A town which does not yet have a road, but where they started building a palace

The city had been ravaged by the war and struck one visitor as a 'disgusting and filthy place'. Two years after Otto's palace had started, a French reporter scoffed: '[New Athens] is a town which does not yet have a road, but where they started building a palace - a sufficiently correct image of a country where they first made a king before they were assured that there was a nation.'

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 443