An endless refugee camp at the port of Piraeus

In September 1922, the city of Piraeus was already severely overtaxed due to a steady wave of refugee arrivals which had started at the beginning of the year. To tackle the inflows, the authorities had already expropriated several public and private buildings and built makeshift facilities in open spaces. As a result, when the mass refugee arrivals started, the city promptly turned into an endless refugee camp, according to the newspapers of the time. Thousands of refugees were staying in the area around the port of Piraeus, from the Eetioneia Coast to the Royal Pavilion, and especially at the Larissa Railway Station (opposite the church of Agios Dionysios), Karaiskaki Square, where refugees were sheltering under warehouse hangars, and the Tselepis coast. Church and school yards, squares and open spaces, like Titaneios Garden, were all overflowing with homeless refugees.       

On September 1, 1922, Athanasios Eftaxias, Minister of Finance, Georgios Bousios, Minister of the Interior, and Spyridon Giannopoulos, Minister of Welfare, visited the city of Piraeus and the places where the refugees were temporarily sheltering, ‘along the circular quay wall of the Piraeus port’, from the Eetioneia Coast to the Royal Pavilion. They decided to remove all goods from the hangars on Karaiskaki Square and empty a large warehouse next to the customs office to accommodate 1,000 refugees. They also granted the authorities use of the Municipal Theatre and, on that same day, started requisitioning dwellings in Piraeus, vowing to expand the measure to Athens and the suburbs if necessary. They also formed a three-member local committee chaired by the president of the Piraeus Chamber of Commerce, G. Iliopoulos, which was assigned the task of caring for the refugees who would settle in Piraeus. The Piraeus Municipal Council was unable to manage the situation faced by the city, as indicated by the fact that it held its very first meeting on October 3, 1922, more than a month into an acute humanitarian crisis.

Housing conditions and hygiene standards were deteriorating as the number of new arrivals rose and any effort to move the refugees away from the port was negated by fresh arrivals. On September 12, a space in the Piraeus vegetable market was converted into temporary accommodation for 1,000 refugees evacuated from Karaiskaki Square and the hangars of the Larissa Railway were requisitioned by the ‘refugee service towards refugee settlement’. On that same day, 1,704 new refugees arrived at the port, followed by 5,000 the next day.

On the Eetioneia Coast, it appears that the sheds and empty train cars next to the railway tracks, the adjacent archaeological site which is part of the city’s long walls, the cemetery of Agios Dionysios, and the port’s empty warehouses and merchandise hangars, all hosted thousands of people during those days. ‘Larissa Station has transformed into a filthy camp. Tents everywhere and the empty train cars are overflowing. How many refugees can fit into an old train car? How many women and children who need to sleep, live, get cleaned up? Twenty to twenty-five. And yet any rules against overcrowding have been disregarded. Each old train car now holds seventy to eighty women, children and elderly people […] Thankfully, overcrowding shields them against the cold night, but it also creates an atmosphere that is unbearable, unhealthy, dangerous. Hygiene standards cannot possibly be upheld. Each family has occupied a space of a couple of square metres, surrounding it with their luggage, bundles, blankets and rugs’. The refugees who managed to shelter in the train cars and station hangars were actually ‘lucky’ compared to those who were forced to stay outside for days or weeks, relying only on tents or improvised sheds of their own making to protect them from the cold and the autumn rains.