Being Born in Athens in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: Demography and Institutions

Reconstructing birth trends in the Greek capital during the first half of the twentieth century remains a difficult undertaking. The two principal factors in this difficulty are the poor state of preservation of the civil registry records, and the frequent changes in the delimitation of Athens and its conurbation. Yet it is precisely during this period that Athens experienced a growth so rapid that its population came to account for a third of the total Greek population. The first part of this article traces the changes in the number of births, often using secondary sources (numerous doctors, who had trained in Western Europe, left behind valuable statistical reports). It clearly shows that inconsistencies in the registration of births (including the lack of systematic registration prior to 1930) and continual expansion of the city’s limits, often renders the data—particularly the birth rate statistics— inconsistent and even implausible. The second part examines the significant change, after the First World War, in the attitudes of Athenian women (and Greek women in general, considering that Athenian mothers hailed from all over Greece) in relation to the birth of their children, despite the difficult economic and political conditions of the period. While the birth rate declined, mothers seeking to improve birth outcomes both for themselves and for their babies began to place increasing confidence in public maternity hospitals—during this period, approximately half of all births in Athens took place in such facilities. The slow opening up of access to the records of these maternity hospitals (which are gradually becoming available to researchers and the indexing of which has just began) will afford us a better understanding of the familial and social profiles of these Athenian mothers. Modernization, however, did not eradicate the persistent extreme poverty of certain segments of the population— particularly immigrants—nor did it decrease the significant number of births outside marriage. The third part of the article is dedicated to these abandoned children, who often ended up in the Athens Municipal Foundling Hospital, an institution that aimed to reduce the dramatic infant mortality rates among them.