Some works are simply technical undertakings — concrete, steel, deadlines. And some works breathe differently, because they rise from memory, loss, and the quiet insistence that history must never be left unattended. The Holocaust Museum of Greece belongs entirely to the second category.
According to information from ypodomes.com, three construction groups have now entered the race to build the Museum: METKA, TERNA–EKTER, and ABAX. Their participation moves the project into its next, delicate phase — the negotiation process, where one of them will be chosen to carry the responsibility of giving shape to a space meant to hold the weight of fifty thousand erased voices.
The Jewish Community of Thessaloniki serves as the project’s implementing authority, with a total budget of around €40 million. The funding itself reads like an act of collective acknowledgment:
- €10 million from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation,
- €10 million from the German State,
- and the rest from donations — gestures of remembrance spanning continents.
The architectural vision comes from a constellation of studios: Efrat Kowalsky Architects (Israel), Heide von Beckerath, and P. Makridis & Associates. Project management is undertaken by the partnership Samaras & Associates – Hill International, guiding a project scheduled to open in 2028, provided that all steps remain aligned.
The building permit was issued in December 2023, and early works are already underway through the GEOEREVNA – OFS scheme.
A Museum Placed Where the Wound Is
The Museum rises next to the Old Railway Station of Thessaloniki — the place from which, in 1943, trains departed carrying 50,000 Jews of the city toward the Nazi extermination camps.
It is impossible to speak of this location without pausing. Without feeling, even briefly, the cold shadow of the platforms. Without hearing, in imagination, the silence that followed.
The Museum will occupy 9,000 square meters, spread across six above-ground floors and two underground levels, arranged like a quiet city within the city. Around it, a small urban grove will soften the edges, as if nature itself insists on offering reprieve.
Inside, visitors will walk through:
- galleries of the permanent exhibition,
- halls for temporary displays,
- spaces for archives, research, and education,
- multipurpose rooms and areas for reflection,
- administrative offices,
- with an outdoor parking area planned next door.
The architecture draws inspiration from Thessaloniki’s octagonal monuments, and at night, the building will emit light from within — a lantern of remembrance, a structure that becomes a gentle beacon, evoking the steady glow of a lighthouse.
A Work Built for the Future, Rooted in Responsibility
Sustainability is woven into its design, with all partners working toward LEED certification, ensuring that even the construction process honors the notion of continuity — that memory should not exhaust the world, but stand responsibly within it.
By 2026, the full museographic plan is expected to be completed by the German studio Atelier BRÜCKNER, giving form to how stories, testimonies, images, and silences will be presented to generations who never knew Thessaloniki as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans.”
“The Holocaust Museum of Greece will highlight and pay tribute to the memory not only of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, but that of the 39 Jewish communities that existed in the country before the war. At the same time, it will illuminate the multidimensional culture of the Jews of Thessaloniki and their multifaceted contribution to the development of the city, as well as Thessaloniki itself as a multicultural metropolis that continues to evolve with perseverance and persistence,” the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) stated in an offcial announcement, which also added, “Its location near an Old Railway Station of Thessaloniki is significant; it is from there that Greek Jews were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps.”
A Space of Light After a Century of Shadows
The Holocaust Museum of Greece is not simply a building. It is an act of return. A gesture of justice, however symbolic. A place where visitors will walk not as spectators, but as inheritors of a history that shaped the city’s soul.
Thessaloniki once held one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the world. This Museum, rising slowly but steadily, is an invitation to remember — and an insistence that no name, no voice, no story is ever lost when a city chooses to carry it forward.
