Thessaloniki’s long-overdue Holocaust memorial park gets green light
The memorial prayer (Askava) and the laying of wreaths at the annual event commemorating the National Day of Remembrance of the Greek Jewish Martyrs and Heroes of the Holocaust on January 28 was among the last to be held on the pavement of Nikis Avenue, in central Thessaloniki. Eleftherias Square will soon be freed from the parked cars and the Holocaust Memorial will take its rightful place in a place of martyrdom.
Eleftherias Square, although it owes its name to the Young Turk Revolution which began in the square in 1908, has been identified with the “Black Shabbat” (Black Saturday) of July 11, 1942, when all Jewish men aged 18 to 45 were ordered to present themselves at the square to be put to forced labor. Guarded by German soldiers, they were publicly tortured and humiliated before being registered. That Black Saturday was the beginning of the end for the Jewish population of Thessaloniki who were murdered in the crematoria of Nazi Germany.
If no objections and appeals are submitted against the plan, it is possible that a contractor will be selected within 2024
The regeneration of the emblematic square – over which so much ink was spilled regarding the unfathomable decision of the former mayor Konstantinos Zervas to restore, even temporarily, an open-air parking lot, “freezing” in November 2021 a plan of the previous administration of Yannis Boutaris to turn it into a park – is a priority of the newly elected mayor Stelios Angeloudis.
During the first days of assuming his duties, Angeloudis approved an update of the specifications for the auction of the project. Deputy Mayor for Technical Works, Environment and Sustainable Mobility Prodromos Nikiforidis told Kathimerini that the cost is expected to be at least 30% higher than the original budget had foreseen in 2017, when the initial tender was launched. Its funding, however, has been secured by the Green Fund.
The reconstruction of the square will be implemented based on the study of architects Themis Chatzigiannopoulos and Konstantinos Charalampidis, who won the first prize (out of a total of 131 proposals) in an architectural competition in 2013.
A decade has passed since then but the project has stalled, despite the square being turned into a construction site in March 2019 for preliminary work and archaeological excavation. The study is now out of the drawer and it is estimated that if no objections and appeals are submitted against the plan, it is possible that a contractor will be selected within 2024. In its final form, with minimal modifications, the square, as a memorial and recreation park, will highlight “the trapped and forgotten historicity of the space with comprehensible and utilitarian interventions,” assistant professor of architecture at Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University Themis Chatzigiannopoulos tells Kathimerini.
The approximately 5,087-square meter (54,760 sq.ft) square will include a cluster of evergreen trees and natural stone flooring that will also cover the perimeter streets Venizelos and Ionas Dragoumis. The place of martyrdom will be marked by the Holocaust Memorial, which will be moved to the center of the square, and a sundial. The latter will be a 30-meter high metal column, which will be placed at the corner of Nikis and Venizelou streets, where the Holocaust Memorial is today, and will cast its shadow on floor inscriptions that will cite the historical events of the city that are linked to the square.
Every year on July 11, the sundial will cast its shadow on the “Menorah in Flames,” a memorial sculpture started in 1997 by Yugoslav artist and Holocaust survivor Nandor Glid for Thessaloniki (and finished by his sons after he died on March 31 of that year), depicting a seven-branched candelabrum in flames in a grid of human bodies, in memory of the 49,000 murdered Jews of Thessaloniki, bringing the city out of the silence and oblivion over the most heinous crime of the 20th century.
