The exhibition will be opened by the General Secretary of the Greek Ministry of Culture Mrs. Maria Andreadaki-Vlazaki, on Thursday, December 14, 2017, at 6.00 p.m. at the Bey Hamam (“Paradeisos” baths), in Egnatia and Mitropolitou Gennadiou Str. The exhibition is organized by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Thessaloniki City. It will run till December 31, 2018.
In 1917, Thessaloniki being part of the Greek State for only five years balanced between its traditional multicultural character and the recent Greek administration under conditions of instability intensified by the engagement in the Great War. Due to the fire of August 1917, a past – unknown to us – was sealed, but a new city was created. Many voices of people living in the city in 1917 have been silenced. The Muslims and the Jews of Thessaloniki – because of the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923 and the Holocaust in 1943 – paid the heaviest price to the memory. Memory islands, reference points and historical constants, at every turn, every change, destruction and reform of the city, monuments are kept alive by the people, those who left and those to come, and retain active the city memory. The exhibition “Monuments in flames”, based on archival material from many institutions, but also from the unpublished drawing archive of the Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Thessaloniki, as well as on recent excavation finds on the occasion of the construction works for the Metropolitan Railway, presents tangible evidence of the ways the Fire of 1917 affected the historical face of the city.
