“Till that second, I hadn’t realized the extent of the destruction – nearly your complete metropolis middle had been leveled. That sparked my curiosity, and I purchased three postcards depicting the aftermath of this disaster,” he tells me one October morning after we meet at his favourite café close to the White Tower. Three playing cards from Thessaloniki rapidly turned ten, then twenty, and ultimately an astounding 15,000. Many of those dated from WWI, when hundreds of troopers – British and French amongst them – handed by means of Thessaloniki. “Postcards have been their solely technique of communication,” the collector explains.“I keep in mind discovering a French soldier’s complete correspondence, with postcards despatched to his spouse day by day for 32 days. The postcards have been numbered, every one describing his day by day actions – by no means a phrase concerning the battle itself. Via these playing cards, I used to be in a position to glimpse on the lives of so many individuals.” Wherever he traveled, Megas all the time looked for issues linked to Thessaloniki. What started with postcards quickly led to images, then to engravings – some relationship again to the mid 1800s. Quickly, he was scouring magazines from England, France, Germany and Russia, and ultimately uncommon books, too. His exceptional assortment spans a century, from 1850 to 1950, with a selected emphasis on the Ottoman period and the town’s historical past as much as 1912, though it additionally contains gadgets from as late because the Nineteen Eighties.
“I used to be solely concerned about Thessaloniki – nothing past it. Not even its surrounding areas,” he says. Accumulating hundreds of artifacts tied to the town’s historical past – from each nook of the globe, together with Europe, New Zealand and Africa – turned, in a manner, his manner of reconnecting with the town the place he was born. Via his assortment, he rediscovered his hometown, even whereas distant from it. What started as nostalgia quickly was mental curiosity. The extra he discovered, the extra he felt compelled to delve deeper into Thessaloniki’s identification. He meticulously cataloged every merchandise in his assortment, making a digital archive that documented the kind, date and theme of each artifact. For Megas, the method of amassing turned a type of exploration, a solution to piece collectively the fragmented historical past of his metropolis; a ardour that he pursues to at the present time.
“As an engineer, I had little connection to the literary world. There have been so many issues I didn’t find out about Thessaloniki’s historical past. Accumulating taught me a lot – a lot, in actual fact, that it will definitely led me to writing. These postcards weren’t simply footage of the White Tower or the seafront. They have been historic snapshots, capturing actual occasions. They advised tales,” he explains.
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