What I can see

Kaissariani today is considered a thriving middle-class district, which was “born” out of the refugee settlement in the area, about 100 years ago. Few buildings are reminiscent of that era. Only few of the first two-storey refugee houses survive. Today we mainly see the later refugee and labour apartment buildings of the 1950s. The architectural characteristics of these apartment buildings are functionality, utilization of space, adequate ventilation and lighting of the apartments, open squares and greenery. Already, however, the earlier, interwar residences followed the same logic and remain very interesting examples of interwar modernist architecture. In some buildings, the bullet holes of the December events of 1944, which were the bloodiest conflict of the Greek civil war in the capital, have also been preserved.

What I can't see

About a million Greek refugees arrived in 1922 and a few hundred thousand more after the population exchange between Greece and Turkiye (Turkey) and the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne. Their housing, together with the wars that followed (World War II, Civil War) was among the greatest challenges of the 20th century for the Greek state. Until basic infrastructure was built, the refugees lived in public buildings, churches and shanties, simultaneously facing health risks (e.g. cholera) and the hostility of the local Greeks, who carried out pogroms and called them “Turks”,  “Turkish seeds”, “shitty Mongols” and other names. The original two- storey houses had a rectangular layout with shared bathrooms and other sanitary facilities. These settlements were built in “empty” areas, far from the already inhabited ones, as the impositions had economic and political cost and the hostility between locals and refugees was exacerbated by their co-housing. The refugee population, like that of Kaissariani, suffered a double shock. The first was the “uprooting” from their ancestral homes and the second was their “violent” urbanization. Many of them lived far from urban centres and suddenly found themselves living – by force and not by choice – in large cities and apartments.

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