Diikitiriou Square

What I can see

The name of the square comes from the former headquarters of the Ottoman era, the current Ministry of Macedonia-Thrace. The current official name of the square is “Cypriot Fighters Square”. An underground parking lot was planned to be constructed here, but the works brought to light antiquities from the Hellenistic to the Ottoman years, offering the city its third largest archeological site. Among other things, the excavation revealed mainly residential buildings of the Hellenistic period, a wall of a public building and the remains of a public building, the foundations of which were used for centuries in later buildings, a paved road of the Roman era, statues and coins. It turns out that the area had been the administrative centre of the city since the Hellenistic years.

What I can't see

In Ottoman times, on the corner of Proxenon Street, there was a hammam and a mosque, in which the mob lynched and killed the ambassadors of Germany and France (1876). Before the 1917 fire, the square was at the same level with the surrounding streets. This changed after the reconstruction. In the interwar period, the square was the centre of labour movements and unions, refugee and professional associations, and the final destination of larger demonstrations, which were usually violently suppressed. One of them was during the Nazi occupation (1944), which was brutally dissolved. Recently approved renovation plans aim to highlight the antiquities and make the square functional.

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