The Smyrna Quay
The «Smyrna Quay» was born in autumn 2012 at a café in Plaka, shortly after the publication of the «Lexicon of Smyrneika». While drinking coffee with Achilleas Chatziconstantinou, we decided to collaborate on a project about Smyrna. And what was a more appropriate candidate than Smyrna's showcase, the waterfront -the famous «Quay»- mainly because of the abundance of photographic material.
Originally, a third person was also involved in this: Nikolaos Avlonitis, the penetrating eye of whom helped us to decipher exactly where the various buildings we saw in the photographs were located, especially in the northern, residential area with the nearly identical houses. However, he was soon forced to leave us due to other commitments.
One of our goals was to create a photographic panorama of the entire waterfront as it was shortly before 1922. Eventually we instead preferred to digitally draw the more than 200 buildings one by one and create a façade panorama, a feat made possible by applying a method of geometric correction (orthogonal rectification) on the photographs. The actual drawing of the buildings spanned almost one and a half years.
Our other goal was to create a dossier for each building, containing all the data we would gather about it and its tenants. To this end, we made use of various sources in Greece and abroad, such as books, newspapers, commercial and travellers guides, public and private archives, testimonials, maps, photographs and postcards, photo panoramas etc.
Six years later, after a lot of hard work but also plenty of moments of satisfaction, we had in our hands the completed two-volume book, aesthetically and functionally set up by the people at Kapon Editions, who supported us from the beginning. The Lycurgus Award of Letters and Fine Arts, presented to the «Smyrna Quay» by the Academy of Athens for the year 2019, was a token of recognition for our endeavor.
