Tag: Thessaloniki

  • Greek Students’ Magical City Tour in Istanbul

    Greek Students’ Magical City Tour in Istanbul

    By Christina Flora on March 19, 2013 In Culture, Education, News, Turkey

    magical-citySeventy two fifth-graders from the Mandoulides elementary school, Thessaloniki will travel to Turkey, where along with 17 students from the Zografeion Lyceum will take part in the musical-theatrical performance, A Magical City, based on a fairy-tale by Helen Priovolos

    The performance will be held in the Zografeio Lyceum in Istanbul on March 21. It is a love story set in a beautiful port of Pontus, named Farmakea, where a young man, Kourkoumas, falls in love with a beautiful girl named Kanella.

    The Zografeion Lyceum is one of the remaining open Greek schools in Istanbul, in the Beyoğlu district and very close to Taksim Square, which is considered to be the heart of the city. The school, like all minority schools in Turkey, is a secular school. In the years that followed its opening, it developed into a particularly active school and has always had more than 250 pupils.

    via Greek Students’ Magical City Tour in Istanbul | Greek Reporter Europe.

  • Bulgaria, Greece Must Unite against Macedonia, Turkey in Agriculture

    Bulgaria, Greece Must Unite against Macedonia, Turkey in Agriculture

    Bulgarian Minister of Agriculture and Foods Miroslav Naydenov. Photo by BGNES

    photo_verybig_147702

    Bulgaria and Greece should team up to offer strong competition in the area of agriculture against non-EU neighbors Macedonia and Turkey, argued Bulgarian Agriculture Minister Miroslav Naydenov.

    Saturday Naydenov visited Greek livestock breeding exhibition Zootechnia in Thessaloniki.

    “There is a competition pressure in agriculture on the part of Turkey and Macedonia, who are not part of the EU and their agriculture sectors can enjoy privileges not available to agriculture producers in the EU,” said the Bulgarian minister in an interview for ANA-MPA.

    “We are neighbors with Greece and our ambition is to be able to increase mutual exchange,” stressed Naydenov.

    The Bulgarian Agriculture Minister noted that Greek agriculture companies already have the established practice of using Bulgarian raw products, and suggested that this can be boosted.

    He also called for an increased trade exchange of produce, with more Bulgarian grain products to be imported in Greece, and more Greek fruit and vegetables to be imported in Bulgaria.

    In particular, Naydenov stressed that Bulgaria has still work to do in the absorption of EU subsidies in agriculture to achieve the full potential of the sector.

    Tags: greece, Greek, Thessaloniki, Miroslav Naydenov, agriculture, greece, turkey, EU, subsidies

    via Bulgaria: Bulgaria, Greece Must Unite against Macedonia, Turkey in Agriculture – Bulgarian Min – Novinite.com – Sofia News Agency.

  • Thessaloniki Mayor Boutaris Meets with Manager of Turkish Airlines

    Thessaloniki Mayor Boutaris Meets with Manager of Turkish Airlines

    Manager of Turkish Airlines, Utku Yazan, had a meeting with the Mayor of Thessaloniki, Mr. Boutaris, in the City Hall. His purpose was to thank the mayor of Thessaloniki for his support during the first three months of the operation of the direct airline Thessaloniki – Konstantinoupolis.

    The two men discussed issues of THY flights from Thessaloniki to Istanbul, but also matters of general interest concerning the economic and social situation in Thessaloniki.

    The Turkish Airlines have a special interest for the city of Thessaloniki, considering that it will contribute greatly to the overall service of Greek passengers to and from Turkey.

    via Thessaloniki Mayor Boutaris Meets with Manager of Turkish Airlines | Greece.GreekReporter.com Latest News from Greece.

  • Give Greece a chance

    Give Greece a chance

    Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, has spent centuries being burnt, bombed and built again. Our writer brings the colourful and cultural metropolis up to date

    • Fiachra
      • Fiachra Gibbons
      • The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011
      • Article history
    • Thessaloniki

      Clockwise from top left: Monks heading to Mount Athos, the Arch of Galerius in central Thessaloniki, and Alexander the Great’s statue on the seafront. Photographs: Alamy

      I want to tell you a story. You don’t have to believe it. I didn’t at first, and it happened to me. It was years ago in Istanbul, at the end of a long evening down by the water at Besiktas, when we had all become as dreamy as the waters of the Bosphorus at that hour. I was aching for my bed, but the tide of the night was running towards an iskembe joint, and I could already taste the garlicky vinegar of the tripe soup on the air. I pleaded mercy – a godawful early start for Salonica – when a young guy at the edge of the group touched my arm. “If you are going to Salonica, you must eat the borek,” he said, and began to write down directions to the best bougatsatsidiko in the city.

      He had never been to Thessaloniki himself, but his grandfather had been born there. Even his grandmother, who came from Hania, with all the Cretan pride that entails, had to admit that Salonicans made the best borek/bougatsa on the planet – the lightest, flakiest filo, just greasy enough to cut the goaty kick of the young mizithra cheese flecked with oregano and mint.

      He handed me a napkin with a line drawn across it to show the sea, a fortress on a hill, a hamam with three domes, and between them the Turkish names of some streets.

      But hadn’t Thessaloniki been Greek since December 1912? Hadn’t it been burned to the ground, bombed, rebuilt, knocked down and rebuilt again since then? Hadn’t it endured two world wars, various occupations, a civil war, a dictatorship and the worst that precast concrete can inflict? Hadn’t its Turks been sent back to the eternal exile of “home” and its Jews, the soul of the city, who made up the majority of its remarkable mix of peoples, been all but exterminated at Auschwitz?

      None of this seemed to phase him. It should be there. “People still have to eat borek.”

      Two days later, using his scribbled directions, I found a bougatsa shop just where he said I would, next to a patsas place that was still serving the Greek variant of that hangover tripe soup I had missed in Istanbul to the last of the night’s stragglers.

      Greek troops Greek troops arriving at Salonica, now Thessaloniki, in 1915The owner was a refugee, too. But his family had come from Smyrna, now Izmir in Turkey. His Borekci grandfather had taken over from a man who had been given the key by a blond-haired Turk the day he and his family were deported in 1924 with the last of the city’s Muslims. And yes, the bougatsa was fit for a bishop.

      I took a photograph of the owner with two customers – one an Armenian Greek, the other a Cappadocian, though neither had set foot in the places they claimed to be from – and sent it to my friend in Istanbul. A few weeks later I received a reply.

      He’d shown the photo to his grandfather, then well into his 90s. I’d got the wrong borek shop. The place never got sun like that in the morning.

      I am telling you this story because to me it says a lot about the people who live in Salonica or have lived there, and people who have only inhabited the city in their dreams or in the stories of their parents or grandparents, but for whom it is still in some ways home.

      The guide books will tell you that Thessaloniki is Greece‘s second city, a port of a million people that doesn’t make the best of its spectacular setting and architectural heritage, its Byzantine churches lost in a permanent chaos of traffic and concrete.

      I can’t say they are wrong. But then there is Salonica, Selanik, Solun and Salonika, the New Jerusalem, the city that was once a candidate to be the capital of a Jewish Promised Land, the second city of the Byzantine empire and later of the vast Ottoman emirate when it was up there with the Ming as the most dominant, dynamic dynasty on earth. This is the city that is the real capital of the Balkans, its missing heart, the lodestar of a whole swathe of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Adriatic to Alexandria. But all that post-Byzantine bustle was an embarrassment to the city and to Greece generally.

      Arriving in Thessaloniki any time in the past 50 years, you would have found a city that had gone into exile from itself. This flight began the day the Greek army marched into Salonica in 1912 just ahead of the Bulgarians to “liberate” a city that wasn’t that Greek, and became practically pathological after the last transports left for Auschwitz carrying its Spanish-speaking Jews 32 years later.

      The people who moved into their shops and apartments had themselves arrived, traumatised barely two decades earlier from Istanbul, Asia Minor, the Black Sea, Cappadocia or the Caucasus, or in endless refugee columns that had snaked from the Crimea, Bulgaria or Eastern Thrace. These new “old Greeks” of Magna Graecia were joined in the 1980s by Greeks from Russia, Tashkent, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia, who now muddle along with the latest arrivals from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and more recently Libya, stuck in the island in the moat of Fortress Europe that is Greece today, unable to get into Europe proper, and too ashamed or broke to go home. Thessaloniki is such a place in exile that its biggest football team, PAOK, has been playing away from home for more than 80 years. Its real home turf is Istanbul – Costantinopoli – its colours shared with Besiktas.

      Salonica church The church of St GregoryNothing is quite what it seems. To really see Thessaloniki for what it is, you have to see not just the living but the dead. You have to look out towards Olympus and the mists that roll in off the Thermaic Gulf and see Pierre Loti rowing Aziyadé away from her husband; or see the last true sultan, Abdulhamid II, step ashore into house arrest from the imperial caique with his harem and carpentry tools in tow (as well as being a paranoid, bloodthirsty tyrant, he was a very nifty cabinet maker).

      You have to imagine, too, those same women herded off a few years later into the saddest of travelling circuses ever to cross Europe. It is not for nothing that Mark Mazower subtitled his magisterial history of the place City of Ghosts.

      This is a city of conspiratorial corners, where you cannot help turn detective as you climb up from Paralia through the Modiano market to Ano Poli and the city walls of the upper town, the Turkish quarter that looks so Greek. You don’t have to look too hard to see churches that have been mosques and mosques that are now churches, old women lighting candles at shrines to holy men that were both saints and dervishes, or find the Moorish mosque-cum-Andalusian synagogue that served the city’s Muslim Jews. Yes, you read right, Muslim Jews – the Ma’aminim or Donme, followers of Sabbatai Sevi. Thessaloniki did unlikely syntheses with the same ummatched elan as it do bougatsa. My God, they’ve tried, but no amount of wrecking balls or chauvinistic brainwashing has been able to destroy entirely the glorious diversity of its DNA. In any case, its unmentionable origins are laid out for all to see three times a day in its fantastic food, and in the songs that are sung in its skyladiko (literally “doghouse”) clubs and rembetiko tavernas every night.

      There is no getting away, however, from the fact that Thessaloniki is still the most conservative, nationalistic city in Greece – where the Orthodox church could bring thousands on to the streets to threaten war with the fledging republic of Macedonia for trying to “steal the name of Macedonia” and the heritage of Alexander the Great. And there are plenty of Orthodox Taliban on the nearby monastic republic of Mount Athos, which has its embassy in the city, ready to pounce on any slackening of national-religious fervour. Which makes it all the more remarkable that earlier this year the radical winemaker and ecologist Yiannis Boutaris swept into office as mayor on a platform of getting Thessaloniki to come out about itself, to embrace the cosmopolitan city that in living memory had shop signs in six alphabets.

      He first promised to build a new mosque and a monument to Salonica’s most famous son, Ataturk, and the Young Turks, whose revolution began there. And the doors should be thrown open to all the Jews, Turks and others who trace their roots to the city. The bishop of the city threatened to kill himself rather than swear Boutaris in and vowed to do everything in his power to stop this “Bulgarian traitor”, a reference to the mayor’s roots in the Latin-speaking Vlach minority. Boutaris branded him a “mujahideen” and took his own “cosmic vows”.

      He’s going to need every bit of karmic help he can get. Thessaloniki has been run into the ground by a cabal of churchmen and extreme rightwing demagogues these past 20 years. The corruption and incompetence is on such a phantasmagoric scale that the city ran out of petrol to keep the handful of working dustcarts on the road. There is the small mattter, too that Greece is bankrupt. There is no better reason to bail out Greece again than to give Yiannis Boutaris a chance.

      Essentials

      EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies London-Thessaloniki in summer from £58.99 one way. Daios Luxury Living Hotel (+30 21 0923 6760; thessaloniki cityhotels.com) has doubles from €110

  • Thessaloniki ready to make its comeback

    Thessaloniki ready to make its comeback

    thessaloniki

    On the sea end of Thessaloniki’s Egnatia Boulevard, which cuts through the city from east to west, lies a small district with a children’s park that bears the same name as the district: Plateia Novarinou.

    All of the “others” who inhabit Thessaloniki flock to these streets. Nikos Canis (Nikos Tzannis Ginnerup) is someone who would rather live here than in just any old neighborhood, and the classic sounds of the violin can be heard drifting from his windows down to the street below. In the middle of a small, high-ceilinged room is a tiled coffee table, and the walls around it are filled with musical instruments. Canis says, “Even though it might be happening slowly, Greek society is going through a period of rediscovering Ottoman culture.” As for him, Canis made his own personal discoveries on this front long ago.

    Although the heaviness of the economic crisis that has afflicted Greece has been sitting over the country like a dark cloud lately, this city has embarked on a journey of self-discovery. As a city, Thessaloniki was once a city the Turks used for every new idea they had. However, it has long been forgotten, as a place where pashas were imprisoned and where armed political parties gathered. Jewish residents, who came on the invitation of the Ottoman sultans, were forced to bid this city farewell during Hitler’s time. As for the Greeks themselves, they often used Thessaloniki as a basis for constructing a national state.

    These days Thessaloniki is trying to make a resolute return that will make up for all the time lost over the past years and is making its own calculations about how to return to the special status it once held.

    The real sign of change came with the most recent local elections. Yannis Butaris was able to use his uniting personality to overturn the 25-year rule of the conservative New Democrat Party, by becoming mayor of Thessaloniki in the process. Mayor Butaris says that his greatest dream is to see Thessaloniki regain its multicultural aspect, noting that in the process he and his team wish to see the reality of the city — which existed for 500 years under Ottoman rule — return. Butaris refers to the past, and to not only the 500 years of Ottoman rule, but also to the Jewish character that developed in this city, saying: “All of the Turks, Jewish people, Greeks and Slavs brought a very multicultural dimension to this city. At the start of the 20th century, this city, which reflected a variety of cultures, had 12 different newspapers published in different languages — from Turkish to Greek, French to Hebrew.” Butaris talks about the past as he makes notes of plans for the future. He says the time has come to transcend false fears, asserting: “Why should I be scared of the Turks? What, are they going to come and try to take Thessaloniki?” Butaris is now promising that a spot once occupied by a monument representing Turks but which is now used as a car park, will be turned into a mosque and a new cemetery for the city’s Muslim population. This spot was where an important speech on freedom was once made, and perhaps once the mosque is built, it will remind people again of the “Hürriyete Hitap” (Address on Freedom) speech that was once delivered here.

    Butaris notes that his work on all these fronts is appreciated by the residents of the city. He notes that overcoming bureaucratic blockades requires nothing but “perseverance, patience and desire.” With the recent economic crisis and the political turbulence that has arisen, many Greek politicians can barely make appearances on the street anymore.

    As for Butaris though, with his arms tattooed all the way down to his hands and his earring in place, he is comfortable just hanging out with the youth of the city at the seashore and singing songs or accepting carnations from voters who see him in the street. In fact, the greatest supporters of the new Thessaloniki — which has also recently applied to be the 2014 European Youth Capital — appears to be the younger generation of the city. Yorgos Yourgiadis (31) of the civil society organization Youth in Action notes that what has been missing in Thessaloniki up until now are dreams and desire. The city, over the past years, seemed shrouded in darkness and just broken down. Yourgiadis describes the election of Butaris as a great opportunity for the city.

    “Thessaloniki was not just the second most important city for Greece in history, but it was also important for the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.” The person who asserts the above is Ekatirini Michailidou, the deputy president of the city’s biggest company and of the Greek-Turkish Trade Chamber of Northern Greece. He says, “If you know what you want to do, this city has opportunities for you.” He also notes that Thessaloniki has stood not only as a gateway to Greece but also to the Balkans, to the rest of the world. His company, Leaf Tobacco, is today one of 50 businesses throughout Greece owned by the A. Michaelides Group, who laid its foundations in 1886 in northern Greece when the region was still an Ottoman state. The company now makes 135 million euros a year from export and is fourth in the world in terms of tobacco harvest and processing. The company is also active in 12 countries, and currently Michailidou is researching collaboration possibilities with Turkey concerning organic agricultural pesticides. At this point, Leaf Tobacco also markets pesticide free of animal by-products to many countries including Syria and Iran.

    “I see more of a desire to make cooperative efforts with Turkey in Thessaloniki,” Michailidou said, also noting that he found the new Turkish Airlines (THY) Istanbul-Thessaloniki flights — which are to begin in the last week of May — a positive step towards furthering cooperation between the two cities.

    Social scientist Despina Syrri notes that “Balkan countries have been engaged in trying to erase their Ottoman past in different ways when they went through the process of creating their own national states. But these were political choices of that era.” She suggests that the warmer ties and efforts to create friendships in recent years are part of a very natural process. Syrri says that because of her own family’s background, she herself feels very close to Turkey culturally and points to how the time has really come for Thessaloniki to re-enliven itself on matters of economy and tourism in particular.

    Architect and musician Nikos Canis says that he has invested a serious interest in to learning more about Ottoman culture. He also says that he has not reached his position he holds today easily, but as a result of gaining experience. His interest in Turkey started in what he calls “difficult days.” He arrived in Turkey in 1988 and stayed for five years. He worked then as an architect in the Istanbul district of Kuzguncuk, and he also played music, from the classic kemençe (a small violin played like a cello) to the tambur (a classic Turkish instrument much like a mandolin), learning a lot about formal Ottoman music at the same time. He also started taking lessons at a music course in Central Anatolia, where he learnt how to play the bağlama (a stringed musical instrument from the eastern Mediterranean region), as well as studying Ottoman Turkish. Nowadays he has a group of friends who put on concerts where they play the classic kemençe all over Greece. This group also plays at festivals. As Canis sees it, there is no Turkish or Greek music, but rather Ottoman music. He is saddened by the lack of a museum about Ottoman civilization in Thessaloniki. But he sees the two-book series published by the Greek Culture Ministry on architectural styles of the Ottoman period as a great start to allowing people to start learning more about the past.

    Canis notes that fears and preconceptions must be put aside now and says: “When you look for an enemy, you will never have any troubles finding one. It was the Turks who were enemies yesterday, and tomorrow it’ll be the Albanians.”

    One of Greece’s leading Turkologists, Professor Vasilis Dimitriadis, is known for starting speeches to his students with these words: “Forget every story and distorted recounting of what you have heard about Turkey up until now. Turkey is our neighbor and a friendly country with whom we are obliged to develop relations.” Dimitriadis worked for 30 years at the Historical Archives of Macedonia in Thessaloniki and has written many scholarly works concerning the Ottoman period. In fact, his “Thessaloniki Topography during the Ottoman Era (1430-1912)” is widely accepted as an important reference source for people interested in these issues.

    Theology professor Grigoris Ziaka asserts that Europe has tried to replace the centuries of culture that saw people actually living together with the concept of “humanism,” and notes that he himself first encountered Islam when he visited the Greek cities of Gümülcine and İskeçe when he was in his twenties. He recalls: “When I visited mosques, people would invite me in lovingly. I would ask whether the fact that I was not Muslim bothered them. And I never got a response that indicated that I bothered them at all. I found humanism and true brotherhood in these relationships.”

    In 1973 a translated version of the Mevlana done by Ziaka was published in Greece. Later, Ziaka studied the concepts of “evi” as he found them in Mevlana and Ibn Arabi. He then also started writing about the Quran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad. His short book on Islam is very much like a catechism.

    As one of the most important intellectuals to come out of western Thrace recently, Ibrahim Onsunoğlu believes that Thessaloniki has always been a magnetic center in the region. Onsunoğlu has worked for many years as a psychiatrist in Thessaloniki and points out that many important revolutions have actually had Thessaloniki as their starting points. Both Atatürk and Nazım Hikmet were born here as well. And the city is not only the starting point for the first socialist movement in the Balkans, but also the place where the first-ever Turkish newspaper was published. In fact, the Yeni Asır (New Century), a newspaper still published in Izmir, actually began in Thessaloniki. Another interesting note is that the feminist and women’s movement that started in the Ottoman era also began here. But even though Thessaloniki was incredibly cosmopolitan throughout the 19th century, it turned into much more of a homogenous city after the majority of its Turkish and Jewish residents left. At that point, it really became a national state. When you look at photographs of Thessaloniki taken prior to 1912, you see minarets rising from every corner of the city. After all that, though, only one minaret was left: Rotondo.

    For the Turks of western Thrace, Thessaloniki has always been the city where teachers who come to teach in their schools are trained. The Thessaloniki Private Pedagogical Academy, founded in 1968, used to send its graduates to teach in western Thrace. However the institution was shut down this year, but there is also the Macedonia-Thrace Muslims Educational and Cultural Association, which is still active.

  • THESSALONIKI MONUMENTS?

    THESSALONIKI MONUMENTS?

    Incoming mayor wants to draw Jewish and Turkish visitors

    The incoming mayor of Thessaloniki said in an interview published yesterday that he plans to build a monument in the northern port city to the movement headed by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish state, chiefly as a way of attracting Turkish visitors. Yiannis Boutaris, an idiosyncratic vintner and the city’s first Socialist-backed mayor in 24 years, said he also intended to build a monument commemorating thousands of Thessaloniki Jews who were killed by occupying German forces. «Our aim is for 300,000 Jews and 300,000 Turks to come and pay homage to their family heritage in the same way that we go to Istanbul,» Boutaris told Eleftherotypia newspaper.