KAVALA’S MUNICIPALITY ENDEAVOR TO BRIDGE THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE THROUGH ITS PARTICIPATION IN THE INT-ACT PROJECT

Kavala is a port city on the northeastern coast of Greece and an important economic center of northern Greece. It has a long and culturally rich history commencing in prehistoric period, as the first traces of human presence and activity testify (sites of Dikili Tash, Antisarra and Perigiali). The second half of the 7th century BC (650-625 BC) the inhabitants of Thassos, settlers themselves from Paros, founded the ancient Neapolis (=new city), the city’s first name. In the early Middle Byzantine period it was renamed as Christoupolis (=city of Christ), to solidify the city’s new religious identity. The city acquired its present-day name Kavala after the Ottoman conquest in the late 14th century CE, and gradually its demographics changed in favor of the Muslim residents. From the mid-nineteenth century, Kavala emerged as an important export center for tobacco of the Ottoman Empire and the city prospered and expanded attracting many Greeks, as well as Jews and to a lesser extent Armenians and western Europeans.

In 1923 Greece and Turkey agreed to the population exchange of their religious minorities (Lausanne Treaty), an event which entailed the forced expulsion of approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey and 400,000 Muslims from Greece. This dramatic event reconstituted the ethnocultural make-up of Kavala, which since 1913 had become part of Greece. The city’s population doubled in size with the vast majority of the residents being refugees originating from Minor Asia, Eastern Thrace, the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus bringing with them a diversity of cultural customs and traditions to the city.

Historical legacies and traces of Kavala’s multicultural past are in no place more present and visible than in Panaghia peninsula, the old city district which forms one of the four Cultural Heritage study sites of the INT-ACT project.

Photo: Panaghia peninsula (Source: https://kavala.gov.gr/)

It is in this place that the first Greek settlement was established and where the Byzantine Acropolis (fortress) was initially built and later on restored and expanded by the Ottomans. It is further the place where Mohamed Ali Pasha’s Imaret, the religious, educational and charitable foun¬dation, and the Complex of Halil Bey (Mosque and Medrese), formerly early Christian Basilica, were found. Several former tobacco warehouses are also present in the district, as well as the shipyard that had served from antiquity until the previous century as the city’s port. Importantly it is in this place where many 1920s refugees found a new home after they were violently forced to abandon their cities and villages in Minor Asia and elsewhere, accommodated in the houses of the local Muslims that had to take the opposite route. Since the early 1990s, migrants from the Balkans and the former Soviet Union joined them in Panagia, while, after the 2015 so-called “migration crisis”, the Asimakopoulou camp was set up in two km distance from the district to temporarily accommodate asylum seekers arriving to Greece.

INT-ACT focuses on tangible but also intangible cultural heritage i.e., practices and aspects of culture that shape our understanding of ourselves, our sense of belonging, and our relationships to each other and to the tangible cultural environment. Following this focus, our first goal is to record and analyze the Emotional, Experiential and Environmental (3E) dimensions of the formalised knowledge on the Panaghia district as well as the 3E dimensions contained in human narratives about the area. There is already considerable knowledge collected and produced on both the tangible and intangible aspects of the local culture by local actors such as the Association of Panaghia, the Municipal Museum of Kavala, the Tobacco Museum, the Museum of Greek Refugees, the AYLOS POROS project, the General State Archives - Regional Archives of Kavala and the Historical & Literary Archives of Kavala.

We plan to systematise and further this knowledge to assist the production of immersive XR environments that integrate tangible and intangible aspects of the local cultural heritage with the end goal to develop a virtual eco-museum. The aim of the eco-museum will be to preserve and promote the cultural heritage of Panaghia, reflecting its history, traditions and values of its community through its precious engagement. How do local residents and other people of Kavala relate with the cultural heritage of Panaghia? How do people of Asia Minor origin and elsewhere and memories of forced displacement and other people of residents of Kavala think about subsequent refugees and migrants to the city, and how do the newcomers relate to the history of the city? Our aim is that the eco-museum will help nurture a space for dialogue and reflection on the challenges faced by the refugees and immigrants in Kavala throughout time, as well as their contributions to the city, to highlight how sharing this cultural heritage and legacy can help foster the city's openness, resilience and social cohesion.