The age-old adage that even waste could reveal secrets of human history has come true in the case of dump findings from an old World War I hospital in the vicinity of Thermai, in the wider Thessaloniki region.

The hospital refuge was interred for almost a century, as it belonged to the Army of the Orient which fought on the Balkan front, and whose soldiers were sent to convalesce at Thermai.

The hospital’s dump was unearthed in 2007 and the findings range from empty champagne and Burgundy wine bottles to military uniforms, buttons, shoes and coins, shedding light on military daily life of an ethnic patchwork army serving in Macedonia in WWI.


The peculiar findings are now on display at the Thessaloniki Museum of Byzantine Culture as part of an exhibition titled Army of the Orient in the Balkans: Archaeological Testimonials of a Hospital in Thermi/Sedes, which runs until March 3. Everyday objects become symbols of multiethnic coexistence: the collection of buttons come from French, Russian, Serbian and British soldiers.


A 10-drachma piece with a bullet hole in the middle become a soldier’s "life jacket"-shielding him from  enemy fire. Anastasios Antonaras, an archaeologist working on the exhibition, said that his first impression was that the hospital resembled an officers’ club, where soldiers entertained themselves.

He further adds that "it took two years of research before I discovered how close pleasure is to pain and joy to sadness, as the [wine] bottles found in the dump were reused to store medicine, covering the considerable needs of the 16 military hospitals that had been set up in Thessaloniki at the time." The exhibition also includes material from Mediatheque de l’Architecture et de Patrimoine – Diffusion RMN of the French Ministry of Culture, the Thessaloniki History Centre, the municipality and private collectors.

MBC: Photographic Material from the exhibition & Greek News Agenda: A Tribute to the Balkan Wars