Greece's Hidden Slums || Εύοσμος Σταυρούπολη Νεάπολη Thessaloniki

The slums in western Thessaloniki were all built from 1949 until the 1970s without planning permission, mainly by internal immigrants during World War II the occupation by the Germans and the devastating civil war (1946-1949) Governments maintained this phenomenon of arbitrary construction for vote-getting reasons so as to blackmail all these people by legalizing their housing and holding them politically hostage. Most of these internal migrants were workers working in nearby factories and most of them came from displaced Greeks from Anatolia who had fled their homes due to the massacres and genocide of the Turks. All this happened from 1900 to 1924, when all the Greeks left their homes and came to live as refugees in villages in Macedonia, which were then destroyed by the Germans and Bulgarians in World War II. We are talking about people who, in the space of 40 years, experienced 2 world wars, devastating hardships, exiles and genocides. The architecture of the houses is improvised without civil engineers and with improvised materials. Every week, workers who were paid by the factories would paint a wall, put in a window, and put in a door, while they themselves lived in the half-built house. It took blood, pain, and tears to build this house; almost all the houses in the western suburbs of Thessaloniki were built under these conditions! Today, they remain to remind us of the folk architecture of the workers, whose main dream after so many hardships was to take root somewhere and acquire a homeland. Today they have fallen, the world despises and abandons them, it no longer accepts them, they are too small to house their petty-bourgeois dreams and their great ambitions. They choose to live in large apartment buildings inside their cages. That is why I decided to show this aspect of Greek reality that most people ignore, to revive an era that has passed, to vindicate some people who fought and lived on the margins of life.