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been better off as a result of the forced relocation. Noting that 2700 poor Jewish families had been rehoused by February 1920, a report from a committee representing their interests concluded that “on the whole the Jewish families have now been provided with better housing than those they had before the fire. As a matter of fact, in the old city, thousands of persons formerly lived in basements and cellars, where light entered in most instances, through very small shafts only, in narrow, humid and filthy alleys. In nearly all of the new quarters, the rooms are well aired. Nothing has been neglected to assure good hygienic conditions.” 9
    Continuing the trend evident since the 1890s, the city was separating on class rather than ethnic lines; workers were to be kept apart from the bourgeoisie, and their places of entertainment were separated too. But there was in fact a deeper truth to the complaints of Jewish leaders: the plan’s primary purpose—and here it surely succeeded—was to assert the control of the Greek authorities over the very heart of the city, and that goal was incompatible with the old spatial organization of Ottoman Salonica where the densely packed Jewish quarters had dominated its core. Today not even the lay-out of the streets betrays where exactly among the downtown boutiques the numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century synagogues were once situated.
    F ROM A LOCAL PAPER at the end of December 1918 came the following comment, entitled “Papa’s Sketches”:
“You see Thessaloniki, how beautifully she has been rebuilt?”
“Where?”
“On paper, for now.”
“Let’s see.”
“Look! A first-class city, with everything. With areas for the rich and separate ones for the workers.”
“And have they really built somewhere specially for us workers?”
“Have they built it? It’s paradise.”
“And where are our neighbourhoods, then?”
“You can’t see them. They are behind the page.” 10
    The pretensions and ambitions of the planners quickly attracted comment from satirists and journalists even before Mawson’s preliminary plan was published. One “proposal” at the end of November 1917 suggested helpfully that
The piers should be turned into a hill where a téléférique transports people into the air.
The trams should be turned into boats, and canals built everywhere.
The harbour should become a square, the forum of Thessaloniki.
The Arch of Triumph, which is not pretty, should be demolished and the bits used to build an Eiffel Tower.
Eleftheria Square should be removed from the new plan and turned into a cemetery.
We should preserve some ruined houses from the fire and declare them historic monuments. 11
    And indeed, reality—as is its way with town planners and architects—soon modified and whittled down the initial proposals. How could it not have done when there were no less than ten changes of government between 1920 and 1924, the most turbulent period in Greece’s history? Within the city centre, Mawson’s original plan to unify the railway termini into one grand new station was quickly abandoned: the various lines and stations continued to confuse visitors for several more decades. And after 1920 a new government made more changes, reducing the size of secondary squares, narrowing roads, doubling the number and cutting the size of the plots in order to appease the discontented owners.
    Money—or the Greek state’s lack of it—was the key obstacle. Even the socialist Papanastasiou soon realized that without private investors, the centre would never get rebuilt. Thus most of the actual construction was left to individual property-owners and well-connected private developers, who did their best to thwart Hébrard’s visions of a regulated and uniform aesthetic approach. The hotels, office blocks, apartment buildings, cafés and cinemas of the interwar years ended up in a bewildering variety of styles—pseudo–Louis XV, neo-Renaissance, -Venetian and -Moorish, Art Deco,