THE REFUGEE, THE "MAGIC" WATER AND A TRADITION WHICH SMELLS GOOD INTO A HAUNT WITH ITS OWN HISTORY
How an elderly escapee from AHEPA, in the distant 1978, gave the name to a tavern that fed (and watered) generations of locals, visitors to Thessaloniki, but also students, in the most student-friendly neighborhood of the city.
THE "ASYLO" TAVERN IS LOCATED AT 2 UNIVERSITY STREET, AT THE ENTRANCE OF THE EVANGELISTRIA NEIGHBORHOOD.
JUMP IN TIME.
Thessaloniki has its own "drunk state". It is certainly not Messini (as in the book of the same name by Sotiris Patatzis), but Evangelistria, a small settlement with a village mentality and everyday life, squeezed between the famous cemeteries and the neighborhoods of Agios Pavlos and the Saranda Ekklesies. A small "state" with low houses, narrow alleys that open into unexpected "clearings", but also a unique feeling created by the relaxed rhythms of everyday life, even though Evangelistria is only a few minutes away from the "heart" of downtown.
TOTAL RESET.
Things, of course, were not always like this... At the beginning of the 20th century, Evangelistria was an uninhabited area outside the walls of Thessaloniki, where a quarry operated (historical evidence states that this quarry was in operation since Roman times).
According to the urban legend, rocks from this quarry (which were transported to the center of the city by wagon) were used to form the first pier of the OLTH, but also the sea front of Thessaloniki as we know it today. With the same raw material, the Sultanate buildings were built by the Ottoman Crown Fund, in which, after the liberation of the city, the courts functioned (until 1978, when they were demolished due to the damage suffered by the great earthquake of Thessaloniki).
The place was not "friendly"... As if the fact that the area was used as a dumping ground for rubble (it was building materials that were dumped at this point during the clearing of the old buildings of the city, after the disastrous fire of 1917) was not enough, the Evangelistria was crossed by a large stream, which ended up at the height of the White Tower (a stream which today passes encased under the road surface of Panepistimiou and Ethnikis Aminis streets). Nevertheless, when refugee populations began to flock to the city after the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922, Evangelistria was exploited as a resident-free area, near the city center, where the homeless could settle – at least at first.
The settlement of Evangelistria was founded (together with that of Agios Pavlos) around 1926, as part of a program of the then Minister of Health, Leonidas Iasonidis. In fact, it was originally called the "Iasonides settlement", with the locals venting their annoyance at the settlement of their uninvited new fellow citizens by calling them "Iasonides' shacks".
FROM THE WATER TO RETSINA.
The first urban legends about Evangelistria were born almost immediately after the first people settled there – one of the most popular ones was about the famous “immortal water of Evangelistria”, with locals and taxi drivers forming queues as late as the decade of 1980 in front of the famous fountain, from which the famous water gushed, to procure it.
Today this "magic" has been lost – research has shown that the water in question contained substances that made it unsuitable for drinking. Another magic, however, lives and reigns. The magic of a shop that offers culinary delights to locals and visitors, but also, over time, to thousands of students, who choose Evangelistria and the adjacent Saranda Ekklesies as their residential neighborhoods, due to their proximity to universities.
The reason for "Asylo", one of the last historical shops of Thessaloniki, which is located at the entrance of Evangelistria.
The interest starts already from its name... According to the story, everything happened one night in 1978, when the owners of the "Asylo", Dimitris, and Maria Gaki, were repairing the shop (which had previously existed at this point since 1946), to reactivate it. On the same night, an elderly man who was hospitalized under police surveillance at AHEPA (for debts of several thousand euros to the State) escaped. To avoid capture, he made it outside the tavern, climbing one of the trees in its yard to hide. The gendarmes quickly arrived at the scene. They did not see him in the tree where he was hiding, and the patrons of the tavern kept their mouths shut and did not betray him. Several hours after the law enforcement had left, the elderly fugitive climbed down from the tree, thanking the restaurant's patrons for sheltering him. The fugitive disappeared into the night... One of the patrons got up, took a paintbrush, dipped it into a bucket of paint from those who were in the area for the renovation of the tavern and wrote the word "asylum" on a wall.
That's it. The tavern had acquired a new name, which was to accompany it even today.
AROMA OF TRADITION.
Behind the worn, wooden door of the "Asylο", at Panepistimiou 2 street, little has changed. In the atmospheric space, dominated by an old, American jukebox, the wood stove, a gramophone, a period scale, photographs of folk and rebetiko singers, but also the voice of Kazantzidis, visitors will find a real "temple" of well-being.
At the tables that hosted from Agathon and Nena Menti to Despina Vandi and Nikos Papazoglou (who always made a stop by "Asylo" after every concert he gave in the summers at the Forest Theatre), lovers of gastronomic delights will find from delicious beef cooked in clay with potatoes and kefalotiri and tender liver to the famous "Asylo" spits with Elassonitiko, short-spit chicken or pork and spit steak, accompanied by cool retsina, wine and beer. Elements that are the ideal ingredients for the joy and pleasure that visitors to this traditional haunt of the city get on every visit, at all times of the year. Cheers!
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