Qualla: Acropole Hotel

Acropole Hotel: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0. One of the things Thanasis Pagoulatos managed to carry out of Khartoum, through streets littered with dead bodies and past Rapid Support Forces fighters who had already ransacked his hotel, was a handwritten note from Mother Teresa. He was seventy-nine years old. He and his sister-in-law Nora, widow of his brother George, had been trapped inside the Acropole Hotel for ten days without electricity or running water, along with four guests and three staff. When the French Armed Forces finally got them out, the hotel closed its doors for the first time in seventy-one years. The note came with him.

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Image: RomanDeckert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Acropole Hotel: A Night Club Opposite the Governor's Palace

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Panagiotis Pagoulatos, known as Panaghis, left the Ionian island of Cephalonia during the Second World War. He washed up in Khartoum, then the capital of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where a sizeable Greek community was already thriving. He married Flora, a Greek woman from Alexandria. ...

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Image: RomanDeckert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Acropole Hotel: Independence, Coups, and the September Laws

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Sudani assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain. Sudan became independent on 1 January 1956. The Greek settlers, some six thousand strong at the community's peak, received Sudanese nationality certificates. Panaghis died in 1965 and his three sons took over: Thanasis, George, and Gerasimos, better known as Makis, who was actual...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Sudani assumed (based on copyright claims). | Public domain

Acropole Hotel: Famine, Fax Machines, and Mother Teresa

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0. What followed was the strangest of blessings. The famines in Darfur and Ethiopia sent every NGO on earth scrambling for Khartoum, and the Acropole was the only hotel with working telephone, telex, and fax lines. Robert D. Kaplan called it "a monument to the inventive cunning and ...

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Image: RomanDeckert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Acropole Hotel: George Pagoulatos, the Best Ambassador of Sudan

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Petr Adam Dohnálek, CC BY-SA 3.0 cz. George Pagoulatos ran the hotel like the captain of an ocean liner, as one obituary put it. His wife was of Italian origin; they had grown up in Sudan together and had been married forty-three years. He rose at 5:30 every morning for fifty years. Sir David Chipperfield featured h...

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Image: Petr Adam Dohnálek | CC BY-SA 3.0 cz

Acropole Hotel: April 15, 2023

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 15 April 2023, the Sudanese civil war erupted in downtown Khartoum, and the Acropole stood directly in the crossfire between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. Thanasis and Nora sheltered in the hotel with a handful of guests and staff. RSF fighters broke ...

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Image: RomanDeckert | CC BY-SA 4.0