A mirror for Thessaloniki
“The city is not something single and totally conceivable. “Thessaloniki, like Athens, is now more of a patchwork,” says journalist and writer George Skabardonis. (SAKIS YOUBASIS)
The next day has not come yet Thessaloniki. The cloud of dust that lifted Alki’s fallen body in Charilaou, at the beginning of the month, insists on being over the city, casting its heavy shadow on every neighborhood, every house, even the cafes and bars, on its side. . Thessaloniki that never sleeps and is in constant joy. It was heavy on the small and medium shoulders of the city. Such as says the writer and journalist Giannis Kotsifos to “K”“Because of the permanent peculiarity of its size, when a 19-year-old is murdered on a main street in Thessaloniki, you feel that it is happening in front of your house – there is no man with children who did not play the scene with his son or daughter in place. of the Bell “.
Thessaloniki did not close its eyes this time. She looked at the wound and saw her image in the wound. Many consider Alkis’s murder the zero point for the city. “This lazy reaction we have had to these acts of violence in the past has not been without consequences. That the political staff did not revolt and did not try to overthrow the situation and at political cost was not without consequences. The bill has come “, says Kotsifos. “The murder set the limit at which the consequences of inaction are exhausted.”
The word decline, heavily, comes constantly in the conversations of Thessaloniki. “There is a general feeling that in various fields the city is declining. Apart from the financial suffocation that is reflected in the closed shops, the low wages, the precarious jobs, the suffocating situation in the movement, we are a city that relies only on the OASTH buses, the lack of security in the center is also intense. It is inconceivable to be afraid to go through the Rotunda, Aristotle, the Ancient Agora, to go to university “. According to Mr. Kotsifos, the care is only superficial, “from behind the small car, the inactivity, the customer relationship, the feeling of abandonment and reflexes that are not irritated by anything”.
The city did not close its eyes this time. She looked at the wound and saw her image in the wound. Many consider Alkis’s murder the zero point.
With a similar look he faces his city and Tasos Retzios, general secretary of the Educational Foundation of ESIEM-TH, journalist and film critic. “The city has become even lower. Limited expectations. What has happened is what is happening in all the cities that are afflicted by the past that is about to disappear. “The standards today are easy riches, the night, the citizens from the Balkans who come to” taste “.” As he says, however, when the model of development is the entertainment industry, the dominant value is “to have a good time”, “partisanship”, well-being, prosperity. Far from the tradition of the city that was the “inner monologue”, far from the spirituality it had. That is why the culture that is being born today in Thessaloniki has become more accessible, less internal. Whoever equates the dominant personalities in the public life of the city is further discouraged. Thessaloniki is columbized, lubenated and we see such phenomena more often. “We are trapped in a spiral that I do not know where it will take us.”
But there is another Thessaloniki, where it is time to make its presence felt, as she says Evi Karkiti, journalist, coordinator of “Thessaloniki Walking Tours”. “There is a dark part, which regularly comes out and sets the tone, but there are also forces in the city that have not stopped uniting, trying to manage its history and these modern phenomena and imagine a different future.” . For her, Alki’s murder sparked a wave of reflection. “Hard and uncomfortable truths have been told and written, but they are worth discussing. Behind the shadow cast by the loss of the 19-year-old child, he distinguishes the pathogenesis. Strange as it may sound, the shadow illuminates “. THE poet Angelos Efthymiadis is less optimistic. “We will mention the lad for a while, there will be a friendly match and nothing will change. The problem is deep, ingrained. Even today children are raised nurtured in this way by their parents, friends, school. All this leaves me embarrassed, I ask myself. I would like to answer that we can, through collectives, groups, movements, make it known to the world that this is not life. “That we can enjoy both football and love.”
According to the journalist and writer George Skabardoni, however, it is futile to wonder what the identity of Thessaloniki is. “Thessaloniki is not understood by the locals, much more than those from there, but as an abstraction. A mental construction plus various historical prejudices that describe it one way or another. However, the city is not something single and totally conceivable. Thessaloniki, like Athens, is now more of a patchwork. There is neither the Athens of the ’60s nor the Thessaloniki of the 1965s, which then had 350,000 inhabitants and now has close to 1.5 million and is almost united in urban planning with Halkidiki. “There is nothing single in a city of 1.5 million with 150,000 non-native students renewed every year – if you consider that Bonn has 300,000 inhabitants.” The generalizations do not explain, they obscure. “The turmoil is deep, complex and flowing everywhere. And of course everything is difficult to understand by definition “.