Bearing names that often recall the lost homelands (Nea Varna, Saranda Ekklisies, Neo Kordelio, etc.), a series of new communities sprouted up on the outskirts of the traditional city, to the west, after the swamps were drained beyond Vardaris Square (1930) and the eastern sector expanded (Aretsou).
Most of them were shanty towns, thrown together in a hundred different ways but mainly closely packed and jerry-built, in order to provide shelter for some 100,000 refugees from Asia Minor, Thrace and the Black Sea (Pontus). A typical example of a refugee settlement was Kalamaria, a whole municipality nowadays, created by the vitality and industriousness of people from the Black Sea.
