In Athens, there are thousands of beautiful conserved neoclassical buildings of the 19^th century which remind its modern history and give a certain character to the city, but there are also many which are abandoned even though they consist a masterpiece of architecture. Some of these buildings are about to collapse.

Our government protects those buildings, and characterizes them as ?preservable?, and as a result, their demolition is forbidden. However, the government doesn?t help financially their owners, in order to maintain them. Those owners, as expected, feel unlucky because they offer a cultural object to the society at their own cost. The high cost of the maintaining of those buildings, all along with the limited use of them, due to the low exploitation of the space used, force many owners, who cant afford it, to abandon and let them fall down, in order to be allowed to use those plots to construct blocks.

In my opinion, the government has the responsibility to help the maintaining of those lovely buildings so they wont turn into blocks. However, this aid is rarely offered guiding to catastrophic results.

Even more, the last 2 years, the tax of the ownership of real estate has been increased a lot. Many organizations and citizens have reacted to it, without any result. Unfortunately, more and more of those structures will perish.

 This happens despite the participation of Greece in the Convention for the Protection of the Architectural Heritage of Europe signed in Granada in 1985, where all states decided that they had to provide financial support to the owners of those buildings and save the architectural heritage as well as to resort, if necessary, to fiscal measures to facilitate the conservation of this heritage. http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/121.htm

Here are some pictures