It’s pouring rain in Thessaloniki, but no one seems to mind it here at dinner, under the open-air tents of the Rouga taverna. A couple of mangas play rebbetiko, like the first night I dined here, on an unspecified day in April 2015, almost ten years ago..
‘I am very very very.. happy,’ Nicola said that night. We were all university students, me even in my starting year, the very first time we landed in Thessaloniki, me and my dear friends Martina, Pietro, Nicola, Alessandro. That evening, after dinner, Martina and I had ended up dancing at the ‘Trois’ club, singing laika Greek pop when I still had absolutely no idea what I was shouting about, let alone who Nikos Vertis was. It was a graduation party of a guy we had never seen and who would become a close friend, Kostas. One of those guys who. ‘we will be friends forever’, I still believe to this day, nothing has changed.
In the following days we ended up at a university party at Ano Poli, again with a person I didn’t know yet, a sweet and noble soul, Spiros. A girl we had met in Chios the summer before, Kostantina, had told us that Spiros would be waiting for us that evening wearing his orange glittering shoes in front of the Turkish Consulate, to take us to his house, where we would sing Eros Ramazzotti with a bunch of first-year Greek medicine students until late into the night. Some of them were to accompany Pietro and Nicola to see the Iraklis game the following day, they were to teach them how to enter the stadium without a ticket. But hadn’t we gone to Thessaloniki to see the Paok team game?
The following evening, we had danced the night away in the veracious square of Ladadika, sung by the icon Dimitris Mitropanos, after intoxicating ourselves with toumba libre, the most vomitous cocktail in history made of retsina and coke. During those days we had visited all the available archaeological museums and monuments, “but who the hell is going to see them?” most locals told us. Between smoke, spring wind and insomnia, I had taken a severe cold, becoming completely mute. Nevertheless, the memory of those days remains vivid in my mind. Despite returning exhausted and wheezing to my friend Elisa at our university class in Venice, I was feeling as if I experienced in four days a concentration of emotions that I would not have accumulated even in a year.
And today Rouga is just as it was that evening. Nothing has changed, maybe only me. Sometimes it happens that we return to the same city at a distance of time and relive ourselves through our memories, imprinted in the most banal places, in the silliest trifles and in the most evocative details. This is what Thessaloniki means to me. I experienced it as a university student, as a young woman embarking on the most improbable, adventurous and unreasonable experiences during a long, hot Greek summer. I was hungry for the future, so hungry that feeling senseless away from my everyday life made me feel good and experience the carefreeness I deserved.
I then experienced it coming back from Istanbul, after an endless night on the bus, when my sister and I and Alberto camped at Thanasis’ house after discovering ‘Kostantinoupoli’ together, in the scorching August of 2017. Thessaloniki had welcomed me differently that day, I remember walking alone around the Church of Agia Sofia, it was the age when I would have to come to terms with a feeling that would compromise me, would I be up to it?
I came back during the pandemic, when no one in the city surrendered to social distancing and the city’s bars and rooftops teemed with people on outdoor terraces. Kostas had told me ‘mask here is forbidden’. At that time, for me Thessaloniki represented an escape from a situation of imprisonment that I no longer accepted. Always restless, to fill the void I had started studying for the national diplomatic competition, believing I would make it. Instead, Kostas alerted me one night at that time, prophetically, as we chowed down on Giannis’ famous sweet and savoury bougatsa: ‘Claoudiaki, you are an incredible woman and I wish your dreams will come true, but remember that things don’t always fully depend on us’.
Finally, in recent years, I have returned once or a couple of times a year for work, once again seeing it from a different side. Understanding the Greeks from their freddo espresso (metrio, sketo, glyko?) is a cultural experience that allows one to perfectly infiltrate the dynamics of their everyday life.
From every angle, Thessaloniki has always seemed wonderful to me, perhaps because every time, the city accepts me exactly as I am, without question, without asking why. Thessaloniki doesn’t give a damn if I change, it itself doesn’t know what it is, and it knows to be effortlessly enjoyed. The first time I took my sister to the city, she asked me, ‘Is this the city you told me about?’ Soon she too would succumb to the charms of the most iconic, ugly, chaotic, lively and fun street, the unpronounceable Tsimiski, which during the day is bustling with businesses and in the evening thunders with the sound of bouzoukia out loud from the crates of cars queuing for the Ladadika and Odos Mitropoleos nightlife.
‘Thessaloniki is the best!’ everyone says, but why? Everyone seems to want to live there.
Founding events of the current Greek republic took place here, such as the assassination of Lambrakis in 1963, reported by the novel and film ‘Z-the orgy of power’. Although the city has only been Greek since 1912, Thessaloniki has always been a frontier city, a jumble of elements blending different influences, and what remains intact from the 1917 fire bears witness to this: the majestic Byzantine walls, the church of Agios Dimitrios, Agia Sophia and the very ancient Monastery of Vlatadon on Eptapyrgion, up on Ano Poli, the silent and dormant, entirely preserved Ottoman-style upper part of the city, overlooking the Gulf of Thessaloniki. The city of Cyril and Methodius is immediately East in the gardens of the Pasha, in the Ottoman fountains, in the house where Mustafa Kemal was born, also target of terrorist reprisals during the events in Istanbul in 1955, in the old hammams now joyfully converted into night clubs such as the Aegli Hammam, in the politiki kouzina served in the taverns, in the pleasant, naphthalene aesthetics of the traditional bars on the legendary Egnatia Street. Thessaloniki was also, until World War II, a city with a very high Sephardic Jewish composition (about 98% of them were annihilated in the Nazi extermination camps), as witnessed by the Modiano Agora, completed in 1930 by the Italian-Jewish architect Eli Modiano on the site of the old Talmud Tora synagogue. Today, however, the attempt is to make Thessaloniki the nerve centre of Macedonia, building its identity by delving into the distant past.
– Alexander the Great, Pella, Vergina (the monumental tombs of Philip II the Macedonian are magnificent), ‘fuck North Macedonia, just Fyrom exists’. –
These are the words that follow each other ruefully when one mentions the Macedonian question, a sensitive subject even for those who are basically just proud to see the statue of Alexander the Great on the seafront, without knowing the whole story. Meanwhile at the Paok stadium, the president and tobacco magnate of Rostov, Ivan Savvidis, is firing on the pitch during the match, ‘these Slavs…’. ‘They are everywhere,’ Thessalonians often say. Particularly in the last ‘leg’ of the Chalkidiki peninsula, where all the Orthodox churches of the world are concentrated in the direction of Ouranoupoli, on holy Mount Athos, where women are not allowed to enter. While in the villages further north-east are the Pomaks, a community of Bulgarians of Islamic language and religion with whom I sipped kahve and played cards in the village bar opposite the mosque, while we waited to consume our gözleme. Whether for religious reasons or not, the territory of this Greece, Macedonia, is porous with respect to trade, tourism, illegal trafficking by Bulgarians, Serbs, Turks, Russians, northern Macedonians. ‘I have been many times to Skopje to buy my cigarettes and do some other stuffs’, is a phrase I have often heard around here.
Anyway, all this fuss about defining the identity of this city is pointless, who cares? Thessaloniki likes it because it does not take itself seriously, thus making itself more accessible, giving the many students who flock here from all over Greece a chance to express themselves, far from the prices and hustle and bustle of the Athenian ‘jungle’. ‘Even an idiot manages to get around the first time in Thessaloniki, it’s three equal streets, it’s easy, you can’t go wrong,’ says Nikos. Everything here is ‘chalarà‘, often random, insubstantial, but incredibly resilient. I was always nourished by life when I came here. And perhaps the metaphor for this city is my friend Kostas, the flag of the town, as I call him, other than the White Tower. ‘Claoudiaki, agapi, kariolaki mou, remember that your inner soul is crazy. I know you, and remember that I can always see it clearly’. Like the time we went to dinner at Olympion in Aristotelous Square ‘so I took you here because we have two sides of Claoudiaki: chimneys with elegant furnishing for your historical and… museum soul or whatever; in the back, devil Claoudiaki, hell dancefloor all night long’.
I raced with him at 200 mph through the streets of the village in his beat-up car and then in a random Tesla, when I even scratched his bodywork. In that filthy car I learnt all the Greek songs I know by heart, singing them at the top of my lungs with him while, with the windows down, he smoked his electronic cigarette of the most disgusting flavours together with cheap cold coffee. Every time I come back to town and plant myself in the front seat he keeps updating me on the latest hits, last year it was ‘Baby bonasera, milas italika?’. An improbable rap, but I love it because it tastes like here. With him I had the only truly trashy and unforgettable nights of my life, things I could never have done in Italy. ‘Everybody loves Thessaloniki because it’s closed to Chalkidiki’. Which in short are those two legs of the Chalkidiki peninsula where half of Greece goes crazy in the summer, amplifying Thessaloniki’s already unbridled fame. I’ve been four times with my sister to Kostas’s house in Pefkochori, frequenting the most adorably trashy beach clubs like Cabana beach, the realm of the so-called kágkouras, made of leopard-skin suits, loincloths, excessive tattoos and chav glasses, basically a movie in which I loved to see my sister uncomfortable; experiencing the mess of the Pearl Club and the after party at Angels, a deconsecrated Cycladic-style church where you wait for the sunrise continuing until 9am; learning how to cook aubergine for melitsanosalata, driving up easily the gas bill; going to pick out meat, too much meat, at the neighbourhood kreopoleio to grill on the terrace until late at night, finishing dinner at 4am, talking with Kostas, Giorgos and Lisa the meaning of the word filotimo. I love it when Greeks get that oriental sense of melancholy, nostalgia, dalkas, which contrasts yet coexist with the other concepts of meraki and kefi. I also love that they have all these meaningful untranslatable concepts and that they enjoy to do their best to translate them into Italian. And that they want to try to involve us in experiences that we don’t understand the sense of, like the wasteful throwing of trays of flowers at bouzoukia, where we all sing, drink and hang out indefinitely. I also tried this with Kostas in Thessaloniki on several midweek days, he is perhaps the only one who manages to make me abjure my strenuous sense of duty. Because even though I approve of almost nothing Kostas does, I can’t resist the incredible sense of freedom we manage to instil in each other. And it is the same dynamic that happens to me when I am in Thessaloniki, the most bastard, indolent and exciting city in Greece. I cannot even enumerate all the memories that make up my sense of belonging to this city, this country, this people. But someone reminds me that there is time…
‘Don’t drink in a rush, that’s Greek coffee! Not espresso. You are in Greece, we never run’. The waiter reminds me to mind about the grounds of the elliniko kafe, while I am paying the logarismόs.
‘Don’t worry, we are not very nice runners in Italy, either’
He smiles and says ‘Goodnight, lovely koritsi’.
Μέχρι την επόμενη φορά, Θεσσαλονίκη!
