5 - 1st Public Gymnasium of Thessaloniki

During the first three years of secondary education, until the great earthquake of the summer of 1978 which shook the foundations of my birthplace, I attended the historic 1^st Public High Gymnasium & Lyceum of Thessaloniki for Boys. It was the first Greek institution of secondary education of Thessaloniki and since the end of WWI was housed in an elegant mansion on Vasilissis Olga’s Avenue, former residence of a wealthy Bulgarian merchant, Theodor Hadjimisev. After WWII and the decimation of the Jewish community of the city, the villa that originally belonged to the family of the Jewish industrialist Joseph Modiano, another neoclassical jewel next to the ‘Villa Hadjimisev’, in the absence of legal heirs came into the possession of the state and annexed to the 1^st Gymnasium. Several years after the earthquake, ‘Villa Hadjimisev’ was eventually restored to its former glory, and still houses the 1^st Gymnasium, more than a century after it was surrendered by the Ottomans to the Greek Army.

The classrooms, testimony to an aristocratic past of the building, had high ceilings and their tall windows allowed plenty of sunlight, but the large numbers of pupils they cramped in those unventilated classrooms made the air dusty and hazy. When the school bell rang in the mornings, our ranks and files gathered in the concrete backyard of the first building for the morning prayer ritual and a heads-up by the schoolmaster. The courtyard was no less dusty and no more spacious than the interiors of the two buildings. It featured a single basketball hoop and a shelter intended for physical education in rainy weather, but it was devoid of any sports equipment or facilities. During the breaks that main courtyard, under a cloud of dust, was buzzing from hyperactive boys of ages spanning six teenage years, wandering aimlessly from one huddle to another, shouting and arguing: a cacophony by sounds by vocal cords thickening and voices getting deeper and hoarser.

The second year my class was relocated to the annex and during the breaks the scene was repeated in miniature: in the smaller front yard of the ‘Villa Modiano’, which was as dusty but felt pleasantly cool in hot summer days under the shade of a tall pine tree at its centre. The façade of the building was overlooking the avenue, but its entrance and front yard were hidden from passers-by and cars by a palisade fence covered with unkempt shrubs. A chin-up bar was installed in one of the corners, on which the fittest of my classmates missed no opportunity to show off their physique and flaunt their yet unripe masculinity to the rest of the school, with ‘pull-up’ competitions.

The main courtyard at the back the main building, the Hadjimisev mansion, was fenced by tall brick walls, like a prison. A heavy steel door opened in the mornings from the narrow Sparta Street and its array of apartment blocks, to welcome us. The grand main entrance, featuring a wide marble staircase and a veranda, with the Greek flag hoisted in front of the porch, was reserved exclusively for our teachers, and the occasional official from the local authority or the school inspectorate visiting the school. The gate of the equally majestic entrance of the school annex, the Villa Modiano, once upon a time opening to the Vasilisis Olga’s Street and a short walk to the seafront, was permanently locked and inaccessible for teachers and students alike.

For the whole school year that followed the earthquake of the summer of 1978, we had to abandon the damaged and judged as unsafe building of the old school, to become tenants in the ground floor of the more modern technical college ‘Euclid’ on Papanastasiou Street, until longer-term accommodation was found or built. The college it housed had absolute priority over the use of its classrooms, which meant a double and even a triple shift system, with classes often extending to late evenings and Saturday mornings. Yet it was by far a more spacious and dignified environment for learning, as well as team sports, as it featured proper basketball and volleyball courts. Alas, it served my class as a temporary accommodation for a few months and by the end of ‘78-‘79 and for the last two years of Lyceum, we were moved to a prefabricated building haphazardly constructed by the ministry within nine months, on an available plot by the ‘New Seafront’ not far from the old school.  Not surprisingly for Greece’s ways of doing (or not doing) things, it does still exist and accommodates the ‘1st General Lyceum of Thessaloniki’ –for both boys and girls now. In our time at this place, only some heavier than usual rain would cause water leaking and dripping through cracks or gaps in the ceilings, and collected by appropriately placed buckets, often in the middle of classroom. Its virtually non-existent amenities made the rooms unbearably hot in the summer and cold in the winter, although our breaths in the crowded rooms ameliorated the latter. Nonetheless, during the class breaks, we were unconsciously enjoying though not fully appreciating, the freshness of the sea breeze, the openness of the sea and the broad horizons of the Thermaikos Gulf with snowy peaks of Mount Olympus in the distance.

Then, in my penultimate year in high school, in advanced adolescence, after another bout of educational reforms, the historical ‘only boys’ school eventually became mixed-sex, starting from the first grade of Lyceum, when I was beginning its last year. The mixed-sex classes of the first were housed in an also prefabricated annex of the main building, behind the main building still reserved for boys only. The courtyard of that mixed-sex annex was separated by a wire fence and a separate entrance. Sharing the main courtyard with the older males of the second and third grades, with their high testosterone, was deemed as a daring step too far. Therefore, most of the boys of the last two years of the Lyceum, were effectively blocked by the daily playful or flirtatious and lustful interactions and encounters with the school's small, but craved for female population. In short, the merging of boys and girls, as far as my stage was concerned, proved pointless and frustrating yet again, and, therefore, most of my classmates, remained sexually deprived and repressed, with many unfulfilled temptations, along with the mountain of exams ahead to climb and distract and divert us after each school day, when some rare opportunities of interaction with the opposite presented themselves.

My unfortunate years in Lyceum were thus marred by the unprecedented sequence of nationwide exams, as mandated by the ninth government reform in secondary education during our young lives. With stoicism, social isolation and deprivation of love and sex weighing on us, we would have to attend the largely pointless school in its inordinate dullness, which tested the limits of patience and endurance of a frustrated adolescence, until its aim is achieved: a graduation certificate -with excellent grades, if possible, success in the university entry exams and the coveted admission to university: to the promised land, as  we were told by parents and family, teachers and tutors, of abundant freedom and personal integration· success would transform the immature teenager to an academic citizens proper· our new status in the society would be worth it and more than repay efforts and sacrifices of many years. Surely, parents and teachers and government, with their designs for my generation could have afforded a golden mean in the trade-off between life as a young person and school and exam work for admission to uni.