Refugee Thessaloniki, 1922
Published 11 September 2026 · by ThessalonikiHub
How the population exchange built half the city's neighbourhoods — and its cooking.
If you eat meze in Thessaloniki and someone tells you the cooking here is "richer", the explanation is not culinary. It is demographic, and it has a date: 1922.
What happened
After the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the population exchange that followed the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), hundreds of thousands of Greeks from Asia Minor, Pontus and Eastern Thrace arrived in Greece. Thessaloniki, the nearest large port, took an enormous share of them.
At the same time the city's Muslim community, which had lived here for centuries, left under the terms of the same exchange.
Within a few years the make-up of the city changed completely, for the second time in a decade.
Where they settled
The refugees did not fit in the centre, which in any case was still a building site after the fire. New settlements went up around the edges, and their names say everything:
- Kalamaria, the largest refugee settlement, today a municipality with an identity of its own.
- Nea Krini, named for Krini (Çeşme) in Asia Minor.
- Toumba, Ano Toumba, Charilaou, Evangelistria: dense, working neighbourhoods that kept their character.
- Evosmos, Stavroupoli and Polichni to the west.
The prefix "Nea" — new — in a name is almost always a marker: people named their new place after the old one they had left.
What changed on the plate
Asia Minor and Pontic cooking did not arrive as a cuisine to be celebrated; it arrived as the everyday food of thousands of households, and it stayed. From it come soutzoukakia, the pies, the spices that southern Greek cooking largely lacks, and the city's insistence on good bread and syrup-soaked sweets.
This is why Thessaloniki is so often called the country's gastronomic capital. It is not a marketing line; it is the result of a movement of people.
Where you meet it
- In Kalamaria and Nea Krini, where refugee descent is still living memory.
- In Toumba, one of the city's most authentic neighbourhoods.
- In the meze houses around the Modiano and Kapani markets.
- In the names of associations, football clubs and churches — read them carefully and they tell you where people came from.
