Flyers in front of an Armenian house

The photograph shows flyers from a demonstration in solidarity with migrants which took place on June 15, 2021. The first flyer reads: ‘WE WANT MIGRANTS IN OUR SCHOOLS AND NEIGHBOURHOODS’ and is signed by the group ‘Autonomous Intervention in El-Eng’ (referring to the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). The second flyer reads: ‘PAPERS, HOUSING, ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE & EDUCATION FOR ALL WOMEN MIGRANTS’ and is signed by the ‘Stop War on Migrants’ collective. In the background, we can discern a house built in 1925 by a bourgeois Armenian family who had arrived in Thessaloniki along with about 10,000 Armenians originating from Asia Minor and the Caucasus between 1919 and 1923. Armenian refugees came to Greece due to the displacement policies adopted by the emerging Turkish nationalism, and some of them were affluent enough to build impressive residences like the one in the image.

The Armenian community has been present in Thessaloniki since the mid-19^th century. According to the Ottoman census of 1885, it amounted to 183 people at the time. This number rose to somewhere between 500 and 600 people after the Balkan wars, as some displaced Armenians from the Balkan mainland found refuge in Greece, but the main influx of Armenian refugees took place after their persecution and mass displacement from Asia Minor in the interwar period when the Armenian population in Thessaloniki surged to reach 10,000 people. However, the Armenian community started to shrink again in the years 1946-1947, when the Greek civil war broke out, with many Armenian families choosing to accept the Soviet Union’s invitation to resettle in the Soviet Republic of Armenia.

In total, about 18,000 Armenians left Greece in six evacuation missions from the ports of Thessaloniki and Piraeus, with 4,600 people leaving from Thessaloniki. During the 1950s and the 1960s, several Armenians migrated to the USA, Argentina and other countries, with the size of the community decreasing to between 1,000 and 1,200 people. Today, it is estimated that about 10,000 Armenians live in Thessaloniki, most of whom arrived in the city after 1990 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. These new Armenian migrants do not have particularly close links with the city’s old Armenian community.