From the end of Ottoman rule on the island in 1898 until the beginning of the compulsory population exchange at the end of 1923, population movements continued. Immigrants for political reasons - mainly because of the difficult position in which the non-Christian Orthodox in Crete found themselves - were Muslims and Jewish Cretans. At the same time, however, people from all three religious groups were becoming immigrants for economic reasons. Christians, Muslims and Jews left Crete in various directions in search of a better life, usually without returning.
Nea Chora is the neighbourhood of Chania where population groups of various religions, nationalities and classes have coexisted for years. As such, Nea Chora encompasses an array of migration histories from the 20th and into the 21st century. However, until recently, the neighbourhood had been absent from the city’s dominant narrative.
Some of the refugees who settled in Chania after 1922 managed to open small manufacturing units and retail shops. This is the location of the dairy shop belonging to the Kouroutidis refugee family which operated until the 1980s.
The Polychroniadis park, also known as Pefkakia, was the first organised park of Nea Chora and the first playground established in Chania in the postwar period. The idea of creating an open space for recreation in the area of Nea Chora had already been proposed by residents before the war, with Leonidas Markoulakis and Nikolaos Kyriakakis the most prominent among them.
For several decades after it was first inhabited, Nea Chora only had one temple, a mosque. When the number of Christians in the area increased during the first decade of the 20th century, it was the residents themselves who put forward the demand for building a Christian church to the local metropolitan, Nikiforos Zachariadis.
During the 1870s, when Nea Chora was systematically becoming a residential area, the neighbourhood’s first temple was constructed. It was a mosque donated to the community by an affluent Muslim woman, Hamide, daughter of Haider Aga Sapunjizade.
The residential area of Nea Chora reflects the neighbourhood’s spontaneous establishment, which resulted in a labyrinth of streets and buildings without any notion of urban planning. Many of the buildings erected by Muslim internal migrants when the area was first inhabited attested to the settlers’ immediate need for housing and lack of resources: makeshift houses built with local materials which were in need of constant maintenance and improvements in the years that followed.
A ‘metochi’ was a rural estate, probably a successor to the fief, which operated as an autonomous residential and financial unit. They were located in the plains of Chania, south of the city and bordering the old limits of Nea Chora, but there were also some next to today’s boundaries of Nea Chora, near the Kladisos River, though they weren’t as iconic as the ones in the plains.
On Aprin 1st, 2014, about 340 people from Syria and Egypt, men, women, and children, arrived in Chania after being rescued at sea. They had set off from Alexandria, Egypt, heading for Italy. The Egyptian citizens among them were immediately deported back to Egypt, while the 145 Syrian refugees were transferred to Hotel Elena on Nea Chora beach.
Until the middle of the last century, in an elevated spot above the sea, there was a date palm tree, which is called ‘vayi’ in the local dialect. Since the tree was not endemic and was considered exotic, it became a landmark for the locals.
We are standing now at the centre of what used to be a walled area which housed the city’s Jewish cemetery. During the 19th and 20th century, the city’s Jewish population might have been small, amounting to only a few hundred people, but the community had been present in the area for centuries. According to testimony, the Jewish quarter and cemetery had been around since at least the 14th century and the island’s Venetian period.
The company ‘Anatoli’ SA, known as ABEA, was the first and largest olive oil processing plant in Greece. It was founded in 1889 by the French chemist Jules Deiss in Nea Chora, next to the Jewish cemetery and, compared to the island’s standards at the time, it was particularly innovative both from a financial and a technological standpoint.
The Greek state’s postwar efforts to promote the country’s tourism development commonly focused on Crete as a popular destination which could serve the needs and meet the demands of major travel agencies due to its size. This focus is evidenced by the construction of the Xenia hotels in Chania, Heraklion and Rethymno during the 1960s.
