Refugee housing in Nea Ionia

Due to the fact that it could easily be accessed by ship and offered good employment prospects, the city of Volos received 13,773 refugees in total; 1,828 before the Asia Minor Catastrophe and 11,945 after. Volos was the only city in Thessaly to receive such a high number of refugees, amounting to almost 29% of its total population at the time. The refugees soon cohered into a solid, structured community which contributed greatly to the transformation of the city and the local economy. The first wave of refugees arrived in Volos in June 1921. They disembarked at the Volos port from steam boats coming from Nikomideia (İzmit), Propontis and Yalova. Some of them settled in Nea Agchialos, while the rest were temporarily housed in tents on the outskirts of the city’s inhabited area, at the end of Iolkos Street. The second refugee wave from Ionia and Thrace reached Volos after the Asia Minor Catastrophe, in the autumn of 1922. The third and last wave came in September 1924. These were exchangeable refugees who were forced to abandon their homes in Pontus and the Asia Minor mainland according to the terms of the Lausanne Treaty.

During those first years, it was up to the local authorities and the city’s charitable organizations to meet the refugees’ immediate needs for food, healthcare, and shelter. Just like the other cities which received refugees at the time, Volos managed to immediately provide temporary shelter to refugees by appropriating public and private buildings, schools, warehouses, and other roofed spaces such as tobacco warehouses, old Turkish army barracks and the Municipal Theatre. Simultaneously, thousands of tents and shanties started cropping up, creating refugee encampments in various areas within the urban fabric, such as the Rigas Feraios Square, the old Port Authority and Eleftheria Square. Approximately 2,500 refugees lived in shacks at the end of Iolkos Street on land lying outside the city’s zoned areas. These plots of land were eventually distributed to the refugees postwar. A refugee shantytown was also created on the Rigas Feraios Square, in the area of the old Municipal Theatre. That is where mostly Turkish-speaking refugees from the Asia Minor mainland settled, specifically at the top of November 2^nd Street next to the city’s railway station. Refugees used these shanties to house both their families and their businesses.

From 1922 to 1925, the issue of social housing was raised on the national level due to the mass arrival of the refugees. The Refugee Relief Fund, which was established in November 1922, contributed to the refugees’ housing rehabilitation. However, it should be noted that the refugees’ housing needs were so overwhelming that they could not possibly be covered by state initiatives alone, no matter how extensive. As a result, the majority of the refugees pursued individual housing strategies or, in other words, opted for ‘self-housing’. The different versions of refugee ‘self-housing’ reveal the contradictions and dividing lines among the refugee population. On the one hand, there were those who had the financial resources to build their own house or rent one within the urban fabric. On the other, those who lacked these resources had no choice but to live in and around the refugee settlements in makeshift, unauthorized and substandard dwellings.

In Volos, as in most Greek cities, refugee housing rehabilitation was the first social housing scheme to ever be implemented. To the north of November 2^nd Street was the Krafsidonas stream. The area lying to the north of the stream was called Xirokampos (meaning ‘dry plain’) because it was literally a plain devoid of vegetation. This area was chosen to permanently accommodate 6,000 Asia Minor refugees and it became the site for the Nea Ionia refugee settlement which was established in 1924. Housing in this case meant the provision of a small plot of land and a ready-made dwelling which the recipients would have to pay off in the form of a fifteen-year loan. The initial core of the settlement comprised 10 blocks, named A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J, which were built around Evangelistria Square in 1924. The blocks included a total of 776 single-room dwellings with a floor space of between 15 and 20 square metres each. Over the next few years, more blocks of refugee houses were built and in 1925, the settlement expanded even further with 356 new ‘concrete’ dwellings which were bigger and of higher quality than the original ones. A year later, with the housing problem showing no signs of abating, the construction of additional settlements was announced. These were dubbed the ‘German settlements’ because they were built by the German company Danziger Hoch- und Tiefbaugesellschaft mbH and the German architect Adolf Sommerfeld, who won the international tender organised by the League of Nations for the construction of 10,000 pre-fabricated homes to house the refugees in Greece. In 1928, 323 families moved to the ‘German’ settlements.

In March 1927, another 104 families were granted single-room dwellings. Since 1922, these families had been staying in a tobacco warehouse on the corner of November 2^nd Street and Xenofontos Street which used to belong to the exchangeable Turk Mustafa Tzamali. Hence, the families’ new homes were dubbed ‘tzamaliotika’. Between 1928 and 1929, 300 more families settled in what became known as the ‘stone houses’, relatively spacious ground-floor duplexes built on larger land plots. Finally, in the 1930s, another 152 houses were constructed, mostly two-room and ground-floor residences with a small yard. These were named after Kostas Kartalis who was mayor when their construction started. However, despite these coordinated housing policy efforts, the shacks and makeshift shantytowns of Asia Minor refugees continued to be prominent in various parts of the city long after the refugees’ arrival.