New usage for historic buildings
Since 1995, when the National Defense Ministry began to give serious consideration to the possibility of moving urban-based military units to camps outside cities, the town-planning organization drew up three studies. The third is expected to be submitted within the next few days. «The Pavlos Melas camp is the only one for which there is no provision for change of land-use designation,» said members of Thessaloniki’s town-planning organization. «Our aim is not to break up the site. We want the building complex to be saved for its importance as a historic monument and a memorial.» The general provision in the study is for the Pavlos Melas camp to acquire a universal importance, to become a green space with low-impact changes for entertainment such as an open-air theater and cinema. The old buildings that are in good condition and interesting for their architecture should be made available for education. Olga Deliyianni, an architect with the 4th Ephorate of Modern Monuments, told Kathimerini that the Ottoman barracks were a prototype for more modern barracks in the city and a characteristic example of late 19th-century public buildings. Apart from anything else, they are the largest public buildings in Thessaloniki, comparable only to the later customs buildings and those housing the Third Army. One proposal is for them to house Thessaloniki University’s School of Fine Arts. A brother’s story Stefanos Balis, then aged 10, used to go daily from his home in Toumba to the Pavlos Melas camp in the hope that he would be able to see his 18-year-old brother Nikos, who had been arrested and imprisoned for being a member of EPON, the youth wing of the wartime Greek liberation army. «I used to bring a bag of food to give him, but they never let me see him and so I would hand it to some other prisoner, asking him to pass it on to my brother. But one day as I was waiting outside the barbed wire, I saw prisoners being led out, chained together in twos. Among them was my brother. I ran up to him, evading a Gestapo officer, gave him the food, thinking that they were taking him to another prison. Then I ran home to tell my mother, but when I explained how they were being transported, she realized that we would never see Nikos again.» Soldier death
