Urban and Architectural Elements

Up to the early 20th century, the greatest part of the configured urban area is limited to the level area beyond the northern riverbank. The town is divided by wider or narrower streets with serpentine windings, local broadenings and dead-ends, into large, rather closed, irregular and unequal residential clusters. Parish temples and the school buildings found near them usually make up local centres. Districts are crossed by small streams which provide motion to mills, sawmills, hydraulic presses, etc. and are used to water gardens, simultaneously constituting a rather effective and healthy sewage network. The establishment and operation of large industrial installations alongside the river right next to the town, initially (late 19th c), on the southern riverbank, and later (between World War I and WWII), on the northern riverbank also, contributed to the town's gradual expansion in other directions as well, both on the other side of the river as well as towards the western grades.

Today's urban plan is, in general, a result of the implementation of the 1928 street- plan, which was revised in 1950. The old city web was modified and decomposed, with the creation of new, straight axes which cut across the old, traditional neighbourhoods.