Patrick Comerford
I have missed visiting Greece this year, especially my visits to Rethymnon, Panormos Iraklion, Piskopiano and Koutououfari in Crete and my friends there. The summer has passed, but I still hope to get back to Greece next year.
I was searching through old photographs recently to illustrate a blog posting when I realised I had taken many photographs over the years of sculptures in Thessaloniki – on the streets, in the parks and squares and along the seafront – but that I have never blogged about most of them.
I have been in Thessaloniki perhaps a dozen times, and there is an affinity with the city that I have excused with stories about my grandfather. I have been there for cultural events and exhibitions, for academic seminars, to write magazine and newspaper features, to meet friends, politicians and the Patriarch, to walk in my grandfather’s footsteps, on my way to and from Mount Athos, to visit museums, cathedrals, churches, monasteries and synagogues, to explore the streets and squares laid out by Ernest Hébrard after the great fire, to experience Good Friday and Easter, to look out at Mount Olympus, and to enjoy the evening sunset on the bay.
The well-known sights in Thessaloniki include the White Tower, the Arch of Galerius, the Rotunda, the Palace of Galerius and the fortified walls. My blog postings during the Covid-19 lockdown included ‘virtual tours’ of a dozen churches (18 April 2020), a dozen historic sites (21 April 2020), and a dozen Jewish sites (22 April 2020). I have written about history, architecture, politics, poetry, song and music, protests, trade unions, theatre, films, church life and Jewish life, monasteries and icons in Thessaloniki, about football and colourful local language, and about the minorities in Thessaloniki, including Catholics, Jews, Dönmeh and Muslims.
In addition, I am the co-author of a book published in Thessaloniki in 2023, and I have written the foreword to another published in Thessaloniki in 2024.
I came across my collection of photographs of sculptures in Thessaloniki after reading an interview in To Vima last month with one of the great modern Greek sculptors, Giorgos Georgiadis, who is now in his 90s, and whose statue of Aristotle on Aristotelous Square is one of the landmarks of the city.
These sculptures brought me on an odyssey of mind and memory, returning to the streets and squares, parks and buildings and the waterfront of Thessaloniki. Their topics and themes range across the full range and breadth of Greek history from Aristotle and Alexander the Great, through the Greek War of Independence in the 19th century and the incorporation of Thessaloniki into modern Greece in 1912, the Great Fire of 1917, and the Asia Minor catastrophe of the 1920s, through the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust, the depressing post-war years of the civil war and the colonels’ regime, and through more recent economic crises in Greece and tensions in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey.
Rather than leave these photographs and memories in forgotten files on my laptop or in the cloud, I decided to start an occasional series of blog postings on some of those modern sculptures I have rediscovered in Thessaloniki.
Many of these creations introduce some of the great modern sculptors of today in Greece. But there are reminders too of poets and politicians, architects and admirals, theatre and opera, musicians and the classical and philosophical legacy of Thessaloniki. There are links with other parts of Greece, from Athens to Crete, from Epirus to the Greek populations forcibly deported from western Anatolia a century ago.
Over the next few weeks, I invite you to join me in this minor odyssey of recovery and discovery. After reading that interview with Giorgos Georgiadis in To Vima last month, it seems appropriate that first of these sculptures should be his statue of Aristotle on Aristotelous Square.
Meanwhile, I have been listening once again to Θεσσαλονίκη μου (Thessaloniki Mou), a legendary Greek laïko/rebetiko anthem composed by the Manolis Chiotis, with lyrics by Christos Kolokotronis. The song, first recorded 70 years ago in 1956 by Stelios Kazantzidis and Manolis Chiotis, is an emotional homage to Greece’s second city, embracing it as the ‘great mother to the needy’:
Θεσσαλονίκη μου μεγάλη φτωχομάνα,
εσύ που βγάζεις τα καλύτερα παιδιά.
Θεσσαλονίκη μου μεγάλη φτωχομάνα,
όπου κι άν πάω σ' έχω πάντα στη καρδιά.
Θεσσαλονίκη μου ποτέ δεν σ' απαρνιέμαι,
είσαι η πατρίδα μου το λέω και καυχέμαι,
είσαι η πατρίδα μου το λέω και καυχέμαι,
Θεσσαλονίκη μου ποτέ δεν σ' απαρνιέμαι.
Thessaloniki, you great mother to the needy!
You are the one who gives the finest kids their start.
Thessaloniki, you great mother to the needy!
No matter where I go you’re always in my heart.
Thessaloniki, I will never be without you,
You are my home, I say it and I brag about you!
You are my home, I say it and I brag about you,
Thessaloniki, I will never be without you!
Next: Aristotle by Giorgos Georgiadis, Aristotelous Square
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