With an asking price of 50 million euros, the legendary property – fillet at the corner of 9 Dionysios Areopagitou and 1 Makrygiannis is once again for sale. This time, it is also accompanied by a neighboring plot of 720 square meters.
The most luxurious property, which once belonged to Yiannis Tzivelis, known as “Mida of Sophocles” and then passed to the control of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is located on a plot of 420 sq.m. and has a total area of 2,450 sq.m. with main areas of 2,045 sq.m.
The building’s five floors include 9 apartments, with 20 bedrooms and 20 bathrooms, while it has two ground-floor shops connected by a basement, where Roman mosaics and ancient Greek ruins are preserved and displayed under protective glass floors.
Beyond the building, the price of 50 million euros also includes a neighboring plot of 720 buildable square meters suitable for parking.
“This property is poised to forge its own story as a meeting point for global figures, a rejuvenating retreat, or possibly develop into a members’ club, gallery or museum,” reads the presentation by well-known real estate consultancy Engel & Völkers . It should be noted that last year the same property was put up for sale with a price of 61 million dollars.
The history of the building
On the most expensive and most prestigious pedestrian street of the country, Giannis Tzivelis had the foresight to position himself already in 1979 by purchasing the historic building. It was rumored that he paid about 1 million dollars to acquire it from its then owners, who were Greek expatriates, reports ot.gr.
His vision was to create in the shadow of the Acropolis an apartment like Giorgio de Chirico’s in Piazza di Spagna, Rome.
The once famous investor, who a month before the first memorandum was signed declared that he was prepared to go to Syntagma Square himself to collect signatures in order to reduce the number of MPs to 150 and to abolish regional MPs, lived for many years in Italy working with the international fur trade, hence the inspiration.
In 2009 and after 3.5 years of work under the supervision of the company Potiropoulos D&L, with Liana Potiropoulou in charge, the building returned to its original neoclassical form (in 1963 it had been rebuilt in a modern style), with the aim of 9 luxury apartments and two shops on the ground floor to rent.
However, luck stopped being on the side of Yannis Tzivelis, for some the Greek version of Warren Buffett. As he may have successfully predicted movements on the stock market, but unlike his “colleague” from Omaha, he failed to predict the depth of the crisis.
In the electronic hammer
Somehow after the forced sales of large blocks of shares owned by the once great investor came the auctions. In June 2017, Alpha Bank put the neoclassical building in D. Areopagitou under the hammer for 20 million euros. This amount today seems like a “crumb”, but 7 years ago the Greek real estate market was still in the black.
A little later, in July 2017, the property went under the hammer again but with twice the total starting price, at €40 million.
The sheikh
After several fruitless auctions the building came back into the news in 2020 when it was rumored to have been ‘struck’ by the ultra-rich but enigmatic Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a scion of one of the six families that rule the United Arab Emirates, but without being known the final price.
Since then Sheikh Tahnoun, who controls a large part of the financial empire of Al Nahyan, the richest family in the world with a fortune of 300 billion dollars, indulged in a barrage of investments in our country, crowned by the Scarlet Beach Hotel in place of the old Ermioni Club, in the area of Ermionida.
A 5-star hotel complex, with a capacity of 100 beds, 15 tourist furnished residences (9 branded residences within the hotel complex and 6 exclusive villas), a conference center, spa, gym, restaurants and other related infrastructure is to be developed there. The investment plan, which received the incentives of the fast-track licensing and zoning of the Strategic Investments Law, amounts to 203 million euros.
Returning to D. Areopagitou, in the last 4 years many rumors have circulated about the use of the prime property.
For some, the five-storey building would be transformed into a luxury residential complex for people with high incomes, even claiming that there has been interest from a leading group in the sector. Even if there was interest, which is not unlikely, the proposals were probably rejected.
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