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Mountain housing settlement. Photo: Irene Hadjisavva
Restored courtyard of a traditional house. Photo: Irene Hadjisavva
Restored traditional house. Photo: Irene Hadjisavva
space built to face the sun, open on one side using
one or more consecutive arches or beams on poles,
according to its length. The most interesting mor-
phological feature of the house, the
iliakos
also pro-
vided access to the adjacent rooms of the house. It
was often repeated on the upper floor of the house.
The doors and windows were small and few and
proportioned according to the structural qualities
of the building materials. Openings towards the
street were scant, usually with only a front door
and an
arsera
(small window) high above it for
ventilation. Houses were always positioned to-
ward the south or the east, to absorb as much sun-
light as possible.
A second floor was built usually when the plot
was small and did not allow for ground floor ex-
tensions. Access to the second floor rooms was
always via an external stone or wooden staircase
located in the courtyard against the front elevation
of the main house; this staircase usually ended in a
small covered wooden balcony.
At higher elevations, on the mountains, the topog-
raphy limited the space available for housing. In
this case a courtyard was rare, and the buildings
seem to clamber up several levels on the steep
slopes. The different levels of the house were ac-
cessed straight from the street at different eleva-
tions. There was often an
iliakos
which formed a
kind of covered verandah on the highest level of
the house.