26c - The Old Neighborhood: Fast Changing Streets (Unconscious to Changes Around)

 Our building on its other side was flanked by the low house of Mrs. Antonia, situated at the corner of our street with the long Gambetta Street. I remember it with freshly painted walls in light blue colours and a small but well-kept front yard with rose trees and other shrubs. A climbing ivy covered the wrought iron railings of the low fence and the gate, which opened to Gambetta Street. I never came across Mrs. Antonia or whoever else was living in that house, nor did I witness any interaction of any of its occupants with my parents or other people in our street. They seemed to belong to the renowned Gambetta more than our alley. To their credit, they resisted the temptation of selling their plot to a builder to erect yet another ugly block of apartments, and their modest house stands at the street corner decades later, with the same well-kept garden -dwarfed by the unpleasantly aged and tired multi-storey rectangular monsters around and across. Perhaps, it is inhabited by second and third generation offsprings of the same family. If one had viewed it from a balcony above, one would have been left with the sad image of an aged beauty who survived in the forest of non-descript apartment buildings, of an elegant, kind old widow neglected among ugly giants indifferent to her presence. 

The destruction of the historical city, the euphemistically alteration of its character for the sake of some sort of modernization, although generalized and ubiquitous was short of an absolute overhaul. Even today, in the streets of the old neighbourhoods of Thessaloniki, one can still find small one or two-storey houses with front-yards and maybe gardens. Many are dilapidated and abandoned, because no usurper was found to claim them via the labyrinth of Greek bureaucracy, or it could be that owners and builders with traces of what we call ‘social conscience’ or adherence to traditional architectural aesthetics or even little common sense forfeited the chance to demolish them and build a contemporary construction on its place. Few of them are well-preserved by families who resisted the torrent of building and construction in breadth and height at the expense of the sun and the sky, the light and the air.

The forces behind the transformation of the old city where our grandparents found refuge from east, west and north and our parents played, grew up, lived, worked and died, and its metamorphosis into a ‘modern’ entity, with the disappearance of the ghosts of its past and the oblivion of old neighborhood tales and history, are not difficult to identify. Tomes were written on the issue. The state, short-sighted, and visionless, its helm incessantly in the hands of dinosaur politicians and bureaucrats or inept and narrow-minded modernizers, opened the bags of Aeolus some years after the end of the last war. Later, when an irreversible damage was almost done, the same state either turned a blind eye or it stood weak and inert, when elementary urban planning regulations, hopelessly inadequate as they were, were indiscriminately and blatantly bypassed by builders and legitimate or illegitimate land- and property owners -for a quick profit. Industrialization and urbanization, and the pressing social problems of housing and infrastructure demands that it created, forced those short-sighted decision-makers to makeshift solutions, with fewer, is true, resources at their disposal in comparison with the developed world, as well the limited purchasing power of masses converging into major cities for work and better living standards. Profit, quick and easy (and only such could that be), bonanzas for opportunistic micro-capitalist builders or petty-bourgeois heirs of plots of land in the metropolitan area, who saw opportunities to expand (at least nominally) their property portfolios and inflate their ego and well-being, were the main motives of a skewed urbanization à la Grecque with little to no respect to history and tradition.

It is possible that for many who came to the city from the countryside or for city-dwellers descendants of the post-war baby boom this seemed like natural progress and an upgrade to the quality of life, from the dusty roads and muddy grooves, the poor heating from makeshift wood stoves, the cold toilets outdoors, the open sewage streams; an advance from Balkan backwardness towards Europeanisation. But everything changed rapidly and unconsciously to the social mind, the outcome irreversible; life in the city in many respects beyond repair or with only minor and short-lived improvements attainable. The apartment buildings of the old neighbourhoods of Thessaloniki for the accommodation of its petite bourgeoise and middle-class strata a fait accompli. The bride of the Thermaikos Gulf was transfigured into a vivacious, yet ugly girl.

Cramped apartment buildings in the open plots where we played football and cars parked in streets and alleys inevitably restricted our natural freedom as children. We were contained indoors, displaced from close-by natural playing habitats, with each year those becoming scarcer and remoter and more difficult to access. The environment where we grew up playing turned unfriendly to our children and children's children. My childhood mates and I were the last fortunate enough to enjoy the streets and open plots, before growing up into adolescents of different priorities and our city neighbourhoods became hostile, devoid of children’s voices of excitement and joy. We could not do much for the future of the city where I grew up. The power of change was overwhelming and well beyond common folk to counteract effectively; the urban development trampled on it like a roller coaster. It could not have happened otherwise, I reckon.