Lefkada

The center of Lefkada has a maze of streets. In the past, that was useful for surviving pirate attacks. Although the main street gives you an easy reference, you will quickly lose orientation when you step into the small side streets. Those narrow streets also offer protection against the strong sun in the summer, and the fierce winds in the winter. Although these are all advantages that many city architects and tourist books explain to Greek old small towns, it remains a mystery to me whether there is an architecturally conscious design behind the construction. Or did it just grow organically that way? Or is it selectively evolutionary: cities that weren't put together quickly became uninhabitable and disappeared.

They even have a specific name for those small streets: ' kantounia '.