Mavi Boncuk | In the late nineteenth century the city of Kavala, a town by the sea in northern Greece,was developed to one of the most important tobacco processing centers in the Balkan area. Powerful tobacco merchants mainly from the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires built a considerable number of tobacco warehouses thus redefining the center of thecity, its character, as well as its borders. I argue that the architecture of those warehouses deeply configured the identities of tobacco workers and provided the means to tobacco merchants to publicly present themselves and their achievements. At the same timethose early industrial buildings subverted the boundaries between the city and the factory, shedding light on the work culture and every day lives of Greece’s tobacco workers.
SEE: Configuring Identities Through Industrial Architecture and Urban Planning:
Greek Tobacco Warehouses in LateNineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
Maria Rentetzi
The HERZOG tobacco company used a large number of tobacco warehouses along Damianou, Ethnarchi Makariou and Nikis Streets. Of interest is the building at the spot where Damianou, Ethnarchi Makariou and Nikis Streets intersect. This was the company’s first administrative building, which was built in 1891 and has turrets at the corners of its roof, like a castle (the architectural term for this is castellated). The administration moved between 1899 and 1900 to a privately-owned building on Kyprou St, which today houses the Town Hall of Kavala.
SOURCE
Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria
By Mary C. Neuburger
Villa Herzog, now the Town hall of Kavala.(1890), the former residence of the Hungarian tobacco trader Pierre Herzog. It is a miniature of a Hungarian castle.
Handling of tobacco was the big industry of Northern Greece in the 1920s and 1930s, and the city of Kavala was in many ways its hub. At its height the industry employed more than 15.000 workers, and more than 60 trading companies, many of them foreign, were established in the city. The port of Kavala was busier than the one in Thessaloniki at this time. Many of the foreign companies built facilities in the city such as warehouses, offices, and residences for their employees, often in architectural styles which were popular in their home countries. One example of this is the Austro-Hungarian company Herzog’s building that is now the town hall of Kavala.
During the early 20th century the economies of a number of Greek cities relied almost exclusively on the cultivation, processing, and sale of tobacco leaves. Especially in coastal cities such as Kavala, a town by the sea in northern Greece, everyday life mirrored the incessant tobacco production cycle—picking, drying, processing and baling tobacco. This was then transported to the port, loaded onto barges lined up at the quays in front of the city’s enormous tobacco warehouses and ferried out to foreign company steamers anchored out to sea. Since the 1840s, Lloyd, the major Austrian steamship company, had established a fortnightly service between Trieste and Kavala. Tobacco exports were directed mainly at the Hapsburg Empire, but also Russia, England, Egypt, France, and even the United States. The city attracted both the Greek bourgeoisie—retailers who traded tobacco as independent exporters in mainly the Balkans, Russia, Egypt, and Turkey—and European corporations. These were powerful investors who built their own tobacco warehouses and often had the double role of foreign consul in the city and tobacco merchant. It is indicative that by 1880 all the major European countries had established consulates in the city of Kavala. By the end of the nineteenth century, around 4,000 tons of tobacco were being sent abroad annually from the city’s port mostly by the Austrian Herzog et Cie. By 1913 there were 61 tobacco trading houses in the city.Austro-Hungarian Jewish industrialist Pierre Herzog who monopolized trade of Balkan and Turkish tobacco in Central Europe by the end of the nineteenth century and his company’s representative in the city, Adolf Wix von Zsolnay; the tobacco trade and economic relations and technology transfer between Kavala and Vienna; the traditional tobacco processing methods and their mechanization; the work culture and the political upheavals that were resulted from the introduction of new technologies in tobacco warehouses; the transfer of architectural styles and forms from Austria to the wider area of Kavala and neighboring cities.
1902 commercial catalogue published by the M.L. Herzog & Co, the biggest tobacco monopoly in Europe at the time. Founded by Baron Pierre Herzog in 1889, the Austro-Hungarian monopoly was the Sultan’s main supplier of tobacco. Advertising the trade connections to the Ottomans, the company’s catalogue was used to boost tobacco sales worldwide and impressed with the extended network of its tobacco trade. The company’s headquarters were in Budapest and their main site for processing tobacco was Cavalla, a town by the sea in northern Greece that was still under Ottoman rule. On the catalogue’s cover also appeared several other Greek cities―Xanthi, Drama, Pravista, and Thessaloniki―all still part of the Ottoman Empire and locations where the company maintained tobacco warehouses and processing centers. In addition to Greece and the Ottoman Empire, the 1902 catalogue signaled the transnational reach of the tobacco and the Herzog Company as it referenced Haskovo in southern Bulgaria; Smyrna and Samsun in Asia Minor, and New York City where Herzog’s 61 Broadway headquarters loomed as one of the biggest leaf tobacco importers in this North American city.
SEE ALSO: Tobacco Roads: Histories of Technologies and a Transnational EconomyMelinda Plastas1,2, Maria Rentetzi1,2
1Department of Women and Gender Studies, Bates Colleges, Bates, IA, USA2Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greecehttps://www.scirp.org/html/1-2810152_65487.htm