Beneath water cascading from rocks, as the early Greeks loved to bathe … the shower is an admirable thing.1
—Sigfried Giedion
To find the source of the Loutra Ypatis, “the baths of Ypati,” follow the sulfurous smell. It will lead you to a hexagonal kiosk in the middle of a rather unkept park in a village that sits at the foot of Oiti Mountain, some 200km northwest of Athens. Press your face against the glass, long stained by mineral vapors. You will see a diminutive steaming crater; this small gazebo is capping a cut into the earth’s inner flows, a sixteen-meter-deep tectonic fault that culminates in this miniature volcano. Visible in the distance is the nearby state hydrotherapeutirion, which, as its name suggests, offers water-based therapy. This place, however, has none of the clichéd attributes of a wellness center in a luxury resort. One enters from the park, and all treatments takes place on the ground floor. The covered upper floor, overlooking the atrium with its central fountain, serves as a resting area and features a mosaic signed by the artist Elli Voila, 1958, in which a winged god holds a cornucopia pouring water. I am unsure if this is Notos, the god of the south wind, or some other figure. In spite of the classical reference, there are no spa robes, ambient soundtracks, nor scented interiors here. Water, steam, and mud—as close to the source as possible—are the sole materials of treatment. The simple modernist building, designed by the architect Kimon Laskaris in the late 1950s, overlooks agricultural fields in the distance.
As one of the bathers in Eva Stefani’s 2008 documentary, Louomenoi (“Bathers”), points out: “beyond the attempt to heal the body we try to heal the spirit too.”2 Sitting in a tub both frees and engages individual and collective bodies and minds. Water is a communicative medium. Sharing a body of water brings people into contact physically, and can also break down the barriers to conversation. “Εις υγειαν,” “to your health,” a woman wishes me before I enter the waters. Immersed in the minerals of a geothermal spring, the guests, or therapeuomenoi, debate politics, socialize, and care for each other. In these baths, the care of the self becomes a social practice. Αnother woman next to me prays before going in. The bathers are in their sixties and have been coming here for years. “If we don’t, the winter is difficult,” they explain.
Here, architecture mirrors political aspirations. Hydrotherapeutiria manifest the attempt to incorporate the distant past into futuristic visions of nation-building in twentieth-century Greece. A simple inventory can reveal what that means in terms of space. In the hydrotherapeutirion of Ypati, there are two waiting rooms, men’s and women’s changing rooms, a central courtyard with a fountain, ticket booths, a doctor’s office, and small rooms for bath treatments. The outdoor pool was a later addition. This combination of a natural spring and therapeutic retreat is a typology that can be found in multiple locations across the country: in Aidipsos, Loutraki, Methana, Lesbos, Nisyros, Kaifas, Kythira, Kylline, Eleutherai, Sidirokastro, Smokovo, Platystomo, Aridaia … Mineral springs are numerous in Greece, and their use is ancient. Nikolaos Lekkas’s book The 750 Mineral Springs of Greece, published in 1938, sets a lower estimate for the number of facilities. A 1951 report circulated internally within the Greek Ministry for Tourism inventoried the damage inflicted upon hydrotherapeutiria during World War II and the Greek Civil War. Of the seventy-four on the list, most were owned by the Ministry for Tourism, while some were labelled private and others “illegal.” Although there are some variations in their architectural detailing, proximity to the spring, footprint, and interior capacity, they are mostly solitary buildings in the landscape. Their chief distinction is subterranean: the binding of architecture and geology through plumbing.
The use of these sites goes back a long time. Many mineral springs are recorded pagan sites and were later dedicated to Christian saints. Some springs are presided over by an orthodox icon, or have a small church nearby. Even today, one overhears the bathers speaking of Αγιονέρι, “holy water.” The chemistry of Greece’s mineral waters was analyzed in the nineteenth century by Greek and foreign scientists, and finally the springs were incorporated into the state’s public health system in the twentieth century. There would once have been doctors here, medical hydrologists, to watch over us. They would have prescribed inhalations, immersions, and drinking cures, depending on the nature of the illness. National archives hold a folder with all the doctor’s names, qualifications, and years of appointments. In Ypati, I was told, at some times of the year bathers queued through the night, and the building was only closed from three until six in the morning. This is not an unusual story: at all of the sites I visited, there were accounts of thousands of patients who returned every year; of almost miraculous cures of people so arthritic that they couldn’t walk; cures of those who suffered great skin illnesses; or of women unable to bear children who later returned with their children and grandchildren.
The springs at Ypati have fallen victim to the slow disintegration of the Greek healthcare system, and, more markedly, to the radical cuts after the 2008 financial collapse. Although the hydrotherapeutiria and their “holy waters” had already been partly displaced by mass tourism to the beaches, more recent austerity measures have closed many bath buildings completely, in spite of their most loyal (often elderly) visitors.3 Another bather speaks of the decline “No more state benefits. Doctors get commissions for selling drugs instead.”
Evolving in parallel with revolutionary advances in invasive medicine in the nineteenth century, hydrotherapy or balneotherapy represented a holistic alternative to the reductive causality of modern aetiology, emphasizing the impact of environmental elements on illness and the role of nature in furnishing cures. In lieu of surgery and before the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, mineral waters were a panacea in twentieth-century Greece. Within this context, the state acted as both hotelier and healthcare provider. Neo-Hippocratic thought, for its part, emerged in various contexts, including the United States, France, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, and Britain.4 For Michel Foucault, “Hippocrates seems to be both the last witness and the most ambiguous representative of the balance between seeing and knowing in medical experience.”5 Many of the hydroclinics were named after the ancient Greek doctor. As a practice, Hippocratic medicine integrates a holistic approach whereby the patient is treated as a “psychosomatic whole … and thus, the Hippocratic doctor treats the specific patient and not the illness.”6 The theory draws on ancient traditions regarding the salutary powers of “airs, waters and places,” as well as the ideas of Paracelsus, the “founder” of modern hydrotherapy.7 In Europe and the US, universities established chairs for hydrology, medical climatology, and climatotherapy.8 Doctors and scientists, excited not least by discoveries in radiochemistry, explored alternative therapeutics based on trace elements and minerals. Neo-Hippocratics sought to extend mainstream medicine by systematically including atmospheric and terrestrial environments in the study of disease. Geopathology was one of the names for this expanded science.9 The field has since been renamed “medical geology,” defined as “the science dealing with the relationship between natural geological factors and health in humans and animals.”10
Whatever the nomenclature, these extensions to the theory of medicine have inevitably led to architectural novelties beyond the standard hospital apparatus. Hydrotherapeutiria exemplify a state-run effort to take care of its citizens through the utilization of natural resources. Neither hospital nor sanatorium, it is an understudied building type.11 Clinics around geologic formations such as Ypati embody a dynamic concept of illness including climatic agency and geological therapeutics. The United States also built facilities for treating polio, arthritis, and veterans’ injuries with water in numerous locations. In 1935, a newspaper headline about one such venue states: “In addition to new equipment, new buildings, and new treatments, it presents a new conception of disease treatment—the conception of health and recreation and enjoyment while finding that health. It is a place where the patient, surrounded by life, forgets illness.”12
In the words of Eugenios Fokas, a Greek medical doctor and healing water advocate:
the diverse geographical distribution of the springs has great therapeutic meaning because not only can we eclectically use the springs depending on the temperament of each person and their illness, we can also take into consideration their hydrotherapeutic needs and the climato-therapeutic data relative to the financial, family, and social conditions of each patient.13
He argues for each center of treatment to also act as a site of self-justificatory research and dissemination: “The building must be configured in such a way that it has the ability to be used not only as a contemporary therapeutic center but also as a scientific one.” As a medical theory, hydrotherapy became either so universally accepted that its justifications were unselfconsciously circular, or so unpalatable that even its obvious successes were ignored. Following their slow decline, Ypati and numerous other mineral spring and bath locations around Greece are now property of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF), established in 2011 in response to the Greek financial crisis. As its website proclaims, HRADF’s “philosophy is to act as a strategic partner for the Greek state to attract investments, enhance the Greek economy’s growth potential, strengthen its international credibility, and produce national wealth.”14 Essentially, the agency privatizes public properties through tenders. An array of public assets is slowly being auctioned off to domestic and foreign investors, including marinas, airports, railways, motorways, ports, and springs. The baths on Kythnos and the Loutropolis of Kammena Vourla have both been leased in the past two years. Τhe fund’s sole shareholder is the Hellenic Corporation of Assets and Participations (HCAP). The state funds were seemingly not performing, and thus their respective mission statement is as follows:
[HCAP] is one of the most complex reforms in recent years concerning the concentration, the unified management, and the transparent exploitation of a substantial part of the assets of the Greek State. The purpose of creating HCAP is not only to ensure better and sound management of public property but also to lay the foundations for overcoming shortcomings and problems over decades related to public ownership and public enterprise.
The baths of Ypati are next in line for HRADF. A video ad is calling for investors abroad, with aerial shots of the buildings and uplifting electronic music accompanied by English titles like “Wellness Tourism,” “Top Popular Spa Destination,” “Clinic with Beneficial Thermal Springs,” “Migraines,” “Hypertension.”15 The video closes with a bird’s eye view approaching the sulfur spring gazebo. As an HRADF representative stated in a conference showing this video: “we are trying to be extroverted, we travel abroad to promote our product to investors.”16
A moment of introversion might be more help. Silvia Federici speaks of the conditions “not only of our physical survival, but of our ‘re-enchantment’ of the Earth for they reconnect what capitalism has divided: our relation with nature, with others, and with our bodies.”17 In the closing paragraphs of Mechanization Takes Command, Sigfried Giedion, speaking of places of public bathing, declares that “a culture that rejects life in stunted form voices a natural demand for the restoring of the bodily equilibrium of its members through institutions open to all … A period like ours, which has allowed itself to become dominated by production, finds no time in its rhythms for institutions of this kind.”18 The neoliberal forces that led to the decline of the baths are now back again to alter their character for good. A period like ours has much to learn both about bathing and about taking care of our bodies with mineral baths. Perhaps it’s time to take the waters.
Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 678. Giedion devotes the entire last part of “The Springs of Mechanization” to the “mechanization of the bath.” There are several drafts of this chapter in his archives, and he also has notes from an exhibition on the same topic in Zurich. Omissions include the following, from the first draft: “All bathing is concerned with the care of the body. One of man’s primary needs, at all times, has been to live in harmony with his own body and to maintain the balance of this delicate instrument.” Sigfried Giedion, “The Mechanization of the Bath: External Ablution Total Regeneration,” The Architectural Review 1, gta archives, Zurich, 43-T-15-1947-7.
Eva Stefani, dir., Bathers (Greece: Graal and Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, 2008), video. I thank the director for providing me with a copy of her film.
See also: Margarita Dritsas, “Water, Culture and Leisure: From Spas to Beach Tourism in Greece during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” in Water, Leisure and Culture: European Historical Perspectives, eds. Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H. Tabb (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2002).
See: Michael A. Osborne and Richard S. Fogarty, “Medical Climatology in France: The Persistence of Neo-Hippocratic Ideas in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, no. 4 (2012): 543–63.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 56.
Constantinos Trompoukis, Vasilios German, and Matthew E. Falagas, “From the Roots of Parasitology: Hippocrates’ First Scientific Observations in Helminthology,” Journal of Parasitology 93, no. 4 (2007): 970–72, 970.
Jole Shackelford, “The Chemical Hippocrates: Paracelsian and Hippocratic Theory in Petrus Severinus’ Medical Philosophy,” in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. David Cantor (Routledge, 2001), 59–88.
Lyon, France became a medical epicenter for the Neo-Hippocratic thinking.
Francis R. Dieuaide, “Tropical Diseases and Geopathology,” Science 102, no. 2661 (1945): 656–58; Frederick Sargent, “Geopathology, a Branch of Biometeorology,” Science 103, no. 2671 (1946): 316–17.
See: Olle Selinus, “Medical Geology: An Opportunity for the Future,” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 114–16; Olle Selinus et al., eds., Essentials of Medical Geology (Springer, 2012); Syed E. Hasan, “Medical Geology,” in Encyclopedia of Geology 2nd edition, eds. David Alderton and Scott A. Elias (Elsevier, 2021): 684–702.
See: Bernard Toulier and Caroline Rose, Villes d’eaux: Architecture Publique Des Stations Thermales et Balnéaires (Paris: Dexia, 2002); Lisa Tannenbau, “Soaking in architecture,” in Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture, ed. Kim Sexton (Routledge, 2017). Espace thermale’ (“thermal space”) is an architectonic concept that goes beyond the built form to describe locales created by natural pools for bathing, places with or without buildings and structures. These could be natural formations or human interventions. And unlike baths or bathhouses, establishments at thermal springs can be hard to account for in conventional architectural vocabulary.
“Spa Opening Edition,” The Saratogian, July 26, 1935.
This quote is from Eugenios Fokas, who was both the personal doctor to and the son-in-law of the dictator Metaxas. Eugenios Fokas, Η οργάνωσης των Ελληνικών Ιαματικών Πηγών {The Organization of the Greek Healing Springs} (Athens, 1955), 9. Private archive accessed and translated by the author.
“ΤΑΙΠΕΔ: Παραδόθηκε το ‘Ξενία Κύθνος’ και οι ιαματικές πηγές στον επενδυτή” (“TAIPED: ‘Xenia Kythnos’ and the thermal springs were handed over to the investor”), Business Daily, July 18, 2022, ➝; see also Maria Paraventes, “Israeli Investor Takes Over Iconic Kythnos Xenia Tourism Venture,” GTP Headlines, July 20, 2022, ➝.
“LamiaReport.gr: Παρουσίαση ΤΑΙΠΕΔ για τα Ιαματικά Λουτρά Υπάτης,” March 10, 2024, YouTube, ➝.
In Greek, “Στο ΤΑΥΠΕΔ προσπαθούμε να ειμαστε αρκετά εξωστρεφείς, ταξιδευουμε στο εξωτερικο, προωθούμε όπως θα εκανε οποιος εχει να δωσει ένα προιον στους επενδυτες…” “Επενδυτές για τα Ιαματικά της Υπάτης αναζητά το ΤΑΙΠΕΔ στο εξωτερικό,” Lamia Report, March 12, 2024, ➝.
Silvia Federici, Re-Enchanting the World. Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2018) 189.
Sigfriend Giedion, “The Mechanization of the Bath,” The Architectural Review (October 1947), 126.
Treatment is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich (2021 and 2025), and Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2025).
