Colonizing New Lands: Rural Settlement of Refugees in Northern Greece (1922–40)

Résumé 0

The Lausanne Peace Treaty (1923) imposed a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, causing a massive refugee crisis in demographically unstable regions such as Northern Greece, which had been liberated from Ottoman rule only in 1912. The majority of the over 1.2 million Orthodox leaving Turkey resettled in Northern Greece, with support from the League of Nations. Greece established over 1,700 rural colonies, reallocated land, and undertook major reclamation works: an approach to nation-rebuilding based on agriculture and backed by the simultaneous founding of Aristotle University and the Thessaloniki International Fair (1926). This contribution focuses on the spatial implications of this process, which entailed the adaptation of housing stock, standardized planning, and prefabrication. Houses came first: while they were being built, the vacant blocks intended for the church and school, provided unofficial early forms of public space. Methodologically, we consulted available literature and unpublished material, including a substantial body of data on refugee villages along the Strymon Valley and in the Kilkis area, gathered by students of the AUTh School of Architecture in local prefectures’ archives from 1992 to 1995. Extensive fieldwork in Central and Eastern Macedonia allowed us to meet independent scholars and consult local state and municipal services. Relevant research material is held in Athens, by the Cartographic Heritage Archives, the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive ELIA, the American School of Classical Studies ACSA, the Eleftherios Venizelos Archives at the Benaki Museum. We also accessed private archives, such as S. Demertzis’s map collection and P. Sommerfeld’s family documents about mass prefabricated wooden dwellings. To comparatively understand the physical features of each context, we produced and used maps at different scales, identifying elements of the historical palimpsest which played a part in the resettlement scheme. The relationship between planning criteria and landscape, or else between housing units, field allotments and basic community facilities, called for ad hoc captions.