Nea Chora

How many people have stood where you are standing now over the course of time? How different was the view you see around you in the past? What do you look at and what do you look past when you wander around the city?

Welcome to the 100memories research project historical walk. Whether you choose to walk with us physically or digitally, you will get a chance to visit places where the city’s residents live their everyday lives. These places might seem insignificant, but it is in these ostensibly insignificant spaces that we can discover important histories of movement, settlement and habitation involving both natives and newcomers during the 20th century; the histories which shaped the development of Chania’s urban fabric, society, economy, and culture.

Chania is one of the most popular destinations in the country for both Greek and foreign travellers. Due to the promotion the city has received from the tourism sector, it boasts consistently high places in rankings for ‘the most beautiful cities in Greece’, it is featured in the pages of travel magazines as ‘the Venice of the East’, and it promises visitors ‘unprecedented historical, cultural and architectural riches’.

This image of the city as an ideal holiday destination was constructed by selecting specific depictions of the urban space, with the port of Chania always lying at the heart of the city’s most popular representations. That’s how the ‘old port’, the ‘Venetian port’ with the characteristic lighthouse, became the city’s major landmark. As time passed and perceptions about what constitutes a monument evolved along with travellers’ desires and demands, Chania started showcasing other parts of the city: first the hidden narrow alleys, then some mosques and some formerly Muslim neighbourhoods, later the Jewish quarter. The recently constructed official website of the Municipality of Chania (2021-2022) offers an overview of the city’s many neighbourhoods, veering away from outdated norms and definitions of what constitutes an ‘esthetically appealing’ landscape, while at the same time serving the needs of the short-term rental industry which has become diffused throughout the city.   

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.

Nea Chora was originally built by Muslim internal migrants in the late 19th century. After 1923 and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, it housed Asia Minor refugees who either received Muslim houses as compensation or were granted land and built their own dwellings. Ever since then, the settlement has been a haven for migrants and refugees.

Apart from its labyrinthine residential centre, a zone of bourgeois houses was also developed in Nea Chora, belonging mainly to the owners of small manufacturing units who lived in the area. These manufacturing units, along with the sea, were the two main sources of income for the people of Nea Chora who were mostly wage workers. This was also a neighbourhood where intense political fermentation took place during the interwar period. The establishment of POEN, a resistance organisation and precursor to the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), as early as June 1941 was indicative of the political reflexes of the people of Nea Chora and their willingness to participate in political interventions.

Nea Chora is the birth place of the poet Viktoria Theodorou. In her short story Traiko, dedicated to her father and the neighbourhood where they lived, she writes:

‘This neighbourhood grew slowly and sprawled as more and more poor peasants from the eastern provinces abandoned their villages and came to the city looking for better prospects and the chance to eat white bread. Most of them ended up as proletarians and their wives became servants or vegetable pickers. 

This is why the residents of Chania who lived past Agios Konstantinos looked down on these people and saw their neighbourhood as a working class neighbourhood, using the words derogatorily. And yet those poor houses, most of them built by the owners themselves, shone with cleanliness and were adorned with woven tapestries and lace and pots with fragrant herbs and flowers. They also had grapevines and mulberry trees to supply the silk workshops they kept at home […]    

The workers’ movement gained momentum in Chania around 1930. The seaside coffee shop ‘Fraggios’, which was to the west of the big port, past the dock for the fishing boats, became the main hangout for workers and fishermen due to its isolated location. On its left was the wasteland of the Jewish cemetery which heaved at night and no one dared walk past it. It was in this historic, small coffee shop that the movement started during the dictatorship of 1936.’ (Victoria Theodorou, Traiko, Kedros, Athens 1982)