The Full Catastrophe (21 page)

But a profound metamorphosis was under way, one that precipitated a stark change in the religious makeup of the city. Thessaloniki began to overflow with the Greek refugees who had been thrown out of their homeland, the budding Turkish state. The changes were sped by a massive fire in 1917 that destroyed much of the city, particularly the Jewish quarter. Many Jews left after this disaster, but still, around 50,000 remained in the city when the Nazis occupied it during World War II. The first deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau began in March 1943, and within a few months of cruel efficiency, Jewish life in the city was almost completely obliterated. Fewer than 2,000 of the city’s Jews survived the war. For Greece, the question of whether one could be a Greek and a Jew at the same time was now largely moot. The near disappearance of Jewish life in Thessaloniki made it easier for residents of the city to ignore the fact that it had ever existed there in the first place.

One month after taking office, however, Boutaris traveled to Israel. “Not for nothing was it called the Jerusalem of the Balkans,” he said of his city in an interview with the
Jerusalem Post.
“And it could be that again.” The mayor also told the newspaper that his first high school girlfriend was Jewish. During the same visit, he spoke to a group of Holocaust survivors originally from Thessaloniki, and asked them to help their city of origin by encouraging people to visit. These efforts seemed to pay off. In the first nine months after he took office, visits to Thessaloniki from Israel quadrupled. Visits from Turkey also increased, though not as dramatically. The mayor was working on it, though. Thessaloniki, he told me at the Ritz-Carlton, is a must-see for many Turks, since it was the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Sure, Greeks blame Atatürk for the Asia Minor catastrophe. But “whatever you think of him,” Boutaris told me, “he’s a child of Thessaloniki.” Kamaras, the aide, then decided it was time to intervene, making the point that this was a particularly controversial outlook for their city’s residents, many of whose ancestors were those Greek refugees kicked out of their villages in Asia Minor. “If you ask me, he is too outspoken,” Kamaras said. The aide preferred to boil the mayor’s views down to the kind of wise economic policy even his antagonists could understand. “In light of the collapse of domestic demand, what we are trying to do is import demand from outside,” said Kamaras. “Openness pays.”

The next morning, I watched Boutaris give one interview after another to Turkish journalists on the hotel’s terrace. The Turkish public—from leftists hostile to nationalism, to Turkish nationalists pleased with Boutaris’s apparent sympathy—exhibited great interest in the mayor, and it struck me that he was perhaps more popular in Turkey than in Greece. The first interviewer was a young woman who employed heavy flirtation as an interviewing method, and soon Boutaris had rolled up his sleeves and was showing her the tattoo on his arm dedicated to his deceased ex-wife. “Our life together was like a fantasy,” he told the journalist.

“What is your philosophy?” she then asked him.

“Be a good person,” said Boutaris.

She, like each of the Turkish journalists who talked to Boutaris that day, also asked about the Atatürk street-naming proposal.

“Now that you are the mayor, why don’t you name the street where Atatürk was born after him?” she said.

“This is a delicate issue,” Boutaris said. The idea was a gesture of “moving forward” beyond the historical enmities, he added, but it had not gone over well in Greece.

“Can I say you hope to do it?” she said. Boutaris squirmed a bit, and seemed tempted to answer yes in order not to disappoint her. Kamaras, who was smoking a cigarillo as he listened, saved his boss. “The reaction to this suggestion was so strong, we thought there were better ways to improve the relationship with Turkey,” he said. A photographer started snapping pictures of the mayor as the song “Moon River” played over the hotel speaker system. “Can you make a peace sign?” the journalist asked Boutaris. The mayor obliged.

In each interview that morning, Boutaris repeated certain themes: Greece and Turkey have a “very, very common heritage,” the Greek mentality is similar to the Turkish mentality, and he feels far closer to the Turks than to Europeans like, for example, Swedes. He mentioned repeatedly that Turkish Airlines offered direct flights to Thessaloniki from Istanbul, and that visitors shopping in Thessaloniki “won’t believe their eyes at all the beautiful things they can find.”

One television journalist asked Boutaris if he thought the 100th-anniversary celebration would stoke animosities with Turkey. On the contrary, the mayor replied. It was a chance to highlight the two nations’ commonalities. The mayor pointed out that the Ottomans conceded the city to the Greeks without a shot fired, and that the first elected mayor of the city after its liberation was Turkish. “I do not believe we have to celebrate the win,” the mayor said. “It was not a win. It was a change of situations.”

Hearing this, I wondered how the mayor had ever been elected.
Though he’d won the 2010 election by just three hundred votes, his victory in the midst of Greece’s deepening economic troubles indicated that many Greeks were craving a new kind of politics. Boutaris, who was supported by a coalition of left-leaning and centrist parties, fused the pro-business tendencies more common on the political right with an aversion to the right’s staid, nationalist inclinations. This was a rather unique combination in Greece, and people seemed willing to try it. Of course, it didn’t take much to be considered a radical improvement over the previous mayor, a man named Vasilis Papageorgopoulos, who was accused of having a severe embezzling habit. Papageorgopoulos, a former dentist and sprinter who won a bronze medal for his country in European competition and was nicknamed “the flying doctor,” had governed the city as a member of New Democracy for a decade. After Boutaris took office, his deputy mayor of finance—the first Jewish elected official in the city since the end of World War II—found that the city was deeply in the red and that the previous administration had apparently falsified the books. Two years later, Papageorgopoulos and two of his aides were convicted of embezzling around 18 million euros and sentenced to life in prison. The severe sentence, which preceded Tsochatzopoulos’s conviction, represented the first time in many years a Greek politician had received such a severe penalty for such a substantial crime. Some Greek newspapers optimistically depicted this development as the beginning of a new era in which Greek politicians were to be held accountable for their abundant wrongdoing, though that seemed to be wishful thinking. Papageorgopoulos maintained his innocence and appealed his conviction, saying he was the victim of political persecution. His prison sentence was later reduced to twelve years.

Boutaris’s treasurer was able to balance the municipal budget within a few years of taking office. This achievement prompted the interest of Prime Minister Samaras, who, one city official told me, said to Boutaris: “I need that Jew in Athens.” Boutaris intrigued
the international press with his self-proclaimed reformist agenda and many tattoos. Journalists, looking for something good to say about Greece at a time when all the news was bad, heaped praise on him. The
New York Times
profiled him with the headline “Greek Mayor Aims to Show Athens How It’s Done,” the U.K.’s
Daily Telegraph
with “Greece’s Vision of Hope,” Germany’s
Süddeutsche Zeitung
with “A City’s Last Hope,” and Toronto’s
Globe and Mail
with “This Greek Hero Slays Monsters of the Fiscal Variety.” Though the international press made him out to be a savior, at home the feeling was more ambivalent. Much of his electorate clearly still despised him, particularly religious conservatives, as the outburst at the
Panagia
’s welcoming ceremony had shown.

As the police hauled off the irate monks, voices in the crowd began to chatter and speculate.

“Surely, Boutaris must have done something to anger them,” a little woman beside me said.

“He didn’t let them come close to the icon,” one woman’s voice responded.

“Well, if he did that, then they have a point.”

“Get out of here, Boutaris!” a woman screamed.

“Boutaris, you’re dirtying the place with your presence!” bellowed a male voice.

I asked one man next to me, who told me his name was Nektarios, why the mayor was being heckled.

“Because he’s an atheist and a devil,” he said.

“Why a devil?” I asked.

“He loves Atatürk.”

As the chatter continued, a politician with finely parted black hair named Theodoros Karaoglou took the stage and began his
speech as if nothing had happened. The icon’s arrival would “help stimulate religious and national feeling of our tested people,” he said. Greeks, he added, clung steadfastly to their roots, “and for that let’s not forget the titanic offering of our church to safeguard our national and cultural heritage.” State and church must “walk and struggle together to support all those who are suffering from the economic crisis.” There was no doubt how the crisis would end, he added. “Greece will get back on its feet. The
Panagia
is on our side.”

I had met Karaoglou, the minister of the Greek regions of Macedonia and Thrace, a few days earlier in his plush, enormous office, located in the imposing building where the city’s Ottoman government used to be headquartered. It was also where the Ottoman military officer Hasan Tahsin Pasha surrendered the city to Greek forces a century earlier, Karaoglou pointed out. He told me his ministry had organized a massive celebration on a Saturday later in the month to mark the city’s liberation from Ottoman “enslavement.” Greek soldiers, seven hundred of them, would reenact the Greek army’s march into the city a century earlier, dressed in period garb, with many on horseback. They would march to the ministry, where the president of Greece would raise the same Greek flag erected there in 1912, when Greek forces took control of the city. The soldiers would then continue past a small church where the city’s bishop and two hundred priests would sing the Byzantine chant praising the Virgin Mary as the “Champion General.” The priests would also sing the Greek national anthem. The soldiers would then march on to the White Tower, where an enormous Greek flag—“the biggest that exists in Greece”—would be raised. There, soldiers would perform a twenty-one-gun salute, which would be answered with cannon volleys by a Greek warship offshore. “Now that we have a heavy climate,” the minister told me, “the goal for us is to produce a climate of national pride.”

The Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace itself existed for reasons
of national pride. It was the only federal ministry in Greece to represent regions of the nation, and persisted by virtue of the fact that it had the word “Macedonia”—the name of the Greek region in which Thessaloniki is located—in its title. A copyright dispute over the name Macedonia has inflamed nationalist fervor in Greece since 1991, when Yugoslavia divided into different parts, one of which called itself the Republic of Macedonia. For most Greeks, there can be no such thing as a country called Macedonia, or a language called Macedonian, because Macedonia is Greek and has been since antiquity. The claim on the name not only reflects an effort to rob Greece of its cultural property, Greeks believe, but could also lead to territorial claims on northern Greece. Furthermore, by claiming the name Macedonia, these former Yugoslavs could also lay claim to the greatest of Greek heroes, Alexander III of Macedon, also known as Alexander the Great. Greek concerns over the issue are somewhat understandable. Memories of battles to win and preserve its northern territory remain fresh in Greece, and nationalist politicians in Skopje, the capital of the would-be Macedonia, have certainly fed Greek anxieties by speaking of the “spiritual unification” of a greater Macedonia. Yet, one could argue, the response in Greece has been disproportionate to the threat. One day in February 1992, schools and government offices in Thessaloniki closed and about one million Greeks, according to some estimates—around one-tenth of the country’s population—protested their neighbor’s wish to use the name Macedonia. A demonstration of similar size occurred later in the year in Athens. Due to Greece’s continued objections, the United Nations refers to the nation that calls itself the Republic of Macedonia by the unfortunate moniker the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM for short.

The ministry’s purpose, Karaoglou told me in his office, “is to send a message of national symbolism that Macedonia was, is, and will always remain one and Hellenic.” A second reason for its
existence, he added, was to fight high unemployment in northern Greece. How exactly the ministry’s employees performed this latter goal, other than by persisting on the ministry payroll, remained during my visit a mystery to me. No one there seemed to have much to do. I saw huddled groups of employees sitting in folding chairs smoking cigarettes in the large corridors of the ministry building. Apparently, others also questioned its purpose. The ministry was relegated to a “general secretariat” in 2009 by the PASOK prime minister George Papandreou. The institution was promptly restored to a ministry after the right-wing prime minister Antonis Samaras came to power in June 2012. Samaras, during the height of the Macedonia naming dispute and protest, had split away from New Democracy and formed his own more nationalist party, Political Spring. That party’s sole purpose had been a hard-line stance regarding the Macedonia dispute, though later, after some of the fervor over the issue receded, he rejoined New Democracy. “When you close a ministry that has the name Macedonia in it, you send the wrong message,” Karaoglou told me. It’s like telling Greece’s adversaries on the other side of the border “that you don’t care so much.”

After my meeting with Karaoglou, I called Boutaris to ask him what he thought of the ministry’s plans to mark the 100th anniversary. “I’m mad,” the mayor told me. First, he said, the ministry had no reason to exist. Second, its anniversary plans were “totally kitsch.” Boutaris said he would boycott the parade. After local newspapers later reported that the mayor called the ministry’s planned commemorations “fascistic,” Karaoglou felt compelled to respond. “It is obvious that the mayor and I have different understandings both of the importance of the 100th anniversary of the liberation of our city from the Turkish yoke, and also about how we should celebrate our historic national anniversaries,” he said. “And because historical forgetfulness harms our collective memory, I would underscore that a people who forget their history have no future.”