The shops on Fardy

The ‘Byzantium’ patisserie, Stamatiadis’ butcher shop, Garitsis’ grocery store (which later became a poultry and egg wholesale store), Minysios’ delicatessen, Karathanasopoulos’ shop. These are just some of the names of stores on Fardy, which hosted grocery stores, butcher shops, fishmonger’s, general stores, shops selling coffee beans and sundries, barber shops, newsstands, a cinema on Averof Street, coffee shops, a bicycle shop. Most of them are gone and only few survive. Throughout this past century, many things have changed in the commercial life of Nea Ionia: new buildings have been erected, new shops opened and reopened according to the needs and trends of each era. Today, the road hosts banks, shops selling mobile phones and takeaway coffee places next to traditional cafés and famous patisseries.    

Just like the houses of Nea Ionia, its shops carry the refugee stories of its residents and a past full of memories. They harbor stories of labour and the efforts, both successful and unsuccessful, of the residents to survive in a new place. Some stores couldn’t cut it, while others stood the test of time and survived through many changes and tribulations. Some started as stalls or were housed in the front yards of refugee houses. Some were makeshift constructions and were the culmination of their owners’ efforts towards a new career in their new home, while others were more organised businesses, built on a lifetime of knowledge and experience transferred from the homeland. 

There was a butcher shop called ‘The Flower’ on Fardy at the end of the 1920s. It belonged to the animal farmer Dimitrios Valachis from Englezonisi  and was housed in the refugee room of his wife Ourania Stamatiadou from Odemisio (Ödemiş), in Smyrna. Today, almost 100 years later, Dimitrios Valachis’ butcher shop is still in operation in the exact same spot on Fardy, or Eirinis Avenue as is its current name. It is run by Dimitrios’ great-grandchildren, Stavros Stamatiadis’ grandchildren. The walls of the new building, which replaced the old, wooden refugee room, do not just bear the history of the family, but also the history of the shops of Nea Ionia.     

Among the first shops which opened in the settlement were refugee coffee shops; improvised at first, more organised later. The coffee shops and ouzo taverns where the spaces where workers and craftsmen (carpenters, ironmongers, furniture makers, plumbers, electricians, and so on) would gather after work to have a drink before heading home. This was an everyday habit which had probably become ingrained into local tradition and labour culture through the ages. These were also the spaces where men would commonly meet in the evenings to make deals and do business. Clients could meet the craftsmen they were looking for and workers learned about employment opportunities. Coffee shops and ouzo taverns in working class neighbourhoods were not only spaces for socialization, but also hubs of economic activity.

Konstantinos Kaiafas, born in Nea Ionia in 1931, says:

 ‘Back then, it was the refugees who brought football to Volos. They also brought culture and many other goods and products. Here, in Nea Ionia, we were living it up. From Syntagma to the bridge, on both sides of Fardy, there were music venues with bouzouki music, traditional Greek music with clarinet, and it was also a bride market, so to speak. We would go there looking for brides. The people of Volos went to bed early, didn’t know anything about wine, tsipouro, and the like, didn’t eat oysters or kolitsianoi [fried sea anemones, a local delicacy]… I mean they hadn’t even heard of them, we would tell them to try shrimp and they’d answer, “Do you expect us to eat centipedes?”’  

The audio story and the accompanying text include excerpts from interviews with Konstantinos Kaiafas (a land docker born in Nea Ionia in 1931) conducted by Maria Karastergiou, 8/6/2013. Audiovisual Archive of Testimonies, Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology (IAKA), University of Thessaly.