Κωνσταντίνος Γ. Τζιάρας
Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης, Σχολή Νομικών, Οικονομικών και Πολιτικών Επιστημών, Τμήμα Πολιτικής Επιστήμης, 2017
Type: Dissertations

 

The subject of this PhD thesis is the history of the poor classes in Thessaloniki, during the inter-war period. The depiction of the lowest classes of society, along with the detection of their survival mechanisms and the description of the more or less political way of expression of those poor dangerous classes constituted, so , the goal of this study. At the same time, what is analysed is the state's attempt, through its mechanisms, to take over the monopoly of violence, preintoning every expression of socio-political activity, within the particularly interesting, stil tense framework of the inter-war period. The thesis was based on the comparative study of judicial archives (especially the analytical filing of the police court archive in Thessaloniki) and other primary sources, police and diplomatic archives, the study of the daily press and published statistics, but also the exploitation of the inter-war as well as subsequent scientific and literary bibliography. Special care was taken lest the archives' classification and the prevalent speech of the elite was reproduced. On the contrary, we attempted to detect the speech and ways of expression of the subject strata, by "turning the archive upside down".

This thesis consists of three parts. In the first two parts, what is presented is the broad spectre of everyday life which the state attempted to control and oversee, both in the public and private sector. In the third part, we refer to social groups, who evaded the state's control, or were left out of it resulting in their being incorporated into the state itself, or conflicting with it. We use the terms "grey zones" and "red zones" What is included in the "grey zones", is the world of the organized crime, whose close relationship with the repression mechanisms is described. The "red zones" consisted of those poor people who attempted to refute the sources of poverty, being integrated into the radical, communist movement of the inter-war period. Putting together the seriously fragmented world of the judicial archives, we tried to depict, through the Thessaloniki paradigm, a miniature of the bourgeois state and its creation  in the inter-war period

Supervisor: Giorgos Maragritis