Agios Dimitrios, Aigli, Alaca Imaret

This is an aerial photograph taken in 1948. In the centre, we can see the temple of Agios Dimitrios, which was reconstructed 30 years after the Great Fire of 1917. In the churchyard, there are still piles of building materials next to a roofed cantharus (a fountain used for ablution before entering the church). At the top and to the right of the church, where Kassandrou Street meets Agiou Nikolaou Street, we can see traditional houses, several of which have erker windows (‘σαχνίσια’, pronounced ‘sachnisia’), and some very low buildings, possibly shacks. At that time, Ano Poli was delimited by Kassandrou Street. On Agiou Dimitriou Street, right below the church in the photograph, we can see taller apartment buildings.

At the top right corner we can see another cantharus, which does not exist today. It was in the yard of the Alaca Imaret Mosque which we can barely make out in the photograph. This is the area where Nazim Hikmet, one of the most famous poets and writers of modern Turkey, was born in 1902. Hikmet was persecuted and imprisoned by the Turkish state due to his communist ideology and spent a large part of his life in exile. Towards the end of his life, in Berlin, he wrote the poem ‘Autobiography’. These are the poem’s first verses, translated in English by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk:

I was born in 1902
I never once went back to my birthplace
I don’t like to turn back
at three I served as a pasha’s grandson in Aleppo
at nineteen as a student at Moscow Communist University
at forty-nine I was back in Moscow as the Tcheka Party’s guest
and I’ve been a poet since I was fourteen
some people know all about plants some about fish
I know separation
some people know the names of the stars by heart
I recite absences

Right past the Agios Dimitrios church, on the right, is Yeni Hamam, an Ottoman structure dating back to the 16^th century. It functioned as a ‘double’ hamam, with baths both for men and women, but changed use in the mid-1920s when it started operating as a winter and summer cinema under the name ‘Aigli’. The winter cinema closed down in 1979, but the summer cinema continued operating until the 1990s. It later operated as a tavern under the name ‘Seville’ and as a music venue under the name ‘Aigli-Yeni Hamam’. Today it is a café-restaurant.

 ‘Aigli’ used to be one of the most popular cinemas in the area. As it was mostly frequented by refugees, the cinema often played Turkish films during the interwar era, but also later, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The most famous movie star of the latter era was Hülya Koçyiğit, whose films were immensely popular in Greece.

In an interesting twist of geography, right next to the church dedicated to the city’s patron saint, a major Byzantine Christian symbol of Thessaloniki, operated a popular cinema which used to be a Turkish bath, playing Turkish films for the church’s parishioners many of whom could only speak Turkish; these are the many lives of ‘Aigli’.