movie set. As such, in spite of it being a shadow of its former self, I was able to match some rooms to some old movie scenes, before nose-diving down the rabbit hole of history that this place has to offer. 

A half-arsed internet search told me that the former King Pavros had this place built for his gardener in 1935, which would be a fine backstory. Except Pavros wasn't King until 1947 and Levidis probably wasn't his gardener.

I quickly learned that the history of the structure was murky, but some facts were regurgitated more than others. Some fictions are, too. They masquerade as the "official" story through the sheer power of copy and paste.

 

For example, nearly every source on the internet says that this place was built in 1935. But... an article written as part of a diploma thesis at an architectural school in 2017 puts the date of construction as 1938. And despite being the least common date of construction out there on the internet, I am inclined to believe an architecture diploma thesis over some guys blog that has been copied and pasted by some other guys blogs. But ultimately that's inconsequential. We can't be too harsh on some guys blog because this is also some guys blog. The house was built in the 1930s. We can leave it at that.

But what of the big circular thing?

 

 

The circular structure is older than the villa, and commonly said to be an old watch tower from the Ottoman Empire. But it doesn't quite resemble Ottoman masonry. Architectural experts have in fact placed its construction around 1840, after the Greek independence from the Ottomans, and believe it to actually be the remains of a windmill.

 

The older structure connects to the front of the villa by this big archway, and this is by far the most recognisable feature from the old movies that were once filmed here.

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

I'm pretty sure this is from a movie from 1968, "Η Αρχόντισσα και ο Αλήτης," which roughly translates to "The Lady and the Tramp," although depending on who is translating it, the word "Lady" is interchangeable with Noblewoman, Princess, or Aristocrat.

(Image not mine, obviously)

 Another movie from 1984 showing the same archway.

 

Slipping under the archway, we have the front door. Scribbled above it is the word "Achilles," which I really should have seen as a precautionary warning to be careful about what I'm looking at. But I'll come back to that.

 

The front door leads down these steps, made out of marble from Mount Pentelicus, the same marble that built much of the Greek Acropolis and many sculptures in ancient Rome. The steps briefly appear in this 1983 movie:

(Image not mine, obviously)

Here's the cast coming in through the front door, and down the marble steps.

 

 

And this brings us into this room, which seems to be the main room used by the film studio. I've seen it in varying forms of refinery, the furniture changing with every movie. But the windows and fireplace are pretty good indicators of where the scenes are.

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

 

I am regretful that these aren't the best images. They are screenshots from footage on the internet of movies that all predate the existence of remastering. The quality isn't going to be stellar. 

 

And I can't understand Greek either. I'm vaguely familiar with their alphabet, and I know the basic words like "Yes" and "No," and "Leave me alone." All the stuff an introvert needs to get by in life, really. But I can't understand Greek, so even though I can watch clips of these movies, I have no idea whats going on.

 

The same room, from a different angle.

And here we have a dance scene taking place in the same room. The title of this movie is "An Italian Girl from Kypseli."

 

The graffiti above the doorway reads "The End is Near People," presumably addressing us, the reader, as People. And I know that I really shouldn't diss bad English grammar in a country where English isn't the first language, but I absolutely love that the absence of a comma makes the graffiti suggest that the end comes with proximity to humans. Thankfully, my proximity is not forthcoming. 

 

 

This area, leading on the back garden, also features in some of the movies, easily recognisable by the arches. 

 

(Image not mine, obviously)

In total, the villa has seventy rooms, and they all look pretty much the same, with barely any roof, and not a surface spared pen or paint. Most of it is naff, but there is some good graffiti hidden in all the nooks and crannies.

 

But let's get to the real meat of the villa. There's more to this place than movies and graffiti, and extravagant air conditioning caused by the total lack of a ceiling. 

 

The occupant, Dimitris Levidis, was a retired Lieutenant Colonel and a good friend of the Greek Royal Family, Lord Chamberlain of King George II, as well as being a doctor at the University of Athens law department, a professional tennis player, the speaker in the Greek House of Parliament, and a Greek Liaison with the British Royal Family. The man has one sexy CV. I have no idea how the rumour mill missed all that and decided that he was Pavros's gardener. 

His wife, Toula Botsi, was the sister of Argyris Botsi and Nikolaos Botsi (the publishers of two Greek newspapers) as well as Maria Botsi-Tsapalira the first female mayor in Greece. Some say that Toula also won the Star Hellas beauty pageant too, but the Star Hellas wikipedia page lists all the historical winners and she isn't on there. Throw that in the bucket of myths along with the gardener and the Satan worshippers. 

Dimitris father, Nikolaos Levidis, also had a military background, fighting in the Ottoman-Greek war of 1897, which was the Greeks attempt to liberate Crete from Ottoman rule. 

The entire Levidis dynasty is actually pretty impressive. The family seems to be of Byzantine origin, coming originally from Istanbul, which was Constantinople back in the day. As such, they were intermingled with the Greek revolts against the Ottoman Empire. Numerous members of the Levidis family actually joined a secret society called Filiki Eteria (The Friendly Brotherhood), which played an active role in the revolution against the Ottoman Empire and subsequently the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1829, and the establishment of Greece as an independent country. Numerous members of the Levidis family, among other Greeks, were publicly decapitated under the command of the Turkish Sultan for the roles they played in upsetting the status quo. 

 

 

And that kinda makes it poetic that Dimitris Levidis had a great big seventy-room villa in Greece, the country that his ancestors had fought and died to create. He too would fight the Ottomans during his own time in the military, during the Greek-Turkish war from 1919 to 1922, the sequel to the first world war that I never knew existed. 

 

Here in the UK, we learn about the world wars from a British perspective, and that only really seems to involve the Germans, French, Americans and Russians. But the first world war did bring about the end of the Ottoman Empire too, and that led to Greeks occupying what we now know as Turkey, and consequently the Turkish backlash, political unrest in Greece, the establishment of modern borders between the two, and a brief period of tension between occupying British forces and the Turks, which fizzled out when nobody wanted to back the UK. And we don't learn any of this in school. We beat the Germans and that was that. Fuck the after-party.

 

In 1940 the Italians invaded, believing Greece to be an easy win, what with the political unrest following the war with Turkey. But much to their surprise they only succeeded in unifying the Greeks, causing them to shelve their political divisions and repel the invaders. But then in 1941 the Germans invaded, and the Greeks were completely overrun. 

King George II had only been reinstated in 1935 following all of the political chaos of the war with Turkey, and he ended up going into exile, leaving his country under Nazi occupation. Dimitri Levidis went with him, leaving a handful of servants in the villa. Among them was a chap called Chrysanthose Kaouris, who seemed to be calling the shots in his masters absence.

King George II and Dimitris Levidis ended up first in Crete, which also caught the attention of the Germans. Crete did put up a good fight, defended by Greek and New Zealand forces, before the German forces finally took it.

Again, a complete surprise to me. No British kid in school ever learns about what New Zealand was getting up to during the Second World War. We only ever think about it being us vs the Nazis, but the war truly was global, and each of its smaller conflicts all played a crucial role.

But with Crete lost, King George II and Dimitris Levidis traveled first to Cairo and then to the UK, where they would stay for the duration of the war.

Let's head upstairs!

 

The graffiti up here is much more extravagant. 

 

 

Someone has taken a good chunk out of their day to paint the walls and ceiling black and then cover it in white dots. If only they'd done the entire room! It would look amazing!

 

I'm quite fond of the jellyfish wearing human bodies.

 

And then here we have human eyes looking out from within a skull. This is the work of the artist Achilles. In fact, quite a lot of the work around here is his doing. 

 

Achilles sometimes incorporates household features into his artwork. In this case, a fireplace has become a skull mouth.

 

And here Achilles has turned a fireplace into a vagina. Nice job, Achilles! I love it, but I can't post it on anything owned by Zuckerberg. Even if the algorithm doesn't get me, the easily offended Boomers will.

 

This appears to be a small chapel in the upper floors of the villa.

 

And here we have another piece by Achilles. But remember what I said about being careful about what I'm looking at? I totally missed the full scale of what Achilles was doing here. See, he's not just a graffiti artist who makes vaginas out of fireplaces. He's a master of perception too, and he caught me completely by surprise, because while I was happy to photograph this room with a cartoon face painted around the door frames and inside the doorways, I totally missed the bigger picture. If only I had taken a couple of steps back! Luckily someone else on Instagram has very kindly let me use their image to show what this graffiti piece looks like in its entirety. 

 

(Photo credit: Stefan Henseke)

 

Isn't this cool? Achilles incorporates multiple rooms into his pieces, and I totally missed it because from the wrong angles, this doorway just looks like a picture of a lollypop and some random splodges. And in a world where so much graffiti is just random splodges, the casual adventurer can just walk right past them. But if you catch Achilles from the right angle, you see a picture. But even then there are additional layers, because in my image, taken through the doorway, we saw that without the boys scalp on the top of the doorway, he has an exposed brain. 

 

And I fucking love it, even if I did suck at seeing it.

 

So we're going to walk through the boys face to get to the roof. 

Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write... 

 

 

Well, I say roof, but it's really just a small room on the top floor with no ceiling and more cool graffiti. But because the roof has collapsed, it is possible to get around by walking on the walls of the ruined villa, something I seriously do not recommend. This place is falling apart and I'm dyspraxic. It was pretty silly of me, but hey-ho. Maybe there's a piece by Achilles that I can only see if I'm sprawled on the floor in a pile of rubble. 

 

 

Now we have downward views of all the upper floor graffiti. But I have to wonder, where are the chimneys?  Is that a decorative fireplace?

 

 

 

From here we can also get a great view looking out over Greece, and the city that would be my home for the next week or so. The sun is starting to set, but we aren't done yet!

 

 

What is unusual is that the villa seems to have a series of large horizontal platforms attached to the back of it, like balconies but huge, and connected by their own internal concrete stairway. 

 

 

It's a bit weird. 

 

 

And whatever the purpose, it was clearly meant to be outdoors and exposed to the elements, because there are the remains of a bay window leading back into the villa. 

 

 

The stairs lead back indoors too. There's some nice, relatable graffiti here. 

 

 

And as I came down the stairs I noticed that I'd stumbled across another piece of work by Achilles. This time I was able to find the correct angle of perspective. 

 

 

Check it out! Isn't it amazing?

 

 

Here it's still possible to see the hexagonal floor tiles, although many have been pulled up and stolen.

 

 

So back to the history... it's about to get grim, and you're welcome to skip this bit and scroll down to the next time I complain about missing one of Achilles graffiti works in the villa kitchen.

 

In 1944 Greece was under Nazi occupation and had been for some time. But there was a resistance, and in the summer of that year, they ambushed a car carrying some high ranking German officers, killing them. To say that there was a brutal retaliation is an understatement. The Nazis were fuherious, and by now they were pretty well accustomed to abusing their power. The problem is they had no idea who these resistance people were.

 

On the 16th and 17th July the Nazis took some two hundred Greek prisoners up to this villa and basically moved in, forcing the housekeeper Chrysanthose Kaouris to serve them as if they were honoured guests. Fifty of their prisoners were already prisoners brought there from a prison camp, but the other 150 were just randoms off the street. Over the next two days, the Nazis interrogated and tortured them for any information they might have on the perpetrators of the car incident. The sound of screams and gunfire could be heard by all of the townsfolk. Chrysanthose Kaouris tried to keep himself to himself but he wrote about the things he witnessed in his journals at the time, describing how he'd be working in the kitchen when a Nazi would just stroll in and wash his bloody knife in the sink, bragging about how many people he'd mutilated with it. On another occasion, Chrysanthose came outside to serve the Nazis some drinks, and saw a Greek man stripped naked and suspended about two feet from the ground by ropes tying his hands and feet to trees. The Nazis kicked the naked man in the genitals, demanding a confession. 

 

And I really feel sorry for Chrysanthose during this period. I mean obviously I feel sorry for the victims of torture too, but for Chrysanthose this was its own kind of psychological torture. He'd been minding his own business, running a house while the owner was away, and now he had to serve these home invaders, as people were tortured and killed around him. He knew that if he objected in any way or refused to be the Nazis butler, he'd be joining these ordinary Greek citizens in their torture, and when this was over he'd be carrying what he witnessed for the rest of his life.

 

Alongside the beatings and mutilations, there was forced sodomy via pointy sticks, and the most notorious act of torture when one Greek had their leg tied to a tree and the other to a motorcycle, which then drove away and tore the prisoner in two. Chrysanthose also described how he saw three Greek prisoners being forced to dig a pit. This pit would ultimately be their grave. Chrysanthose says that anyone who had survived the torture was executed and thrown into the pit. Dismembered limbs were put on display around the villa grounds, and the Nazis left the villa and just got on with their lives. Some of them did want to burn down loads of Greek homes too, but then a Captain Schmitt, the German commander of a large radio installation, convinced them that this would be overkill.

 

Hmm... personally I think we passed overkill some time ago, but hey-ho. Captain Schmitt is regarded as a voice of sanity among the Nazis occupying Greece, and I think that's something worth remembering. The first country that the Nazis invaded was their own. While they did enable every psychopath with a fantasy for committing atrocities to make their dreams come true, there were still a lot of German people who just wanted to get from one day to the next.  

Following the German occupation, Chrysanthose put a wooden cross over the burial site of the 200 people tortured and murdered at his house, and for a while it became a place that the Greek citizens would come to and pay their respects. 

 

In the back rooms of the villa, I found what I assume to be the kitchen and bathrooms. It's difficult to tell for sure when everything has been stripped out, but the surviving features do give this area a kitchen vibe.

 

 

Some wallpaper has miraculously survived. 

 

 

Stepping back into the hallway from the kitchen, I noticed this eye painted on the wall, and I really wish I had gone back into the kitchen to look at it from there, because this is yet another piece by Achilles that went completely over my head. 

Luckily someone photographed it back in 2018, and has very kindly let me use their shot here.

 

(Photo credit: Konstantina Pontiki)

 

Honestly, I'm blown away by Achilles talent but also angry at myself for missing it repeatedly. How many more pieces of art am I missing purely because I'm standing in the wrong place?

 

 

Over here there's some poetry scribbled on the wall. 

 

 

I'm assuming that this was a bathroom.

 

There's this stairway labeled "Death Way" rather ominously. It leads into the cellar. Perhaps it's a bit silly of me to venture into the cellar of this place, seeing as it's falling apart. Whoops.

 

Here we have our first penis graffiti. I guess people all over the world like drawing cocks.

 

 

Looking at youtube videos, it seems that the cellar is the place where most "Paranomal Investigations" take place. I personally didn't encounter anything. I never do. I'm open to the paranormal but I do think that if it happened with enough regularity to support as many youtube channels as it does, it would be scientifically observable and we'd have solid conclusive proof of it by now. Ectoplasm would be on the periodic table.

Having said that, given the history of this place, it's no wonder that people believe it to be haunted. I've had people ask me for the locations of places so that they can sit around in the dark and scream at the wind do paranormal investigations, and it will be something silly like a derelict hair salon. I mean why would that be haunted? If anywhere is going to be haunted, it's Villa Levidis.

 

 

Numerous stairs lead up to the surface. I think this may come up by the Lollypop Boys face. 

 

 

On the wall it says "Satan is Alive." Oh No!

 

 

Over there by the door is another interesting piece of graffiti. It's a figure made out of paint splatters and then given a head and hands.

 

I'm a little miffed that I didn't photograph is close up, so I'll just zoom in on this picture: 

I'm quite fond of it.

 

 

Because of the sloped landscape, the cellar actually comes out in the garden, and it was in the doorway that I found another one of those splattery figures with a realistic head.

 

Well, realistic-ish. His brain is on the wrong way.

A short distance away, stairs spiral back up to the ground floor, and they are decorated with similar graffiti.

I really like this. It's almost like decorating the house with the portraits of imagined former occupants

 

So this is Lina Cavalieri in a space suit. She was an Italian actress born in 1874. Her likeness was originally put into a space suit and then printed onto a decorative wall plate by the Italian home decor company, Fornasetti. It seems that the graffiti artist has taken that image and reproduced it here.

(Photo credit: Fornasetti)

I wasn't able to find much else on the other portraits, but it seems the person who painted them here was taking portrait inspiration from a variety of different places, and I am all for it. The faces are weirdly haunting, and give the illusion of portraits hanging on the wall. It kinda sweeps up the imagination a bit.

Aaaand then we step outside and find She-Ra fingering herself.

 

Dimitris Levidis returned in 1946. He found that his former home was now a mass grave site visited frequently by the loved ones of those who had died there at the hands of the Nazis. And I'm sure he felt some sympathy. Who wouldn't? But the bottom line was he wanted his house back. He allegedly had all of the corpses exhumed and moved, presumably to a more respectful burial site.

And then he got on with his life, growing old with his wife here at Villa Levidis, holding all manner of fancy party attended by his wealthy friends. He finally died in 1963, and his wife Toula had difficulties maintaining the house without him. She ended up renting out the house to a film studio, resulting in Villa Levidis being the backdrop of many a Greek movie throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Toula died in 1990, at which point her son George inherited it. 

George didn't want it. Perhaps this had something to do with its gruesome history. Perhaps he just didn't like the look of it. Whatever the reason, he sold it to a businessman in 1991. But then mysteriously the building caught fire the day after the sale, and the villa fell into ruin.

 

But with the building in ruin, the new owner found himself in a bit of a pickle. The whole hill was considered a protected forest, meaning nothing new could be built here. The only alteration he could legally make was the restoration of what already existed. A costly project, getting more and more costly by the day.

And so the mansion was abandoned, although it's been said that a lot of the physical vandalism has been carried out by treasure hunters, following rumours that the Levidis left a lot of dosh hidden in the walls.

 

From what I've read, it was in front of this garage area where the Nazi executions took place. Now this area is all just more of the same.

 

But there is another Achilles piece here, and this time I managed to get the correct angle. Nearby Achilles has painted a gigantic eyeball over the window of a small bungalow, and put Death on the wall, facing out through it.

 

And I love it. If you want to see more of Achilles artwork, and all the cool things he does with doorways and perspective, check out his Instagram here. 

Let's slip inside the bungalow...

 

That bungalow went on longer than I thought it would. Now, there's one final stop and that's the backyard.

 

And here we have the swimming pool. It's iconic in that it appeared in various movies filmed here, but there's also a gruesome rumour that a little girl once fell in and died. But I can't find any verification on that. Maybe it's as much a myth as the Satan Worshippers are. 

The house has seen enough suffering, and the use of this place for movies is nice, but putting all that aside, this place was a home once. It was built to be the place where a couple lived happily together, and as such it's kinda nice that I have found images of this pool that show Dimitris and Toula together in 1961, with all that awful history now in the past. 

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

 

(Photo not mine, obviously)

It's kinda wholesome, and even though these photos are blatantly posed, it's nice to see that this place had some happy memories too.

 

The future for Villa Levidis seems pretty non-existent. In 2007 it fell into the hands of another businessman from Cyprus and he's done absolutely nothing with it. But then the ex-King Constantine, the last King before Greece dismantled their monarchy, has apparently expressed an interest in buying the mansion, having spent a lot of time here in his youth, being the son of Pavlos and the nephew of George II. 

 

Constantine's plan, it seems, is to run the Anna Maria foundation from here, and that's pretty cool. Basically in 2003 the government reimbursed the former royal family for all of the property they'd lost when the monarchy was abolished, and ex-King Constantine said that whatever money they received would be used to set up a charitable foundation in order to give back to the Greek people. The Anna Maria Foundation, named after his wife, provides aid to people suffering from natural disasters, and its president and board of directors are nearly all members of the former Greek Royal Family. 

 

How awesome is that? Could you honestly see the British Royal Family behaving charitably if we abolished the monarchy over here?

Actually, that's probably for the best in regards to Andrew. There's one guy we don't want to see building a children's home. 

So far, Constantine hasn't done anything with Villa Levidis, and he died last year so I doubt he ever will now, but there are rumours that the former royals have re-obtained the villa. I guess we should just wait and see.

 

Oh and here's the dog kennel. 

 

 

So that's all I've got for Villa Levidis, but it is the start of my blogs about my adventures in Greece. I won't be writing them all at once though. I had a great time in Greece, but I don't want to re-live it all in one go. Let's really drag that trip out. 

My next two blogs will be on the Shropshire blog. Telford, to be specific. Time to prod that wrinkly old hornets nest. 

In the meantime, I'm on social media, and I hate it, but it is the best way to make sure you don't miss a blog post. Instagram is by far my most used platform even though the algorithm hates me. Facebook is my second most used, which really shows how much I hate the others, right? Vero is everything Instagram should be but slightly buggier and with a smaller userbase. Reddit's alright. Threads and Twitter seem to be competing for the largest number of caveman-brained bigots. And I'm on them all, because I have a self harm problem. Find me. We'll be buddies.

Thanks for reading.