Thread by @Gurdur

1/n For y'all, a thread on Greek Cyclades (Aegean Sea islands) houses, their iconic blue-and-white coloring*, and its history. Includes pandemics.

#History, #PandemicHistory, #architecture. Photo from pexels.com/photo/white-an…
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Unless you're Bavarian. White and blue. I get it.

2/n Long time ago, Cyclades islands buildings were just grey. Stone, b/c not enough trees for lumber. A killer in a hot summer; grey rock absorbs heat from the sun quite well, making life impossible at night. So people started whitewashing.
Photo from pexels.com/photo/white-co…

3/ Come 1347 A.D.. Y'all know to shout, "Black Death!". Yes. The Republic of Genoa, then controlling Provence, Corsica & much of Northern Italy, as measure mandated whitewashing houses w/ easily available lime (from crushing limestone or burning seashells)
olivetreevalley.com/when-black-dea…

4/ Confusing factoid, as pointless intermission. The Greek word for limestone is "asvestis", which may well discombobulate those of you wary of asbestos.

5/ Come 1938. Greece, under the Metaxas dictatorship. A cholera epidemic strikes (not a pandemic in 1938, more a regional epidemic, inbetween the sixth & seventh pandemics). Metaxas orders houses to be whitewashed in lime, as measure against the epidemic.
griekse-les.nl/greek-easter-i…

6/ Meanwhile, there was a cheap blue laundry dye ('blueing'), called loulaki in Greece. So people started mixing in loulaki into their lime, to make blue accents on their buildings.

7/ In 1954, Queen Frederica of Hanover, German wife of King Paul I of Greece, went on a cruise around the Cyclades islands. She came back with photos of Mykonos, showed them to Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis, & said, "This blue & white would make a great tourism icon"

8/ In 1974, Greece was going through another of its periods of pointless, dismal, brutal dicatorships. The Cyclades islands suffer too. To instil 'patriotism', the Colonels' Junta orders all houses in the Cyclades to be painted blue & white, the colors of the Greek flag.

9/ The incompetent colonels get overthrown, Konstantinos Karamanlis (1954/1955, remember) gets invited back to become PM again, the laws on blue & white get repealed. But many in the Cyclades like the color-scheme, so they keep it. You get used to your icons.
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Footnote: only partially explaining one of my complicated jokes. Usually, in German, one says Blau- Weiß, blue-white, or blau und weiß (the ß = ss). But Bavarians say, "Weiß-blau".

https://twitter.com/Gurdur/status/1394806015724511242