Aliki Chapple
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commonmugwort.bsky.social
Aliki Chapple
@commonmugwort.bsky.social
1.3K followers 1.1K following 4.1K posts
Literary translator, actor, early modern drama enthusiast.
Luddite geek. Greek. Truth, justice, and the comics. Mostly in Athens.
(@amaenad from Twitter but more chill)

All photos licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
More on: https://pixelfed.social/CommonMugwort
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commonmugwort.bsky.social
Eye on the past.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo. In a rundown area of central Athens, an ornate metal door has had a metal plate welded to each side. On top of that, a spray-painted design of a stylised human eye in neon gree, plight ping, Kellogg and white stares out.
December 8, 2025 at 6:08 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Ruins of Athens: No filter
#Athens #UrbanPhotography #abandoned
Colour photo but everything is white or darkness or grey with the odd bit of rust. On a concrete platform, once white, a small one-storey house or shack, also once white. A door with metal bars like a cell, the inner panel gaping on darkness. One window on either side of the door, one high up and small, both barred, the smaller painted white, the glass of the other shows darkness. Part of a metal spiral staircase leads to the front door. Bleak, bleached, cursed-looking.
December 7, 2025 at 5:58 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
A Cats of Athens/Ruins of Athens crossover.
#Caturday
#Athens #UrbanPhotography #AbandonedPlaces
Colour photo: perched above the rusted gate and below the crumbling staircase of a dilapidated house, a calico cat in ginger tabby, black, and white, glared accusingly at the photographer. The many abandoned houses of Athens are often cat colonies, most of them provided with food and water by neighbouring cat lovers.
December 6, 2025 at 6:35 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Ruins of Athens: facing the past.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo. The wall at the end of an empty lot. The traces of a ruined house on the wall. On the left, a vertical patch of yellow paint, with older blue paint beneath it. To the right, a strip of concrete where an inner wall was. Further right, a large, squarish area where traces of pink overlie pale cream. A former window, square and boarded up looks a bit like a cartoon eye, the shadows of bars cast over it like eyelashes: a cubist face.
December 5, 2025 at 6:27 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Up Cemetery Road.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo: two concrete posts painted dark ochre, with a white-painted metal gate between them. The gate looks mid century, though the barely-sugar twist on some uprights is an older style. Stairs behind it lead to a mid century house above, and a bougainvillea with dark fuchsia flowers tumbles over the get in abundance. The house is on the uphill boundary road of the First Cemetery in Athens.
December 4, 2025 at 6:48 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Old Athens (Gkyzi): Stairway
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo. A house in Gkyzi. It’s hard to describe. The ground floor door is old Athenian metalwork and glass, with one panel painted khaki green and the wall a violently clashing pistachio green. There’s an outside staircase of concrete rising tall and steep to just outside the door, then curving back towards the building. There’s concrete pillar at the front of the staircase supporting a concrete landing where that staircase arrives, and another staircase leading up from that, with a second tall concrete pillar by the door. Everything has metal railings and the landing and upper stairs are full of flowerpots.
December 3, 2025 at 6:08 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Dean Spanley.

Why: deeply touching, funny, and mystical film about family. Involves meals accompanied by alcohol. Also, dogs. Has snow on the poster.
Poster for the 2008 film Dean Spanley.
December 2, 2025 at 7:20 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Birds on a wire.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo taken by pointing camera up at the sky, against which: some shrubbery, a street light on its tall concrete column, which also supports two crossed wires dotted with pigeons, dark against a blue evening glow.
December 2, 2025 at 6:21 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Sunday in the park with cars.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo. The windshields and hoods of a row of vintage cars, Citroën 2C, parked in the Zappeion park, windshield reflecting the trees. Cars orange, blue, yellow, red. In the background, the Anglican Church of St Paul on Filellinon.
December 1, 2025 at 6:50 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Aftermath
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo. In a plate glass window with a design of diagonal black lines in it, a pale gray curtain on the lower half, inside. Above the curtain the building opposite is reflected; bakery below, decorated with a huge gold bow for the holidays, pink neoclassical above, with a business, a law student tutoring school. The glass is partly smashed in two places, probably by a brick or rock, two closely spaced attacks with cracks radiating out in circles from them. This was taken near the law school, the week after the annual commemoration of the November 17th massacre in 1973.
November 30, 2025 at 6:59 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Cinnamon cat. #Caturday #cats #CatsOfAthens
Colour photo. The cat is in profile, sitting on haunches, ad looking to camera. Green eyes, and a very unusual colour, neither orange nor that brownish black, but cinnamon brown. There’s almost no trace of tabby stripe, also unusual in a cat that isn’t black or white, just a faint stripe or two in the tail. Yellow eyes, and tense with my approach.
November 29, 2025 at 6:37 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
I made no attempt to enter the buildings, and little to photograph through what openings there were (unlike me, I know), because I found the whole compound more interesting than any details I could capture.
Thread ends.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
An old wooden door, once green, now faded to the wood in places. A panel near the handle is missing, and partly boarded up, but darkness and rubble can still be glimpsed within.
November 28, 2025 at 8:37 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Here’s the view towards Vassilissis Sofias. The modern building is outside the complex. It might be part of NIMTS, or maybe not; there’s a patchwork of institutions in the area.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo. Two rows of cow, stone buildings with terracotta tile roofs, separated by a sort of plaza on several levels, a bit modernist, and wide stone steps. In the background, against blue sky, a modern hospital building.
November 28, 2025 at 8:23 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Not everything in the hospital complex dates to a hundred years ago and more; basketball wasn’t much of a thing in Greece before the 1980s.
A wonky colour photograph taken in a hurry. The abandoned building has a very plain facade with less symmetry than its older counterparts. A green painted door and shutters on the ground floor are faded and boarded up, while the square window on the next storey, above the door, looks charred. The whole building is a very faded faded sienna yellow, and above the door on the left, there’s an old basketball backboard and hoop.
November 28, 2025 at 7:46 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Here is an ailing citrus tree by a widow.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography #abandonedPlaces
Colour photo. The corner of an abandoned one storey building of neoclassical proportions, mostly undressed stone but the lower part looks plastered and there’s a decorative plaster surround with fancy corners on the large window with the weathered pale blue shutters. The small tree is black with maybe fungus and a handful of green leaves remain. It’s near the corner of a sort of raised patio, by a former flowerbed full of weeds.
November 27, 2025 at 4:29 PM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
And 3. Our family’s famous stuffing, adapted from an Italian-American recipe by Greeks.
A Pyrex dish of chestnut and cornbread stuffing dotted with cranberries. And much more!
November 27, 2025 at 11:23 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Thing 2: Apple slab pie
Colour photo: Rectangular pan lined with parchment paper and full of clumsily made but nicely golden shortcrust pastry.
November 27, 2025 at 9:36 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Thing 1: Skillet cornbread.
Colour photo. A black iron skillet full of golden cornbread sits on a marble slab on a countertop.
November 27, 2025 at 8:44 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Different buildings have decayed differently, perhaps because of how they were built, how long they stayed in use, or their placement within the compound.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography #AbandonedPlaces
Colour photograph. In this larger neoclassical building, there’s a semi-basement work or storage space - such are often kitchens in structures of this period, and perhaps this was a mess hall. There are wide marble steps leading up to the front door, with ailanthus seedlings pushing their way through and dislodging the slabs. Up above, the plastered façade of the ground floor, still slightly tinted terracotta orange from the original mineral pigments, has mostly peeled off, showing the stone below. The wooden double door has inset panels of decorative grillework, now rusted, and with their accompanying glass gone. A wire and fitting for a long-gone lightbulb hangs at the top of the doorway.
November 27, 2025 at 6:46 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
This one must have been an administrative building; I can’t imagine patients were treated here.
Colour photograph. A two storey neoclassical building, unornamented, with three windows across each storey, tall and well placed, and a terracotta tiled roof. Blue sky above it, and a soft white cloud above the left corner of the roof. The building is abandoned but looks mostly intact, though one window shutter has a square hole in it which is bright blue with the sky that fills it.
November 27, 2025 at 6:22 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
There’s something serene about it, the undressed stone, the space, the contrast to the modern buildings around it, almost as though I’d stepped through some portal into a different city.
#Athens #AbandonedPlaces
Marble steps, on three levels with low, long buildings of undressed stone and terra cotta roof tiles on both sides. On the upper levels, a couple of cars parked. Another low building and some trees in the background, and, brightly sunlit above these shadowed structures the upper stories of several mid-late 20th Century apartment buildings, windows glowing evening gold.
November 26, 2025 at 6:54 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
The courtyard on the other side of that wooden gate.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography #AbandonedPlaces
Colour photo. An impression of low stone building to left and right and a clear courtyard area of massive concrete and pebble paving blocks before, then, after a couple of marble steps leading down, a lovely old one storey stone building with double doors and barred windows. A small cypress tree stands in front of the doors, small olive trees and a large pine partly obscure the façade, which is unornamented and utilitarian but nicely proportioned, the long roof of terracotta tiles.
November 26, 2025 at 6:19 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
I’ve often walked past the derelict military hospital complex on Deinokratous, and tried to take photographs through the gap in the massive wooden door, but the other day I found the main gate open, and the guards placidly undisturbed by my “I like old buildings” and my wandering around.
A thread.
The aforesaid gap in the great wooden doors, horizontal like a mail slot and just wide enough to give a blurry sense of light and greenery beyond.
November 26, 2025 at 5:51 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Ruins of Athens: Lemon courtyard.
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo. Taken through a rusty garden gate that frames the image, a tiny whitewashed courtyard, derelict, with a narrow, simple colonnade, whitewash flaking, above a wooden door painted yellow. There’s a lemon tree in the courtyard, and leaves and two green lemons hang above the door in the picture. Above them, a curlicue in the rusted gate looms large and slightly out of focus.
November 25, 2025 at 6:36 AM
commonmugwort.bsky.social
Old Athens: School
#Athens #UrbanPhotography
Colour photo: The doorway of a school, shabby looking, but I think still functioning. Close-up. A grid of metalwork painted pale blue, the wires cut or missing to crate a clear rectangle, through which a shadowy hallway leads to a yellow-lit school corridor work a bulletin board and educational posters.
November 24, 2025 at 6:56 AM