Komotini: Layers of history and cultural diversity
A Babel with Pomaks, Roma, Armenians and descendants of Eastern Thrace Greeks, Asia Minor Greeks, Pontians, Sarakatsani and Epirotes, only fragments of the past survive in Komotini, northeastern Greece. Alongside a section of the Byzantine walls, stones from a synagogue, a 14th-century imaret (poorhouse), several mosques and some stately buildings, there are the post-1922 refugee neighborhoods, the Muslim quarter evocative of a labyrinthine mahalle, and the Roma settlement of Alat Koyu. “They say about Komotini that you cry twice: once when you discover you’ve been accepted [to university] here and once when you graduate, because you’ve come to cherish it,” says law student Ioanna Paravanti. [Nikos Kokkalias]
