The rehabilitation of the city’s housing stock and the preservation of memory

Some owners tore the old houses down and built bigger ones, others sold them off and others rented them to new and old residents of the city from lower economic strata. Some of these tenants have always been migrants. However, some of the original houses have become mere empty shells, material reminders of the time when the settlement was established.

In the first years after the Asia Minor refugee settlement, the main issue to be resolved was the housing rehabilitation of the refugees through the construction of new houses. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the houses that used to be new during the period 1922-1924 have become monuments requiring special care and preservation. Between 1994 and 1999, Volos and Nea Ionia became part of the European URBAN I initiative which, among its many objectives, aims at rehabilitating old and historic buildings. It was within this framework that the stone houses on 34-36 Kritis Street were rehabilitated to house the Municipality’s social services. Up until 1947, when Nea Ionia became an independent municipality, Kritis Street was called Nikomideias Street and was the boundary of Block I, the first block south of Evangelistria delineated by Dorylaiou Street, Fardy and Kallipoleos Street.

Giannis Kontaxis grew up in one of these rehabilitated houses on Block I, number 78 (first door on the left). Together with his neighbour, Dimitris Konstantaras-Statharas, whose origins were also from Asia Minor, they recorded and preserved most of the city’s refugee history and cultural heritage. Kontaxis worked as a pharmacist’s assistant for 40 years, but liked drawing from a very young age. After he retired, he continued working as an artist and his drawings of life in the refugee neighbourhood of Nea Ionia were used to illustrate some of the books of local history written by Konstantaras-Statharas, who was an educator and school counselor. Kontaxis writes in one of the books written by his childhood friend: 

‘My childhood home was rectangular and had doors on both opposite ends. It originally was two rooms (houses) and had two yards facing two different streets; on the one end, a smaller yard faced Nikomideias Street, and on the other end, a larger, rectangular yard faced the inside of Block H (Akriton Street, now Ap. Volidis Street). That’s where we added a spacious and bright kitchen/living room and, further away, the laundry room and the lavatory. During the German occupation, my father built a large hen house and a rabbit cage. A long concrete path led to the front door. Along the edges, there were flowers and trees (a tall jujube tree and more)’. 

Kontaxis’ drawings and Konstantaras-Statharas’ books reveal the ways in which the members of a community can organically record and illustrate its memory and history.