Refugee Houses of Neos Kosmos

What I can see

In Neos Kosmos or “Dourgouti” (named after Dourgout, the Ottoman landowner of the area) on the side of Kallirois Street and Syngrou Avenue, there are seven apartment buildings. They were the first Bauhaus multifamily apartment buildings, built in the 1930s by architects Dimitris Kyriakos, Kimon Laskaris and Aggelos Siagas to house refugees and to replace temporary refugee shelters (shanties). Originally, they welcomed mainly Armenian refugees but housed mostly Arab immigrants during the 1980s. Like the refugees of the 1920s, Arabs were faced with discrimination when they came to Greece. In the 1960, the shanties of the refugee settlement, as well as the “Italian” district (six rows of 24, single-storey houses funded with war reparation money from Italy) were demolished by the George Papandreou government under the slogan “death to the shack”. The area was later included in the planning zone and shacks were replaced with new apartment buildings, added to the seven existing ones. The project was continued by the junta in an attempt to gain popularity.

What I can't see

Until the early 20th century, the area of Neos Cosmos (in ancient times “alopeci,” meaning fox) was relatively far from Athens. The refugee influx of the early 1920s, which consisted mainly of Armenians and Greeks, led to miserable housing conditions, with shacks being the dominant housing arrangement. The refugees were victims of racism from native residents as well as from the royalist press. They were called “tourkospori” and “skatoogloudes”, among other derogatory terms. For several decades, the neighbourhood remained predominantly Armenian and leftist. The junta regime of 1967 to 1974 forced many of the residents to move to other parts of Athens, to suppress potential dissidents.

Bibliography