Naval Hospital

 

This huge hospital has been on my to-do list for a while, so I was quite thrilled to actually get around to doing it  after all these years. Architecturally, it's a bit simplistic. I mean, it's got a nice entrance supported by these pillars, and as much as everyone loves a big girthy column, beyond that it's kinda basic. I guess when it comes to hospitals I've set the bar high. Denbigh Asylum was gorgeous even without floorboards or a roof. Here we've traded style for safety. Structurally, despite the powers-that-be saying that it's unsafe, it's probably one of the sturdiest abandoned buildings I've ever entered. And in spite of the main entrance being bricked up, there's a billion other ways in.

 

 

Looking at it now, it's really just a great big canvas for seemingly great big people. I have no idea how half of these wall scrawlings have been been achieved, but I fucking love it.

 

It began life as a sanatorium, which is an archaic term for a specialised hospital used for specific conditions. Historically sanatoriums existed for such things as hysteria, alcoholism, and an addiction to masturbation, but most commonly they were used for Tuberculosis, as is the case of this one. So feel free to pour some shots and start wanking hysterically. There's no judgement here. 

 

 

We'll start at the blocked off main entrance. People would have entered and come up these steps to the main hallway. I'm quite fond of the graffiti here. There's still a few examples of "my parents are siblings" graffiti, because we'll never be free of that, but at least the actual art is somewhat more prevalent. I like those chess pieces.

 

In the main hallway, despite the decay and vandalism, it's still possible to see the original hospital floor. The main stairs head upwards to a myriad of identical wards. 
 

 

The sanatorium dates back to 1948 when a load of sailors, or more likely their families, were given oodles of compensation after a load of them drowned in dodgy ships that hadn't been maintained properly after the war. All of that money went towards building a tuberculosis hospital exclusively for sailors. Back in the day, tuberculosis sanatoriums were all the rage. The vaccine wasn't out yet, and so far the best known treatment for patients was good clean air. As such, the hospital was built out of the way, in a woodland setting, and there were numerous balconies in the upper floors for the patients to relax on. It all sounds quite idyllic, if we ignore the part where people were dying.

 

 Towards the back of the hospital is a smaller set of stairs and an elevator.

 

 

All of the rooms, whether they were offices, store rooms, or patient bays, are now indistinguishable. But the graffiti makes all of them worth a mooch. 

 

 

Back in the day, the hospital was praised for being one of the most modern nursing institutions in the country. It had 300 beds, although sources vary from 250 to 350, so I guess 300 is just a happy middle ground. It's said that because sailors were the main clientele, and also the people who had funded the building, they were able to assist with the import of medical equipment that didn't exist anywhere else in the country yet, making this truly state of the art.

 

 

The graffiti is pretty awesome.

There's a shower block on the ground floor which isn't like the bathrooms on the other floors, which makes me wonder if this was the nurses quarters.

Onto the chapel...

I'm quite fond of the chapel. It's had quite the snazzy paint job, which I understand is just one of many it's had over the years. People keep coming in and changing it. I kinda don't mind the colours here, but I wish it wasn't limited to the far wall. Why can't the entire room be painted like this? It would look amazing.

According to the media, the chapel still gets used for a variety of rituals, most of which involve summoning Satan, which is kinda adorable. Real Satanists don't believe in a literal Satan. Satan is just a symbol that represents freedom from some silly set of rules set by a silly bunch of people. He's a metaphor for questioning unjust authority and not letting people say they're better than you. Satan wants you to be yourself, which is a horrific notion to some other religions, and really boils their piss.

And as funny as that is, the truth is that when the media goes on about devil worship, they're just trying to scare you. Or it's just a bunch of idiot kids trying to be edgy. But it's never anything to take too seriously.

But I digress. Let's move on.

The hospital also has a huge assembly hall, complete with a stage and everything. It might be a questionable thing for a hospital to have, but Sanatoriums were kinda like self-contained communities. The patients were here for a while. They had dances and other events, just to make their stay more pleasurable. It's likely that it was also a dining hall too.

And it looks pretty good. Buildings that are basically just shells can either be really awesome or really shit depending on the quality of the graffiti. This one is actually alright.

 

 

But I am a little bit intrigued by these slopes along the edge of the hallway.  

Moving on upstairs...

 

 

 There's a little balcony overlooking the stage area with some cool eyeball mouth graffiti on the wall. 

 

 

And from here we can also see more of those sloped bits at the edge of the hallway. It looks like someones attempted to make the assembly hall into a skate park or something, presumably once having more ramps and slopes and stuff in the middle of the hall. But I don't know for sure.

 

 

So while the hospital thrived throughout the 1950s, the progress being made in tuberculosis treatment would eventually lead to its downfall, and to the obsolescence of sanatoriums in general. With the vaccine introduced, people didn't need to come here anymore. 

And so in 1975 the hospital was opened to the public for general use, although it was said that repairs needed to be carried out "due to serious damage." It's not clear what these damages were, but the hospital ultimately closed for renovations in 1977. The renovations cost about 110 million, but much to the public's intrigue and suspicion, in 1983 the construction company mysteriously withdrew from the premises and didn't come back. Upon inspection, it was revealed that absolutely nothing had changed. No renovation work had happened at all. The only difference was a plaque at the main entrance informing people that it was closed for renovation.

That's an expensive plaque.

 

 

There's a load of small rooms here that would have once been offices or patient rooms. 

 

 

This would have been a bathroom.

 

 

The hospitals closure was a bit of a mystery. Nobody seemed to know why it had closed, why the renovations hadn't taken place, or what happened to the 110 million that had been sunk into it. It was still being described as luxurious in a report from 1988 which seemed to suggest plans to reopen it, but also that maybe it wasn't in need of renovation at all. 

Finally in 1989 the Minister of Health said that renovation work would start again in seven months, but this didn't happen, and it was never revealed why.

By the 1990s the hospital had descended into something of a scandal, with the media reporting on its wasted usage. Photos from 1993 show it still furnished, but already suffering from decay and vandalism. No doubt the pre-internet urban explorers had their mitts in it too, not realising that their hobby was only a decade or so away from taking off, blowing up and dying at the hands of walking dribbles of piss on social media. 

But the hospital continued to spiral downhill. Some called it the shame of the city. Various sailor unions and locals begged for it to be restored and reused. But nothing happened. 

It should be noted that fifteen people who had been on the board of directors from 1976 to 1978 were called to trial to find out what had happened to that 110 million, and why renovations of the hospital had never taken place, but due to the statute of limitations, basically slapping a time limit on legal proceedings, all of these people walked free, and everyone's questions were left unanswered.

 

 

Here we have one of the many balconies scattered around the hospital. Sanatoriums were a peculiar blend of hospital and spa. For a tuberculosis patient in the pre-vaccine era, fresh air was mandatory and timed, so back in the day there would have been a bunch of deck chairs out here and the patients would have spent considerable time relaxing under the watchful eye of the nurses.

 

 

There's a view of the front of the hospital from here. 

 

 

I quite like the graffiti here, with a smashed wall leading to a stairway to heaven. It would just look better if it wasn't next to a window. 

 

 

It's time to head upstairs again.

 

 

 

This floor is pretty much more of the same. 

 

 

But as always, it's the graffiti that makes it interesting. 

 

 

Here's this floors bathroom.

 

 

On this floor there's this weird semi-outdoors bit that leads out onto the roof.

 

 

And there's a chunk of the ceiling missing. So was this some sort of day room? Was it some sort of rooftop conservatory that enabled patients to get fresh air while remaining indoors? That's pretty cool. 

 

 

But out on the rooftop we can see that there's still a few more floors to go, and another rooftop to be accessed. 

 

 

The graffiti on the stairs is pretty interesting.

 

 I feel like there's some kind of message here that I'm missing.

 

 

This floors bathroom is decorated with skulls.  

 

 

Here we have some pretty impressive artwork by Mr Achilles, who does art on multiple walls that has to be seen from the correct angle to appreciate properly. I haven't quite got it right, but a few more tweaks would have given me a perfect skull. 

I spoke about Mr Achilles in a previous blog, where I lamented that I missed several pieces of his work purely because I didn't see it from the right angle. But then other people let me use their pictures so I didn't feel so bad.

 

 

There's a bath here.

 

 

It looks like Achilles did the cool cosmic kitty too. 

 

 

At the end of the hallway is another balcony. 

 

 Onto the last floor...

 

 

Regarding the future of the hospital, in 1993 the Prime Ministers wife allegedly looked into using it as a center for chronic diseases, and dedicating a wing for the sailors to honour the buildings origins, but this never went anywhere.

 

More laughably, in 2020 there were whispers of equipping this place with intensive care beds so that it could house patients during the Covid pandemic. That never came to fruition, and with good reason. Clearly whoever suggested that had never seen the place and was expecting it to still be pristine since the 1970s. What a buffoon.

 

 

In a more wholesome twist, a wild boar was recently found to be living here, but it has since been removed and taken to a safer environment.  

I'm not sure how I'd react if I saw a wild boar in an abandoned building. They can get pretty damn big.

 

 

The top floor is pretty much the same, but there's still a bit of furniture up here. 

 

 

The mattress was probably brought here by a homeless person. I don't know why someone decided to park an office chair on it, but as far as squatting goes, this person has great taste, picking a room with an excellent view.

 

 

The overall layout is pretty much identical across all floors, but the level of decay makes it impossible to know exactly what it looked like back when it was active. In a way it makes me kinda sad. Hospitals are fairly important, but somehow there isn't any other institution on the planet that is quite so consistently mismanaged. In this case they had a perfectly functional hospital, but they let it become this for seemingly no reason. 

 

 

This bathroom has some Rick & Morty graffiti. 

 

 

In classic urbex fashion, there are rumours that the hospital is haunted, and it is apparently a haven for ghost hunters. As usual, I didn't experience anything. The scariest thing in this building is me.

 

 

The last balcony overlooks the city, and has a couple of pigeons mooching on it. I've changed my mind. The scariest thing in the building is these feathery cunts.

 

 

I don't know if these pigeons are malnourished or if British pigeons are just fat. Probably the latter. 

 

 

The view up here is pretty nice. What a lovely place to live.

 

One last stop remains, and that's the roof.
 

 

 

There's just something really fucking relaxing about being on the rooftops, especially on a huge abandoned building. And the strange thing is, there could be loads of other people hanging out in here without me knowing. This place is huge.

 

 

It was actually a very hot day when I came up here, and I actually found it much more comfortable indoors. But even so, imagine how cool it would be to get some deck chairs and some booze, and chill out on the roof on a starry night. I bet it would be amazing.

 

 

So that's the end of the adventure, but a rather promising future looks to be on the horizon for the old hospital. I've stumbled across plans to turn this into a tourist attraction of sorts, where people can saunter through the building and learn about various myths. In particular, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, the myth of Plato's Cave, and the myth of Ariadne's thread.  And the plans look pretty detailed too. This isn't random half-baked ponderings about what it could be. Someone is actually giving it some serious consideration.

 

(image not mine, obviously)

I'm quite fond of this because it shows loads of rooftop parks! I've actually spoken about my love for this idea before, mainly because people tend to dislike brutalism architecture. Put parks on top of all the ugly structures! They can't ruin your view when you're sat on them!

Another plan shows the interior of the hospital under these plans, and it certainly looks ambitious. It looks like it would largely involve gutting most of the interior in favour of making more twistier passageways. But if someone has the means to make that happen, I'm all for it.

 (Image not mine, obviously)

 

But to conclude, I did like the hospital. It was a great way to wrap up Greece, and structurally it's fine. It's actually a pretty good place to come and chill out, and a good place for urbex beginners, because access it easy. If I wasn't so insistent on being a lone traveler, I'd totally bring some friends up to the roof for some drinks. Alas, I have no overseas social life. At least, not yet. 

So I'm going to focus on my local blog for a bit. I have a lot of being a bad example to catch up on. And then when I return to this blog, it will be some more European locations. 

In the meantime, if you like these blogs and would like to see more, then perhaps you should get a lobotomy, or just follow my social media thingies. Reluctantly I get my dopamine from Instagram, Facebook, and sometimes Vero and Reddit. I get very little from Twitter or Threads, apart from the knowledge that I'm annoying Elon Musk by using Threads and deadnaming Twitter, but follow me there anyway too. Fuck it.

Thanks for reading!