Abstract
In August 1917, roughly two months after Greece declared war on the Central Powers, a fire occurred in Thessaloniki which decimated the majority of the central areas of the city. What differentiated this fire from previous ones is that successive Greek administrations between 1923 – 1940 did not rebuild the city according to the pre-existing ground plan. Beginning with Eleutherios Venizelos, the various Greek administrations recast the city according to their perceptions of ‘modern’ urban development. A formative component of this redevelopment was to establish Thessaloniki as a clearly ‘Hellenic’ city that was devoid of its Ottoman past and dominated by ethnic Greek Christians. In addition, by exploring the governmental reconstruction of the city, it will be argued that the manner in which Thessaloniki was rebuilt reflected a continued fear and insecurity of potential territorial revision that continued through the interwar period.