The wall as a housing threshold for refugees:

the case of kastroplikta in Ano Poli, Thessaloniki

Abstract

The area of Ano Poli was one of the main areas where refugees settled in 1922. In particular, the
houses known as ‘kastroplikta’ are typical examples of refugee self-housing practices and have
become inextricably linked with the identity, memory and physiognomy of Ano Poli. These are
houses that use part of the Byzantine-Ottoman wall to create the housing shell. Therefore the
wall from a defensive fortification turns into a threshold for housing the newcomers. The
authorities have been trying to demolish them for a long time, however, recently several buildings
have been turned into housing occupations by new arrivals from West Asia and Africa.
In the above context, the paper introduces the concept of the housing threshold in order to
examine the area of kastroplikta as a contested space between the renewal plan and the
newcomers’ housing practices. The paper is based on ethnographic research, and its key findings
concern the ways in which newcomers invent practices of self-housing and reassign meaning to
the kastroplikta.