Tentative snapshots from Thessaloniki and Smyrna before the 19th century

Our paper ventures into ancien regime portscapes, taking as case studies Thessaloniki and Smyrna before their 19th-century westernisation, followed by the great fires of August 1917 and September 1922. To do so, we cross-checked scholarly works, travel reports, maps and visual sources, eventually drafting conjectural maps at different scales to depict a built environment that has disappeared, which followed a very different logic from the functional idea of a city.