The Nea Chora settlement

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.

The people who arrived in Nea Chora from Asia Minor after 1924 settled in the houses of exchangeable Muslims. These houses commonly had courtyards enclosed by tall walls, sometimes had basements and ‘oda’ (Ottoman reception rooms), and shared yards in between. However, these houses were not enough to accommodate the entirety of the refugee population and no official settlement was built in Nea Chora to house the rest of the refugees. Instead, their housing rehabilitation was accomplished mainly through self-housing, with the refugees themselves erecting makeshift dwellings on land granted by the state. Understandably, the houses built under these circumstances offered, for the second time in the neighbourhood’s history, only basic facilities and construction elements. They were makeshift refugee houses built out of whatever materials were available in the area, with only a ground floor, few rooms, and simple doors and windows. As Katerina Karadima, a doctoral candidate at the Polytechnic University of Crete whose research interests include the settlement of exchangeable refugees in the Municipality of Chania, points out:      

 ‘I can imagine that the informal dwellings were made out of simple materials that they could easily carry themselves, comprising basically a very small room on the ground floor as it would be easier to build. So, going by the basic construction, the small size, the simple  openings, which all affect an area’s development and architectural profile, we can tell which houses were built by refugees, for example.’

Nowadays, we can still see remnants of buildings which reflect this history. We can also trace later phases of urban development, like intermittent construction booms, the commercial uses of buildings, and the introduction of ‘antiparochi’, a practice which allowed developers to acquire land by offering the landowners apartments in the finished building. The latest shift transforming Nea Chora’s urban landscape is the proliferation of short-term rental housing, with many older and newer buildings being refurbished according to the latest architectural trends to welcome tourists and travellers. The result is a gradual displacement of permanent occupancy in favour of short-term accommodation, especially on the streets closer to the sea.   

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