Athenians in the interwar years would casually say "I'll pop over to the Podarades" and everyone knew exactly where they...

Athenians in the interwar years would casually say "I'll pop over to the Podarades" and everyone knew exactly where they meant. Today, almost nobody would. The Podarades was the old Athenian nickname for Nea Ionia, the refugee settlement built in the summer of 1923 for families displaced by the Asia Minor Catastrophe, and the story behind that name stretches back far further than the shantytown itself. The modern neighborhood began to take shape on June 30, 1923, when Nikolaos Plastiras laid the foundation stone for a settlement of 400 refugee families from Pisidia. Thousands of uprooted Greeks had been sleeping in railway stations and theater halls across Athens. At the ceremony, Prime Minister Gonatas, ministers Doxiadis and Sideris, and former U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau all stood alongside Plastiras. The refugees begged him to promise he would take them back east, to the lands where their dead lay unburied. He told them with emotion that better days were coming. Six months later, on December 9, 1923, the settlement was inaugurated as Ionia, with 400 rooms already standing. The name never quite stuck in popular use. Residents came not only from Pisidia but from Inebolou, Sinop, Trabzon, Bursa, Philadelphia, Chalcedon, and the western Anatolian coast. Everyday Athenians kept calling the place the Podarades for decades. Four explanations have been offered for that name. The most straightforward says residents had to walk several kilometers each way from the Patission tram terminal every day, and the area's name derived from that daily foot slog. A second theory connects it to an ancient stream called the Podonihtis, where locals once washed their feet. A third points to columns of the Hadrian Aqueduct on the border with Philothei, which people called "Podares," though researchers say this explanation has no historical foundation. The fourth theory, and the one scholars consider most credible, ties the name to a Byzantine aristocratic family called the Podarades, also known as the Platypodes, who owned a vast olive grove in the area before the fall of Constantinople. People heading there would say "I'm going to the Podarades' land,"...