The Full Catastrophe (22 page)

While the monks were berating the mayor, the bishop of Thessaloniki, a short man with a long beard, had a peculiar look on his face. He peered somewhat sideways at the commotion, resting both hands on his staff amid the other clerics onstage, his gaze not fully committed to the direction of the disturbance, which fell below the dignity of a bishop’s full attention. It was hard to discern the expression behind the eyeglasses and gray hair that covered much of his face, but I wondered if perhaps what I was noticing was a slight look of pleasure.

Bishop Anthimos of Thessaloniki did not appreciate Boutaris’s talk about the non-Hellenic, non-Christian aspects of the city’s past. Nor did the mayor like the fact that the bishop treated his Sunday pulpit as if it were his own cable news talk show, during which he railed against developments in the country that indicated the enervation of its “Helleno-Christian” heritage. The bishop often warned in his sermons of a panoply of threats: territorial threats, whether from the Turks or from the republic that wanted to call itself Macedonia; the threat of allowing gay pride parades in the city; the threat of illegal immigration; the threat of European Union hegemony; the threat of Islam, which seeks to rule Europe.

When Boutaris was still running for mayor in 2010, he said that Anthimos reminded him of the “mujahideen” for his fundamentalist views, and suggested the bishop spend more time helping the poor instead of buying new vestments. After these comments were published, the two men met during a service in the basilica housing what are said to be the remains of St. Demetrios. Boutaris approached Anthimos to kiss a gold cross the bishop held in his hand. Anthimos, unimpressed with the candidate’s piety, scolded Boutaris with a protruding index finger. “If you don’t recant,” the bishop said, “I will make a big effort to make sure you never see the mayor’s office.”

The bishop and the mayor continued their public feud, to the great delight of the Greek media, which covered it closely. Whenever the two men were in the same vicinity, citizens watched in anticipation of a good spectacle. At one point, Boutaris suggested that Anthimos shave his beard and start a political party if he was so interested in sharing his political views. Yet, after the mayor was elected, the two men—unable to avoid one another in their public roles—did their best to tone down the quarreling and made an effort to keep friendly appearances. “The first person I greet is the bishop with a kiss on the cheek,” Boutaris told me of public events he attended with Anthimos. Of course, that gesture could have been perceived as a veiled slight, as the customary way to kiss a bishop is with a reverent peck on the hand. For his part, the bishop seemed eager to use his pulpit to rail against Boutaris’s agenda, though he refrained from mentioning the mayor by name.

The mayor may have gone out of his way to invite Jewish tourists to the city, but one Sunday, the bishop warned the congregation about Jewish businessmen intending to buy real estate along the harbor in order to build big hotels. “Without bile, I say this,” said Anthimos. “Keep in mind, we love the Jews. We helped them in Thessaloniki and in Athens, and I’ve explained before we have a common origin in the Old Testament.” This seemed like a bit of an odd thing to say, given the city he was in. During the World War II occupation, in Athens and elsewhere in Greece, clerics and laymen did help Jews avoid the Nazis. But in Thessaloniki, things had obviously ended very badly. The bishop went on to warn of an academic conference highlighting the city’s Jewish history, coinciding with the 100th-anniversary celebration. He read aloud a list of the events’ sponsors, such as the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and other Israeli organizations. He raised his voice slightly to accent the words “Jews” and “Israeli,” in order to emphasize the Jewishness of it all. The city of Thessaloniki itself was also a sponsor, he pointed out,
pausing for emphasis as if deeply disturbed, as if the city were a traitor for participating. “I hope you don’t one day remember I was telling you about this,” Anthimos said, suggesting that, by then, it would already be too late. The responsible authorities must clarify, he said: “What exactly is going on?” He then came to his conclusion: “The Jews are flirting with Thessaloniki.” He let the comment set in for a moment. “You tell me, ‘What does that mean?’ I’m not going to say it. You all understand. You understand it. We have Europe. We have the immigrants. We have the illegal immigrants. We have the threats,” referring to Turkish ambitions in the Aegean. He closed his speech by saying: “I cannot tell you more,” as if doing so might incur the mysterious wrath of the Jews.

On another Sunday, the subject of the bishop’s outrage was a report that a Macedonian-language radio station seeking to spread “propaganda” was asking for a license to start operating in northern Greece. If this radio station was allowed to open, Anthimos said, “the youth and I and whoever else wants to” would go over there “in forty or fifty buses” and “turn everything into shattered glass and nails.” He added, “The job won’t get done otherwise.” Another time, he called the popularity of Turkish soap operas in Greece an “insult and challenge to our national consciousness,” and akin to telling the Turks “we’ve surrendered.” Once, after a visit to Athens, the bishop said he nearly “lost it” after seeing the number of migrants who had “blackened” the place. The migrants, many of them from Muslim countries, must be sent home, he said, in order to combat a Turkish plan to flood the country with Muslims and “Turkify” it. On another occasion, he sermonized on the growing danger from those undermining the sacred ideological pillars of the nation. This was a “leprosy,” he said, and it was evident in “attempts to spurn, to strip bare the miracle of thousands of years of the Hellenic-Christian culture of Byzantium.” It was a culture of astonishing men and scientists, he said, whose books have filled the libraries of all Europe. “It was a great
culture, and it was our culture, and we are the continuation of that culture,” he said. “And here, some of our own within the Hellenic realm want to disavow this culture, or to name it something else.” Those who do so, he went on, “possess the leprosy of denial, or adulteration of our history.” He concluded with what seemed a direct rebuttal of the mayor’s efforts. “If we remain Greek and Orthodox, the economics will go better,” he said. “I believe we will not be destroyed.”

On the day of the
Panagia
’s arrival, the protesting monks were out of sight by the time Boutaris approached the podium. To my surprise, he was not booed. The mayor, clearly on hostile turf, was on his best behavior. He paused and looked at the clerics before beginning to speak. “Your Beatitude,” he said, nodding to the head of the Church of Greece. “Your All Holiness,” he said to Anthimos. “Your Eminence,” he said to another cleric. The icon’s arrival “coincides with one of the most critical periods of the postwar history of our country and the hard times our people are enduring,” the mayor said, his head pointed down at the text he was reading, his voice weary and seemingly forced. By bringing the icon, the clerics had shown “love, encouragement, consolation, and concern with our city and our citizens, and especially for the infirm and afflicted, those whom the crisis has hit with devastating consequences for their daily lives and their families.” He finished by adding, “We are grateful for this gesture and reciprocate with respect and honor.” There was a smattering of applause from the crowd.

After that, the
Panagia
was placed on a wagon hitched to the back of a camouflaged jeep for a procession through the city. The icon, flanked by clerics waving smoking thuribles, was led by the marching band, the men dressed like revolutionary bandits,
officers in full dress whites with their swords drawn, and soldiers doing a poor job of marching in step. Hundreds more sullen-looking priests and monks trailed behind, and silent, darkly shrouded nuns carried lit candles, the wax dripping on their hands. Politicians in suits followed along with thousands of citizens as the icon was pulled along a street called “National Defense.” The procession passed the graffiti-tagged campus of Aristotle University, one of the nation’s most well-regarded schools, where slogans like
NEVER AGAIN FASCISM
and
VICTORY TO THE STRUGGLE OF THE STUDENT WALKOUT
were sprayed on the unkempt buildings. The campus is built on the site where hundreds of thousands of graves once constituted one of Europe’s largest Jewish cemeteries. The cemetery was destroyed during the Nazi occupation at the urging of Greek authorities eager to free up the huge swath of land for development.

The procession went on, passing rows of unsightly apartment buildings, essentially concrete boxes with balconies, the common architecture of Greek cities. Residents emerged from the buildings to watch the icon pass, making the sign of the cross. Finally, the
Panagia
reached the Church of St. Demetrios and was carried past the green marble columns of the entrance and inside the sanctuary, underneath the high, open timber roof. It was placed before the altar, and a long line of pilgrims queued under the dim arcade and out the doors into the sunlight, waiting for what would be hours for a chance to make the sign of the cross before the icon and kiss the glass case covering it. Others waited to pay homage to the remains of St. Demetrios, kept in a small silver coffin beside a large icon depicting the scene of his martyrdom: several Roman soldiers thrusting spears into his breast. The church is built on the baths where his murder is said to have occurred, and the Roman-era ruins can still be seen in the crypt. Demetrios is referred to as the “myrrh streamer,” because a miraculous flow of myrrh is said to have emanated from his tomb. Many claim they can still smell it, though I was unable to detect any fragrance during my visit.

The next morning, I returned to the church as a doleful chant of “hallelujah” came out over the loudspeakers perched on the facade. The queue of worshippers waiting for a chance to kiss the icon had not diminished. Inside, I found Devin Naar, an American historian in his late twenties from the University of Washington in Seattle with a particular interest in Thessaloniki and its Jewish past. I had met Naar a few days earlier at a Friday night Shabbat service at Yad Lezicaron Synagogue, where the more religious of the thousand or so Jews who now live in Thessaloniki go to worship. Naar’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews who settled in Thessaloniki in the early sixteenth century, and they founded a synagogue called New Lisbon. Centuries later, before World War II, Naar’s great-grandfather took his family to America. The young academic’s interest in the city began with an effort to learn more about the grim fate of those family members that had remained. Naar, a lanky man with long, curly hair, spoke passionately on the subject of his study, employing his hands to accent his anecdotes as if he had just emerged from a long visit to unexplored archives, and could hardly wait to share what he had discovered. He was in town for an academic conference on the city’s Jewish past—the kind of event Bishop Anthimos had warned was part of the Jewish “flirtation” with the city.

Naar and I passed the line of people waiting to kiss the icon, and descended a steep set of marble stairs into the crypt, where we were nearly alone. We walked past the ruins of the marble fountain that had been part of the early church, and illuminated displays of Roman-era column capitals. Naar didn’t pay much attention to the displays. His eyes were directed toward the marble floor, where he was looking for headstones from the destroyed Jewish cemetery. After the cemetery’s destruction, the headstones were frequently used in construction projects and could still be found scattered around the city. One suburban home I saw was enclosed by a wall of marble Jewish tombstones, the Hebrew
script and dates of death according to the Jewish calendar year plainly visible. As I stood in front of the house staring in disbelief, an old lady who passed by told me the script was “a design” the homeowners had put on the stones recently, though she certainly knew the truth. St. Demetrios Church had been almost entirely destroyed in the massive 1917 fire, and was rebuilt after World War II, when the headstones were in ample supply. Naar told me they were almost certainly used in the church’s reconstruction. He spotted a slab of marble where he thought the Hebrew script looked like it had been chiseled out, and took a photo. We then walked to the yard beside the church where a lot of marble slabs were stacked in the tall grass. Most of them had old Greek writing on them, but some were tombstones with Hebrew script. Naar walked through the tall grass, reaching more piles and looking for more headstones. For a moment, as the sound of chanting clerics floated in the warm breeze, a gush of fury seemed like it might break through his exterior, academic calm. Naar later pointed out that the preponderance of desecrated headstones had one unintended consequence: scattered throughout the city as they were, the headstones made accidental memorials, providing unmistakable reminders of the city’s nearly blotted-out past.

The monolithic, ossified brand of Greek nationalism that has long concealed evidence of past pluralism has served to denigrate the concept of Hellenism itself, making it trite, insular, and fragile. When coupled with the economic crisis, its logic also proved to have dire ramifications across Greece. Widespread belief in Hellenic purity and superiority manifested itself in the hostile treatment of immigrants and the rapid growth of the fascist Golden Dawn, a party steeped in anti-Semitic, anti-Turkish hate. Yet, at the same time, in Thessaloniki, the signs of a change in
thinking were also evident. The city’s residents, after witnessing the global attention and spike in tourist visits Boutaris brought, appeared to see the benefit of embracing a more expansive view of their history. In the spring of 2014, the citizens of Thessaloniki reelected Boutaris mayor, giving him 58 percent of the vote, a sizable improvement over his previous victory margin.

On a dreary November day months after his win, Boutaris gave a speech on the campus of Aristotle University, the school built on the grounds of the destroyed Jewish cemetery. The occasion was the unveiling of a memorial that recognized what had been there before. Boutaris stood beside a large bronze sculpture of a menorah. He wore a plaid kippah, a gesture Greek politicians normally avoid—even when stepping foot in synagogues—out of fear the electorate will disapprove. Boutaris told the crowd that the city was ashamed of those Greeks who during the occupation had betrayed their Jewish fellow citizens. The city was ashamed, he went on, that it had taken so many years to recognize where they were standing, the place where for five centuries the city’s Jews had buried their dead. His words inspired a round of applause. Thessaloniki, Boutaris added, had taken far too long to break its silence.