Longos Mansion

Thessaloniki's Red House is famous for two things that turn out not to be true. It is not built of red brick: the architects who surveyed it for its 2014-2019 restoration recorded stamped red-tinted render imitating brickwork, with the pale carved ornament imitating stone in the same material. And it was never a mansion abandoned for seventy years. What the documents say is stranger. Ioannis K. Longos, of the Naousa textile family, bought the plot on 16 June 1923 in the zone burnt out by the great fire of 1917, and much of the cost came from the dowry of his wife, Thomai Karamperi. Then the builder went bankrupt in 1931, the family mill in Naousa burned, Longos died in Switzerland, and a deed dated 19 July 1934 handed the house to a landowner from Nymfaio at forced auction. Talk of suicides, curses and vampires grew around a facade that was visibly rotting while a literary cafe traded downstairs. Almost every ghost story now circulating was published after 2014, the year the building was sold and restored.

Thessaloniki's Red House exists because the old city burned. The great fire of 1917 destroyed the centre, and the reconstruction plan drawn up under Ernest Hebrard rebuilt it on a new street grid organised around the monuments that had survived. The Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia was one of them, and the plan gave it a square. The blocks framing that square fell inside the sought-after sector of the burnt zone, earmarked for services and for middle- and high-income housing. On 16 June 1923 a title deed registered at the Thessaloniki land registry (volume 23, no. 231) recorded the purchase of plot 6 in block 5, on the south-west side of the square, by Ioannis Konstantinou Longos. He belonged to the Longos family of textile manufacturers from Naousa and was an active figure in the industrial and political life of the city. His wife, Thomai Karamperi, was a tobacco merchant's daughter, and according to the family testimony of Eleni Daniilidou, née Karamperi, collected by the team that later surveyed the building, her dowry covered a large part of the construction cost. Almost every popular account, including both the English and Greek Wikipedia articles, credits the house instead to Grigorios Longos; the architects who worked from the deeds place Grigorios D. Longos elsewhere in the same family, trading plots in the burnt-zone property boom. The builder was the newly founded Anonymos Oikodomiki Etairia Neon Choron, the Building Company of the New Lands, with Panagiotis Stais as supervising engineer. The design is habitually attributed to the Italian architect Leonardo Gennari, and that attribution is repeated everywhere; it is worth knowing that the architects who prepared the restoration study state plainly that the building cannot be assigned with certainty to any architect or engineer, because the signature on the surviving elevation drawing is illegible and no other evidence exists. In October 1925 the owner asked to add a third floor to the building permit, which is why the house has the profile it has today. The result, finished in 1926, is a hybrid: load-bearing masonry stiffened with reinforced concrete, an L-shaped plan, basement, ground floor, mezzanine and three storeys, with two flats on each of the first two floors and, on the third, the owner's apartment. That apartment had two front doors purely for symmetry, one opening on the formal rooms and one on the private ones. It had a full direct-current electrical installation and a boiler room for central heating and hot water, both luxuries in the Thessaloniki of the 1920s. The painted ceilings are usually filed under art nouveau, but the survey found them closer to the geometric, stylised manner of the Viennese Secession, stencilled in outline and finished freehand. Then everything failed at once. The construction company went bankrupt in 1931, shortly after the house was completed; the Longos textile plant in Naousa burned to the ground; Ioannis Longos died in Switzerland and his wife not long after. The mansion had been mortgaged to the National Mortgage Bank of Greece, and it was sold off. A deed dated 19 July 1934 records the transfer to Stergios Missios, a landowner from Nymfaio in Florina, whose family kept it for the next eighty years. The ground floor never stopped working. Until 1992 it held the literary cafe Ermis, a meeting place for the city's schoolteachers and professors, whose sign stayed on the facade long after it closed; the beer hall and restaurant Kourdisto Gourouni followed. The apartments above were another matter, empty for long stretches, with one of the owners living on the top floor until shortly before the building was finally left alone. Protection came in 1983, when the Ministry of Culture listed it as a historic monument (Government Gazette 393 of 15 June 1983); the ministry responsible for planning issued its own preservation order, Δ-734α, on 28 November of the same year. In 2007, at the proposal of the Ephorate of Newer Monuments of Central Macedonia, the minister of culture Georgios Voulgarakis approved either compulsory expropriation or direct purchase so the state could restore it for cultural use; in 2009 his successor Antonis Samaras revoked the decision, finding that the public interest was no longer justified. That left the Red House on the open market, and in 2013-2014 it was bought by Atlantis Pak Properties B.V., the vehicle of the Greek-Russian businessman Ivan Savvidis, for a reported 4.7 million euros. The restoration study was drawn up between 2014 and 2017 by the architects Giorgos Pavlidis, Pigi Sarvani and Vasiliki Massen, with structural work by the Penelis practice. Work began in August 2017. On 20 November 2018 a 65-year-old man working for the contractor Redex fell from scaffolding on the top floor and was dead on arrival at Papanikolaou hospital. The scaffolding started coming down that same month, the restored building was inaugurated in mid-2019, and its upper floors became offices.

The Longos Mansion stands on the corner of Agias Sofias and Ermou streets, on the south-west side of Agias Sofias Square in central Thessaloniki, facing the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia across the square. Agias Sofias is pedestrianised in front of it, so the two ornamented facades can be looked at properly from the street. The Agias Sofias station of Thessaloniki Metro Line 1, which opened on 30 November 2024, is on the square; all stations on the line are step-free and equipped for passengers with low vision or hearing loss. There is no visit as such. The building is private property. The three upper floors, about 900 square metres in total, were converted into offices for the Savvidis group companies, and the interiors that make the building remarkable, the painted ceilings, the plaster reliefs and the staircase, are not open to the public. Anything you can see indoors depends entirely on what happens to be trading in the two ground-floor units. Those tenants change often, and this is where any guide goes stale. The Ermis cafe closed in 1992; the Kourdisto Gourouni restaurant shut when the restoration began; a PAOK FC club store opened in the restored ground floor in November 2018 and closed for good in July 2023, its stock moved to the shop at the Toumba stadium; a branch of the Lunchbox chain opened in 2019; and a meze restaurant that took the building's own name, To Kokkino Spiti, opened on 28 March 2024. As of mid-2026 a Greek restaurant directory lists that last one as closed. Check before you plan a meal there. One warning about photographs. Almost every image of the Red House circulating online, including older pictures on this page, was taken before the works of 2017-2019 and shows stained render, boarded windows and a for-rent sign. The building you will find on the square today has been fully restored and looks nothing like it.