From the villages of Thessaloniki to Kassandrou Street

Eleni and Panagiotis Tsitselas were born in the 1930s in Ardarmeri, a village in the region of Thessaloniki behind Mount Chortiatis. Their narrative is part of an interview conducted in April, 2002. At the time, Eleni and Panagiotis had already retired and spoke of life in the village and their resettlement in Thessaloniki in the mid-1970s. In Ardameri, they had been animal farmers and cheese makers, but they decided to live closer to their children, who had already moved to Thessaloniki, and find employment that guaranteed a steadier income.

After their arrival in Thessaloniki, they stayed in an apartment on Kassandrou Street for a few years. Panagiotis worked in a factory on the western outskirts of the city for a while, but soon, both Eleni and Panagiotis were hired as wardens at a church in Kalamaria. They moved to Kalamaria in 1978, at a time when Thessaloniki’s suburbs were being transformed yet again by the arrival of internal migrants and intense land development, mainly through the practice of ‘antiparochi’ (a process which allowed developers to acquire land by offering the land owners apartments in the buildings that would be erected).

According to Kalogirou, during the 1960s and 1970s, internal migrants to Thessaloniki mostly came from nearby prefectures and villages on the outskirts of the Municipality of Thessaloniki. They often found employment in factories in the western part of the city and their presence contributed to Thessaloniki’s population boom. However, as noted by Karadimou-Yerolympos, housing conditions in Thessaloniki had been deteriorating since as early as the beginning of the 1950s, with the available building stock remaining relatively limited while the city’s population kept steadily rising. During the ‘60s and the ‘70s, Thessaloniki’s spatial expansion gained speed, often in informal and illegal ways. Internal migrants started settling in the municipalities surrounding the city centre, where the construction of apartment buildings had intensified and mass residential development was facilitated by the practice of ‘antiparochi’.