Mouschoundi Square

Within 32 hours, the blaze had burned down 9,500 houses across 100 hectares, leaving more than 70,000 people homeless. The fire heavily impacted the city’s Jewish community and, to a lesser extent, the Muslim community, while the Greek Christian neighbourhoods were barely affected. After the fire, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos invited French urban planner Ernest Hébrard to redesign the city. Hébrard’s urban plan eradicated the chaotic and haphazard character of Ottoman Thessaloniki by applying the system of Hippodamus, namely plotting rectilinear avenues and roads and arranging the city in large rectangular building blocks. Today, only the area of Ano Poli maintains the morphology that Thessaloniki had before the Great Fire of 1917.  Across from the house where the fire started was a water fountain called Horhor su (‘burbling water’ in Turkish) which has not survived. 

Today, Mouschoundi Square is the entrance to the centre of the city from the areas of Sykies, Neapoli and western Ano Poli. It is frequented by local residents, who come from lower socioeconomic strata and originate mainly from Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as newly arrived migrants from Syria and northern Africa. Neighbourhood shops, improvised open-air cafés where residents bring their own chairs and tables, fresh laundry hanging over the grey facades of apartment blocks, the few remaining ‘kastroplikta’ (dwellings built against the Byzantine walls), shuttered shops in the old vegetable market complex on the south part of the square; all these disparate elements come together to constitute a distinctive landscape that functions as a gateway into the time, space and anthropogeography of the city.