ABSTRACT
This paper juxtaposes a detailed history of post-1912 changes in Thessaloniki’s built environment to extracts from the rich literary culture Thessaloniki inspired, to determine how local residents reacted to modernization and judge whether memory of the earlier city persisted or faded. A freehold land system aided the accommodation of the Asia Minor refugees of 1922–1923 and the post-1950s internal migration. The resulting housing projects, however, bore no resemblance to Hébrard’s elaborate design for a modern city. Thessaloniki’s literary elite took a dim view of urbanization. Writers criticized the destruction of the city’s urban and social fabric, but archaeological discoveries and restorations play a smaller role than modern political history in Thessaloniki’s literature of place. Contractors and predatory developers became the villains in many stories. Modernity means menacing, tall, anonymous, and unarticulated apartment buildings that destroyed the earlier neighborhoods and turned streets into dark and narrow passages. Like the majority of the city’s inhabitants, most writers lived in these new, poorly constructed buildings and saw the few surviving old buildings only in their walks. Nevertheless, they often chose to locate their narratives in the constricted parts of the city that had escaped demolition and rebuilding.
