What I can see

These days, nothing in the broader area of Agias Sophias Square, including Karolou Ntil, Iktinou and Zefxidos Streets, brings to memory the tumultuous past of the area and the city. It is a market with interesting shops, some of the most famous patisseries and several cafes and bars, some of which are LGBTQ-friendly. From the square, one can admire important buildings like the Loggos Mansion (the so-called Red House, where a teachers’ cafe haunt called Hermes was housed for 66 years on the ground floor), the Terkenlis house, where a historical patisserie named Achilles operated, also on the ground floor, the Chatzidimoulas Mansion and, of course, the Church of Agia (Hagia) Sophia. Some of the city’s most important sculptures are also exhibited here.

What I can't see

Agias Sophias Square is one of the landmarks of the city’s national and religious life. During the Metaxas dictatorship, group marriages as well as military and paramilitary parades took place here. In the Post-Civil War era and the colonels’ dictatorship, religious processions and anti-junta rallies took place here. The square has witnessed historical events like the mass demonstration against the Nazi occupation, which was violently suppressed to prevent nation-wide protests, and subsequently, the great doxology that followed the liberation of the city. George Ioannou’s recollection of the events in his book “Our own blood” about the suppression of the anti-Nazi demonstration is quite moving. The Nazis arrived on motorcycles with integrated machine guns aimed at the crowd. The stillness of the crowd was “deafening”. The veterans wounded in the Greek-Italian War, who could not be moved from the centre of the square, shouted at the crowd: “Go away, you will be massacred! They will kill you. Run!”

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