The new Thessaloniki
The new Thessaloniki
23/01/2022 22:30
Something has started and is fading in the city. Despite the ten-year economic crisis, the force of the pandemic and the darkness of the days we are going through. Because Thessaloniki is not just gossip and pimping circuits…
A walk I took in the last days in the port created in me this optimism that is not usual at the end. I passed outside the old “Olympus Naoussa” and opened my eye. Where our fathers used to gather, where Konstantinos Karamanlis ate when he came to Thessaloniki and Giscard d’Estaing, where the good old bourgeois Thessaloniki used to haunt. Today, many years after this legendary restaurant, which rightly became the toponym of the city, I saw its facade reappear. And I realized that the project is in the final stages and that it is a matter of weeks before it reopens. A few meters further there he found that Kalapothaki had put its good things back and with the help of a very chic five-star hotel it has been significantly upgraded. When there are good, remarkable and insightful businessmen, such as Dinos Tornevoukas, Antonis and Costas Doudos, everything can smell Europe again.
A few blocks away, Modianou has not yet removed the tarpaulins, but in this historic building where Thessaloniki used to gather to shop for the image and the message was clear: the renovation is progressing. If all goes well in the spring of this year the renovated market will open its gates. Here the Fais group put its hand while the project is run by a lively and active fan of this city, Hasdai Kapon. If we add to all this very tangible the renovation of the area of Agios Minas, the city becomes more beautiful. Immediately.
A little further north, Egnatia became again without obstacles in a four-lane boulevard and shouts that the construction of the metro is progressing. When the good will end in 2023, the city will be free of thirty years of dust and I am sure that when the rails enter and the first trains run, no one will remember the obsessions of the various for the ancients. All this will be a distant past, such as the protests of some for the mentality of the Regional of the 80’s or the demolition of the alana next to the Archaeological Museum of the city which was for many an easy parking lot. And it became City Hall.
Do you know why these protests will quickly become distant memories? Because always progress and projects leave behind maintenance and misery. As they are the new.
Thank you…
* Published in “MTK” on 23.01.2022