Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 Read Online Free PDF

committee’s chairman, the distinguished British landscape architect Thomas Mawson, to regard the city as a blank slate. The results were far-reaching, and have been described by a recent historian as “the first great work of European urban planning of the twentieth century.” They eradicated the last downtown traces of the old Ottoman town and substituted the modernizers’ vision of a city conceived as an integrated whole. 5

    After the fire: the 1918 plan
    Both Venizelos and his minister of communications, Alexandros Papanastasiou, were capable and decisive men who believed—in the prime minister’s words—in “thinking big,” and regarded the Ottoman city they had inherited as unworthy of the progressive and modern nation they wished Greece to become. Over the previous century, the ending of Ottoman rule had led to new towns being built throughout much of Greece, but nowhere—not even mid-nineteenth-century Athens—had these settlements come close to the size and importance of Salonica. For Papanastasiou, the problem was not only the unhygienic and uneconomic character of the old town; it was also the way that individual property owners had previously been able to block any attempt at improvements for the general good. Wholesale expropriation would allow the government to plan on the basis of new, larger and more regularly shaped building plots, allowing broader, straighter streets, larger squares and, in all, an urban design that was both more functional and more pleasing to the eye. Before August was out, a law had been passed providing for the immediate demolition of the affected area and prohibiting rebuilding without government permission. Engineers carried out the demolitions, and the huts, tents and benches of street-traders who had begun to drift into the centre were shifted to new areas on its outskirts, by the White Tower, and along the Langada road. The only living beings left amid the ruins were several hundred destitute Jewish refugees, who passed the winter in dark, damp cellars and half-rotten burned-out synagogues in danger of collapse. 6
    Mawson was a landscape gardener, best known for his work in colonial estates from Hampstead to Vancouver. But before the war he had also been advising the Greeks on urban improvements in Athens, and all concerned seem to have seen Salonica as an extension of this.Barely three months after the planning committee first met, a preliminary study had already been exhibited to the public and an exhausted Mawson had been sent back to England to recuperate. Filling his place was a Frenchman, Ernst Hébrard, a younger man, who had been excavating Roman and Byzantine sites in the city for the army’s archaeological service. Hébrard was an architect too. Some years earlier he had published a study of the “world city” of the future; later he would go on to design towns in French Indochina. Like Mawson, he was a creature of the colonial era, only in his case, Salonica was an important stepping-stone near the start of his career and the plan that emerged bore his imprint. 7
    Putting theory into practice, the Hébrard Plan fundamentally changed the character of the historic heart of the city for it envisaged a chiefly administrative and business quarter, with residential space relegated to the outskirts and the new suburbs. A new industrial zone was to be established behind the port, condemning the old Ottoman pleasure gardens to a slow demise. The open slopes beyond the eastern walls were to be turned into parkland and the campus of a new university, displacing the vast cemeteries there. Space in general was identified on the basis of its use and function, something quite alien to the city that had preceded it. Streets were to be widened and straightened and the rectangular plot became the norm; the winding narrow alleys which had obstructed Emmanuel Miller’s efforts to carry off Las Incantadas in 1864 were banished for ever. Long vistas down regular thoroughfares