The first refugee neighbourhoods of Nea Kokkinia

The urban refugee neighbourhoods funded by the Refugee Settlement Commission or other housing schemes tend to look alike for many reasons. They were built based on the same or similar urban development plans; they were characterised by small houses which incorporated public space as part of the house when the weather allowed; and the people who lived in these houses had similar migration histories and gradually developed relationships and a shared everyday life. In her book Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe, Renée Hirschon dedicates an entire chapter to the courtyards and the neighbourhoods of Nikaia’s refugee settlement, presenting the findings of her on-site research, but also her impressions of the people, mainly the women, who lived in the settlement and used these courtyards, focusing on the neighbourhood of Germanika.

She makes particular reference to the fact that the neighbourhoods were organised according to place of origin and highlights the distinct characteristics of each neighbourhood, focusing mostly on the original residential clusters of Agios Nikolaos, Osia Xeni, Agios Georgios and Germanika. She also highlights the evolution of the residents’ relationship over time. The people of Nea Kokkinia ‘came from different areas in Asia Minor and belonged to different economic strata. At first, the population was so diverse that relationships rarely developed between households. It was also very rare for relatives or friends to get a house next to each other. Instead, adjacent houses were granted to people who were basically strangers. Gradually, neighbourly relationships began to develop between the residents, strengthened by marriages and other social relationships that extend the meaning of family (becoming godparents, acting as best men/women). As a result, a network of close social relationships and interconnected social ties was created and spread throughout the area’.

Hirschon also explores at length the importance of geographical proximity, noting that ‘families that lived “back to back” were not considered neighbours. […] the defining characteristic of a neighbourly relation was visual contact, namely how much of each other the families saw every day. The neighbourhood was usually limited to the street and rarely extended beyond the nearest street corner’. Her ethnographic observations run along similar lines to the ‘categorisations’ employed by the residents of each neighbourhood, still remembered by the elders of Kokkinia to this day. For example, the refugees from the western coast of Ionia (Smyrna, Urla, Çeşme etc.) were seen as more sociable, fun-loving and progressive, while those from Ikonio (Konya) and Cappadocia were called ‘Orientals’, ‘tourkomerites’ [coming from Turkey] and ‘Karamanlides’ (a Turkish-speaking community) and were considered more introverted. The Pontians had acquired a reputation for being more conservative, hard-working, proud, but also stubborn, and finally, the refugees from Constantinople were viewed as cosmopolitan.

Walking around Nikaia today, among the courtyards of the refugee houses, the ‘laundries’, as the residents call them, you get the sense that you’ve found yourself in two different neighbourhoods simultaneously. On the one hand, you have the avenues Petrou Ralli and Laodikeias, the city’s two main traffic arteries, which are noisy and in constant motion. But in between hide the courtyards of the refugee houses, the ‘laundries’; all of them are unexpected oases of quiet, but also each one is completely different from the next. Unlike the facades of the refugee buildings, which are uniform, their inner courtyards show considerable diversity. Some are well taken care of, others are neglected, but all are geometrically peculiar for various reasons. They are being encroached on by the refugee houses through successive additions and expansions, they have multiple uses (parking spaces, gardens, storage spaces), and they are susceptible to the residents’ whims and needs, often reflecting the quality of the neighbourly relations on the block.

Older residents commonly have a different form of extroversion compared to the newer residents. They spend more time in the courtyard, socialise more with their neighbours whom they’ve known for years, can immediately spot a visitor, and easily take on the role of ‘block representatives’ who have a duty to talk about the beauty and the hardship they and their parents have experienced. They tend to gloss over the problems caused by neighbourly co-existence in the past and complain about the new realities and difficulties that characterise life in these houses. They usually know the life stories of everyone who has ever lived on the block and have an interesting detail to share with the ‘foreigner’ who is visiting their neighbourhood.