Genti Koule, also known as Eptapyrgio, situated atop the Acropolis of Thessaloniki, Greece—a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site—bears witness to a centuries-old history shrouded in darkness.
It was built in the early 14th century and has dominated since as the highest point of the city. It has ten towers and mezzanine towers: to supervise the area, to accommodate troops, and to function as a shelter in case of occupation of the city. Built on the site of an older fortification during the reign of the Palaiologos, it is located at the southeastern end of the walls of Thessaloniki, in the Upper Town.
After the conquest of Thessaloniki by the Ottomans in 1430, the middle tower was erected and given the name “Genti Koule,” by which the fortress complex is known. The phrase is rendered in Turkish as “Seven Towers.” In Istanbul there was a similar building called “Genti Koule,” known as one of the cruelest prisons.
Eptapyrgio underwent structural changes during the Ottoman period and especially at the end of the 19th century, when it was turned into a prison by the addition of buildings, cells and functional spaces. With the liberation of Thessaloniki, it maintained its function as a prison until 1989, when it was closed and returned as a monument to the Ministry of Culture.
The prison of Genti Koule is linked to dark pages of Greece’s history, as was revealed by scholars at a scientific conference held recently in Thessaloniki.
“A prison monument, a hell, that was associated with the Metaxas dictatorship, the German occupation, the Civil War and finally the Colonels’ Junta,” said the deputy head of the Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Thessaloniki, Elisabeth Tsigarida.
At the conference, the conditions of detention, torture and executions of political prisoners were discussed.
The Gendi Koule in the Ottoman years
Although the prison of Eptapyrgio was the most notorious place of detention in the Ottoman Greek period of the city, it seems that it was neither the only one nor the oldest place of confinement of prisoners.
The University of Crete’s Christos Kyriakopoulos said that places of confinement included the White Tower from at least the early 1870s until 1900.
“In February 1907, due to the overcrowding of the western prisons of Eptapyrgio, the White Tower was converted back into a prison and in the first phase 400 convicts were transferred there,” he clarified.
According to him, the saturation of the prisons was due to the long duration and extension of the trial procedures of court cases, and resulted in prisoners of different religions being held in the same cells.
“This situation caused frequent fights between Muslim, Greek, Bulgarian, and Vlach convicts,” he said, adding that the sanitary conditions were problematic, especially with the disposal of sewage and latrines.
“Due to overcrowding, some prisoners could not find a bed and slept on the floor. Under these conditions, various diseases quickly appeared, such as the typhus epidemic, and especially the old sewage pipes constantly caused diseases such as cholera, while a little later the smallpox epidemic broke out.”
Detention conditions at Thessaloniki’s Genti Koule during the interwar period
The second smallest and most miserable prison in the country was Eptapyrgio in 1935, according to historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Kostas Tziaras.
“In 1935, each prisoner in the Eptapyrgio prisons had 2.7 square meters. Overcrowding, combined with the general conditions of detention in the state of the medieval building, directly affected morbidity,” he noted, saying that during the years 1929-1933, when the most detailed reports exist, it seems that more than half of the prisoners were consistently ill every year, mainly from malaria, tuberculosis and childhood diseases, diseases that they almost always developed after entering prison.
“This percentage, 52 percent to be exact, was double the average morbidity rate of prisoners in Greek prisons. The vast majority were treated within the prison and only rarely in external hospitals.
In five years, 53 deaths were recorded within the prison, mainly from tuberculosis, pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. Of the deaths reported nationwide within Greek prisons, approximately 20 percent concerned prisoners from Eptapyrgio,” concluded Mr. Tziaras.
Executions of political prisoners during the Civil War
Parthenopi Vergou, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Balkan, Slavic & Oriental Studies at the University of Macedonia, spoke on the issue of executions of political prisoners.
She spoke about the establishment of the Extraordinary Military Courts, which were responsible for adjudicating cases related to violations of the resolution of 18 June 1946, that is, any action directed against the nationalist state.
“The military courts, with final decisions and through short trials, determined the punishment of the accused, such as imprisonment and the death penalty, which were based exclusively on political criteria. And while in the first months of the implementation of the emergency legislation, the trials concerned mainly individual acts, from 1947 they now concerned large groups of citizens,” she pointed out.
She also emphasized that in the case where the death sentence had been pronounced unanimously by the five judges or if at least four of the five agreed, then the execution took place in a very short period of time of 3 to 5 days, without the defendant being able to submit a request for clemency.
“The renunciation of communism could convert the death sentence into life imprisonment, although this was not always the rule. Therefore, the public denunciation of communist ideology before the Court was an incentive for the accused to . . . avoid the death penalty,” she stressed.
The first executions in Eptapyrgio began in the summer of 1946, but due to the large area around the prisons, it is difficult to determine the exact point of executions.
However, Vergou argued that the bodies were buried on the spot, with the graves distinguishable only by the curve they formed in the ground.
“According to research into the exceptional death books of the Municipality of Thessaloniki for the period 1946-1949, 184 death sentences were carried out in Eptapyrgio, imposed by the Extraordinary Military Court of Thessaloniki. Initially, in 1946, individual executions of one or two people are recorded, while the numerous executions, as well as their greater frequency, appear from 1948, specifically in the spring,” Vergou concluded.
Mass graves at Genti Koule
In March 2025, two mass graves containing the remains of executed individuals from the Greek Civil War were discovered near Genti Koule.
The first human remains were found in late 2024. Although the antiquities authority determined that the skeletons were not of archaeological interest, municipal authorities requested further excavations, citing their historical and political significance.
So far, at least 22 skeletons have been unearthed, one of which is believed to belong to a woman, as traces of a woman’s shoe were found. Additionally, four or five skeletons appear to belong to individuals around 20 years old.
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