The building at 37 Poliorkitou Dimitriou Street: The Cartographic Heritage Archives

The house was probably built at the end of the 19th century and used to belong to an affluent Muslim family. After the population exchange, the owner of the house left the city with her four children, leaving their house behind.

The house was deemed ‘exchangeable’ and came under the jurisdiction first of the Public Properties Office and then the National Bank of Greece. Refugee families from Asia Minor moved in the building, ‘spontaneously at first’, but then registered by the relevant authorities. In the house’s six rooms, seven families, amounting to 35 people in total, were ‘accommodated’ and had to co-exist for a few years, with another family of five also staying there temporarily. The basement and the small kitchen in the garden were shared by all tenants. As in many other similar cases, the house was finally bought out by a refugee family and used as a private residence, later undergoing partial changes in ownership over the course of time.

According to testimonies, during the German occupation, the house was commandeered and functioned as the local school for a few years, while the family that had been living there had to move into an outbuilding in the yard. Elderly residents of the area who attended the school remember how, every time the raid siren sounded, the older children helped the younger ones quickly reach the courtyard from the second floor classrooms by climbing down a maple tree that survives to this day. Other testimonies mention a makeshift raid shelter under a raised section of the courtyard which has not survived.   

The building was listed in 1979. In 1996, abandoned and decrepit, it was sold by its last owners to the Greek state ahead of Thessaloniki’s tenure as the 1997 Cultural Capital of Europe, just like many other buildings at the time. The restoration process preserved its traditional architectural elements as much as possible and the rights to its use were transferred to the National Map Library. Today, it houses the Cartographic Heritage Archives, which are part of the Hellenic General State Archives, a service aiming at the management, preservation, use, and diffusion of the country’s cartographic heritage as well as the development and promotion of the cultural, educational, artistic, scientific and technological aspects of Maps and Cartography.