The establishment of the Nea Kokkinia refugee neighbourhoods by the Refugee Settlement Commission

For the next five years after the dissolution of the Refugee Relief Fund, the Refugee Settlement Commission assumed the responsibility to formulate a comprehensive urban development plan for the area, implementing a systematic, multi-phase, residential scheme. The engineer Dionysios Kokkinos was the project’s technical supervisor, assisted by the engineers Achilleas Mavromatis and Alexandros Fatseas. In January 1924, the Ministry of Hygiene and Welfare expropriated the land so that development could begin. The first phase of the Commission’s housing rehabilitation scheme (1924-1926) encompassed approximately 75 hectares of land and the settlement started expanding to the north for 1 ½ kilometres following a grid plan. This area was mentally divided into three neighbourhoods known by the names of their churches: Agios Nikolaos, Osia Xeni and Agios Georgios. These three neighbourhoods contained single-story and two-story tile roof houses arranged into blocks with a courtyard in the middle, a communal lavatory and a utility space which became known as ‘the laundry’. The land had been divided in a way that allowed all properties to have a street facade at the front and open space towards the inside of the block at the back, which the owners would later use to expand their homes. According to the 1925 Refugee Remembrance Journal, what had been constructed in Kokkinia was ‘a miracle of aesthetics, urban planning and public hygiene’ for 42,000 refugees from Asia Minor and the settlement was ‘colossal, a behemoth built out of patience, expense, and technical expertise’.

In 1927, the Commission conducted a new topographical survey north of the neighbourhoods Ai Nikolas and Osia Xeni. An area of more than 8 hectares was divided into 32 blocks, measuring 50 by 35 metres each. However, the dwellings that were erected were not of the same quality as the ones in the original settlement. This was a reflection the Commission’s limited funds, but also of the fact that it was prioritising rural settlements. The blocks were separated from each other with 10-meter lanes which comprised the road network. Each block was divided into 20 plots of land, on which 10 pre-fabricated wooden houses were erected. Each asbestos building included two identical dwellings under one roof which covered both plots. This neighbourhood was named Krini, after the coast district of Smyrna of the same name (now called Çesme), but even today it is still known by the name ‘Germanika’. ‘Germanika’ was the Commission’s last project in Nea Kokkinia. In parallel with the work of the Commission, the Ministry of Welfare implemented another housing scheme which granted land plots to exchangeable refugees. Despite these housing schemes, makeshift refugee shanties and hovels continued to exist in Nea Kokkinia.

Over the decades that followed, the original refugee blocks constructed by the Commission underwent changes in appearance as well as use. To accommodate the needs of the families living there, ground floor houses expanded into the communal open space, the space under the stairways became small shops or sheds, corner balconies were closed off and became rooms, the ‘laundries’ first housed homeless families and after 1960 were torn down. Today, these houses are inhabited by refugee descendants, internal migrants who bought them postwar, Roma families, and migrants from Eastern Europe, Albania, and Pakistan, namely moving populations which found refuge in the same blocks, the same houses originally built for the 1922 refugees. Our interest might lie with the successive populations that passed through these houses, but we shouldn’t overlook the relief and rehabilitation efforts, the new cities built for the newcomers, the services and rehabilitation schemes devised to aid the refugees. Despite the problems, delays and injustices which plagued the rehabilitation process, the arrival of the refugee populations of 1922-1924 was at least handled according to an organised relief plan. Since then, the Greek state has never developed a similar plan to manage the populations arriving in its territories.