“1922”: The refugees changed Athens and Thessaloniki
Podoniftis (New Philadelphia), 1923. All photos are from Kyriaki Arseni’s book “Athens of the Interwar period through the photographs of Petros Poulidis” (Commercial Bank of Greece).
One of the great parameters of the Asia Minor Catastrophe was the impetus it gave to change life in Athens, Thessaloniki and other urban centers. Especially for Athens and Thessaloniki, the arrival of refugees was a catalyst for their transformation and the gradual adoption of metropolitan characteristics, which became more pronounced in the second decade of the interwar period.
“1922” and the paraphilology about this pivotal year has left an important legacy of oral testimonies, which assists the official History in understanding the complex dimensions of this cataclysmic change in the Greek area. And along with the living memories that were recorded, there is added the micro-history, which passed at best in the small print of the newspapers, when it was not banished to the land of oblivion. But this micro-history, the everyday life, the life on the pavement, in the market, on the sidewalks, in the urban houses, in the public buildings, generated the pressure for the cities to change, so that they had to give shape to the future, so that Athens, above all , to cease to be a small capital, where everyone knew each other and where everything flowed at a more or less predictable pace.
Athens in 1922 had already passed through a vestibule of preparation for its metropolitan future. Already the urban transformation under Charilaos Trikoupis and Georgios I had established a solid class of consumers. 1896 with the Olympic Games was the first, in a sense, connection with international communication networks, tourism and promotion. After 1908-1912, with the declining fashion of neoclassicism, new building technologies and neoteric aesthetic currents lead to extensive experimentation in the form and volume of buildings.
Especially after the division of 1915, Athens has passed – and psychologically – to the need to adapt to other standards, brought by the new entertainment market (and especially the cinema and musical theatre), the new fashion for the most emancipated woman, the installation of electricity and motorized transport, the development of a culture of nature worship and sea bathing. All these seminal metropolitan features would be intensified and diffused in a new urban reconstruction after 1922-23.
In Thessaloniki, urban life had deeper roots, with compact communities of Greeks, Jews and Turks. In 1912-13 initially, and especially in 1917 with the devastating fire, they prepare the new future of the Greek-European Thessaloniki, which after 1922-23 acquires, like Athens, new suburbs with pressure on its value both in the center and. and in the suburbs.
The arrival of refugees is transforming both cities. If one wants to summarize this change, one could focus on the creation of new suburbs that will remain distinct from the historical center for a few more decades. Internal geography is being reorganized.
Athens will experience pressure on land values in the private market and new government social housing programs. Punctuality is widespread in everyday goods and cases of embezzlement are many. Issues of epidemics and cleanliness in the city, but also the cafes, restaurants that concern the press. It is not out of place to suggest that an increased sensitivity was cultivated in matters of sanitary order and consumer protection.
The suburbs after 1922 are born everywhere and are refugee settlements in gradations, from Nea Smyrni and Nea Philadelphia to Kokkinia and Kaisariani.
If one focuses on the development of the capital after 1922, one should point out the gradual unification of Athens and Piraeus, with the gradual union of the suburbs between them. Refugees are opening up the labor market, bringing know-how and new factories are being established within the multi-building complex of the capital. On the outskirts of Piraeus, along Kifissos, in Nea Ionia and elsewhere, new industries are changing the landscape. The expansion of industrial and craft activity towards Moschato hastened the decline of New Faliro as a resort and, in turn, facilitated the development of Old Faliro, defined the genesis of Glyfada and strengthened a tendency to exploit the “Riviera”.
The suburbs after 1922 are born everywhere and are refugee settlements in gradations, from Nea Smyrni and Nea Philadelphia to Kokkinia and Kaisariani. At the same time, the densification of life and the change of everyday life in Athens also accelerates the creation of suburbs for the upper class in the model of garden cities, such as Psychiko and Ekali. The private initiative also gives birth to the middle-class suburb of Kypriado in Ano Patisia.
But even in Athens the changes are enormous. The refugees also influence the way the popular and small-town single-family house is now built, with techniques and patterns from a stylistic panspermia. We have the generally single-storey residence with folk Art Deco elements in all districts, while in the center we have a weakening of the urban cores of the Belle Epoque (Vasilissis Sofia and Amalia, which welcome other uses) and strengthens the trend towards the axis of Patision, from the square of Egypt to the square of Agamo (America). Patision was spectacularly strengthened after 1923 with the construction of luxurious apartment buildings as grand palais, before the consolidation of modernism after 1932-33.
The 1920s were pivotal for a number of additional changes. In summary, we have the adoption of the new calendar in 1923, the change of constitution with the establishment of the Royal Republic in 1924, the creation of the Marathon Dam which solves the time problem of water scarcity in 1929, the legislation on the horizontal year. constitutes the birth deed of the apartment building. In the same decade, the Academy of Athens (1926) and the Bank of Greece (1929) were founded, movements of institutional modernization in intellectual and economic life.
At the same time, in the 1920s, a tender was announced for the country’s largest building, the Army Stock Fund Building, on the site of the royal stables, in the Stadium-Bucharest-University-America block, to be completed in two phases by 1939. Shortly after and a little further down, the Bank of Greece Building is founded, changing the direction and orientation of Athens.
In the same decade, the new city was born in Thessaloniki with the contribution of Ernestos Ebrar, who designed Aristotelous Square. A new type of metropolitan palace is born in Thessaloniki, a hybrid style with elements of eclecticism, art nouveau, art deco, arabesque and beaux-arts with harbingers of early modernism.
In conclusion, to better understand Athens and Thessaloniki we must look more closely at the 1920s.