Today’s selection of Thursday Doors comes from the fantastic lakeside town of Ioannina, Greece. Ioannina and the surrounding Epirus region on the mainland are my latest favorite places to explore in Greece. We spent a short but action-packed five days there in the heat of July.
As I walked the avenues near the Castle of Ioannina, abandoned homes with chained and barricaded doors dotted the neighborhood. Many of the distressed doors were tucked in between well-kept homes and likely wouldn’t be noticed by passersby on cell phones or those rushing to their destinations. As I put this post together, Tom Petty’s song, Don’t Come Around Here No More, started playing in my head and it won’t go away.
This abandoned home sporting the door shown in the featured image sits adjacent to the beautifully restored one below that now houses the Presveia restaurant where we enjoyed a delicious lunch on their open-air back patio. More to come on Presveia later.
Here’s a look at the front entrance to the Presveia restaurant. I found it amazing that the owners left the dining chairs out unsecured. It says something about the safe nature of the town.
Here’s a boarded-up door that definitely shouts, Don’t Come Around Here No More.
This former beauty with the arched transom can’t get no respect with graffiti flanking it on both sides.
I almost missed this door made practically invisible by the mesh netting and dried-out plants covering it.
I still scratch my head trying to figure out the setup of the graffitied doors on this old house. To be fair to this lovely town, and to assure you that I don’t hang out in derelict places, below are a few street views of the avenues I walked for my doorscursion in Ioannina.
Cheers!
Inspired by Thursday Doors.
Capturing Moments 
Great selection of doors, really like the colours and textures.
Many thanks! Lots of texture in those worn-out doors. 🙂
Lots of sadness here. I guess, if you’re going to have a song stuck in your head, Tom Petty isn’t a bad option. I can’t imagine the circumstances that would cause someone to simply abandon a home.
Yes, sad to see these homes abandoned. What happens in Greece is the younger generation often moves away from the smaller towns to Athens and either doesn’t want to or can’t afford to upkeep their parents properties once the older generation has passed on. Because of the austerity measures in Greece, it’s tough to sell real estate right now. One can only hope that these homes will be purchased and renovated once the economy picks up again.
Once beautiful – sad when people can’t respect other people’s property! But the streets you showed are nice, and Love the capture with the stack of chairs -so cute!
Indeed. Most of the homes in the part of town we visited were lovely. I felt I needed to show that.
Sad… but beautiful… ??
An uneasy beauty.
What a lovely door stroll and now I’ve got the song in my mind too, thank you! 🙂 Such intriguing door shapes. I have a feeling that if the door is graffiti-free, it’s out of respect, even if there is much of it all around. May be that they realised the beauty of it and left it as it. Those chairs are neat as well.
Thanks, Manja. I believe you are right about taggers showing respect when they leave a door alone. A daughter of a friend of ours in Greece was a tagged as a teenager and she shared that she only tagged abandoned buildings. She and her friends tagged as a political statement about the austerity measures in Greece. Unemployment for young adults is very high. It doesn’t make tagging right but that’s the social norm among the youth. Thanks for stopping by!