22 - The Old Neighborhood: Our Little Street

The apartment building where my family settled for the years to come and I spent my childhood was one of the first to be erected in the old neighborhood. It was a tall and graceless building, a rectangular box with narrow cantilevered balconies and façade plastered in a pale shade of gray; a rather ugly, no-frills utilitarian design with brutalist influence -one might say. It stood out of sorts looking down the more colorful and stylish, yet humble single-storey houses with tiled-roofs, remnants of a bygone era. That block of apartments became home and refuge and hideout of my childhood years.

It was the summer of year 1968 when we moved: Mother and Father, uncle and godfather Marios -newlywed with aunt K, and my grandparents from Father’s side, occupied three self-contained flats on two different floors. The alley the block stood (only with a stretch of the language could be labeled street proper) was aptly named: ‘Passage B off-Deligiorgi Street’. Our alley, still a dirt road when we moved, like many others around the city, was fifty meters-long and no more than four-meters wide; with potholes and grooves carved by the drainage water from the wash and laundry of the old houses, which, through the alley or some other way trickled into the Toumpa stream, a little further down. A few years later the alley was eventually asphalted and upgraded to a normal street, so to speak, after it was respectably named ‘Hecuba Street’ by the council.  

Even Deligiorgi Street, which our alley joined at one end, was narrow and short itself and barely recognizable by name from city residents outside our neighborhood, although it existed for years in the heart of the old city not, fat from the center. But it was already asphalted and paved and featured a small bridge over the stream, for cars and animal drawn carts to cross. It connected Xenophon Street to the east with the broadly recognizable Fleming Street to the west, which begins at the more affluent Queen Olga Avenue and ascended north to the Hippocrateon Hospital. Across our alley and stretching parallel to Deligiorgi Street, was the narrow and claustrophobic Gambetta Street known as one of the longest streets of old Thessaloniki. As a child, I never walked Gambetta along its entire length, as it stretched west to the Archaeological Museum Street (actually featuring ‘museum’ that was a conversion of the excellent Yeni Mosque of the city's vanished Ottoman past -as I learned from Mazower) and ended at its perpendicular 25^th of March Street, in the Harilaou district at the eastern edge of the city; more half an hour walk amongst still unknown neighbors of Thessaloniki, it exceeded the permissible range of my childhood wanders. Deligiorgi, Xenofon, Fleming, Gambetta and the other decent streets, which surrounded our anonymous alley hidden amongst them, became central and integral part of many children lives.

This happens with every life. It begins within the confines of a room or a flat or a little house, then it spreads wings to explore one’s hometown, later, in its heyday and maturity, it flies to distant places and countries, before, in an old age, retires in another obscure neighborhood, in another little flat, where it expires. It was the same with me: in the early years of school, naturally for a sensible and disciplined child under the discreet supervision of adults, had its life centered in our apartment building and its alley. Early solo journeys, before my family relaxed the reins and I myself found the courage to discover and reach the real limits of freedom offered by the great city, were constrained within short sections of Gambetta Street, that took me to my primary school on Delphi Street, a couple of minutes’ walk from the grocery store of the ‘black-marketer’ (as Mother called him) Malides for daily petty shopping, the dairy shop across on Xenophon Street with the delicious syrup sweets, or the tiny convenience shop for Father's cigarettes and newspapers and chocolate wafer or chewing-gum treats; or a little further on, a five minutes’ walk to the intersection of Gambetta and Athanasios Diakos streets where grandmother regularly sent me for a fresh loaf of her favorite ‘Regal’ or ‘Rustic’ breads, which I could not help nibbling on the way back.

My family life had a long history in that alley. It was where two generations of a branch of the Ibrişimci family lived major parts of their lives. Father was born and grew up there before and sometime during the German Occupation, in a two-storey house, which, a constructor contracted by grandfather in the early 1960’s had it demolished to build a five-floor apartment block, in-lieu of three flats, one for the grandparents, and two for the brothers and their growing families. In this unremarkable alley and its surrounding streets, the first strong and unforgettable friendships were built. It is where, on either bank of the Toumpa stream, we set up games of all sorts. In this part of city, I wandered up and down the perpendicular to the city axis roads from the seafront and the promenade all the way up to Toumpa. I explored the uncovered stream that descended from the Seih-Sou hill, dry in the summer months, overflowing with muddy water in days of heavy rain, carrying it under the Deligiorgi Street bridge all the way to Thermaikos Bay, under the sorrow facades of derelict and haunted Jewish houses on its bank. It was in this corner of the city where I grew up and spent childhood and adolescence, years of mood swings and the emotional turbulence that changes in mind and body bring about. There it was, in short, that life began in earnest.

The neighborhood was by no means affluent, neither impoverished. It was in the other side of the city, in its far western districts, where, through endless wanders in later years, I discovered its hidden slums and encountered real poverty. Besides, our apartment building was constructed, as I was overhearing in conversations between Father, my uncle and builder friends, on relatively modern albeit minimalist specifications, and designed to withstand the passage of decades and, indeed, survive the big earthquake that shook the city. It intended to house, in addition to the core of the Ibrişimci family who owned the plot it was built on, a few other relatively hard-working individuals and families. An exception was an indolent individual, Fanis his name, who lived with his mother off a possibly false disability benefit, and a dowager with her two boys. For most of its residents, it was a step up to an improved quality of life, at a convenient distance from the historic and commercial center of a city that was expanding in height and breadth at a breakneck speed.