Betwixt and Between: Youthful Vitality and Renewal in a Twenty-Three-Hundred-Year-Old City

As well-traveled theatre and performance scholars, the absence in our previous itineraries of Greece seemed a rather large hole, so the occasion of the Eleventh Europe Theatre Prize's setting in Thessaloniki, Greece seemed rather fortuitous. Not the Greece of picture-postcard whitewash, wandering cats, and intense blue waters, Thessaloniki is a working city, the second largest in Greece, yet it is a determinedly youthful city. It is the juxtaposition of this youthful and industrial vitality with Greek history and age, which seems so poignant in this city that shaped our perspectives on the festival. Thessaloniki appears a crossroads, between age and youth, between East and West, between North and South.

Home to the 95,000-plus students of Aristotle University, with a portside setting on the Thermaikos Gulf, and known for its coffee, Thessaloniki, or Salonica, is often referred to as the "Seattle of Greece." We were told that the locals love their coffee, and that the working day was often interrupted by prolonged coffee breaks; we were sent to the Electra Palace Hotel on Aristotelius Square as a place to sit at the rooftop restaurant overlooking the gulf to enjoy a frappe, the favored coffee selection—basically a rich, shaken iced latte. Indeed, this was an idyllic setting, and despite the contemporariness of the fixtures and restaurant design, it evoked a certain timelessness. Trapped between the laid-back attitudes of Greek islands and the bustle of what wants to be a contemporary city, Thessaloniki telescopes twenty-three centuries into the present moment and yet seems slightly out of time in the early twenty-first century. This sense of the past can be felt especially in relation to the increasingly global smoking ban, which on July 1, 2007, was embraced even by the UK's joining the parade of countries to ban smoking in enclosed spaces—yet there in Thessaloniki, everyone seems to smoke. As we sat in the Electra Palace with our frappes, almost all of the other tables were filled with groups of people, mostly women, who sat chatting, eating and drinking, and smoking through the afternoon. Waiting for our baggage in the airport, sitting in cafés and restaurants, in the hotel lobby, people smoked cigarettes, cigars, and even pipes, creating an image of a time gone by, of having landed in another era.

The city itself was founded around 315 B.C.E. by Kassander, who named it after his wife, the sister of Alexander the Great. Part of the Kingdom of Macedon, it remains today a sense of that between-ness, both Greek and Macedonian, while not fully either. While off the path of most tourists to Greece today, it has played crucial historical roles; it is located nearby to Philippi, the site of the climactic battle where Marc Antony and Octavius met Brutus and Cassius; it was as well one of Paul's frequent stops; he penned two epistles to the Thessalonians, having visited the city's strong Jewish community. It was the second city of the Eastern empire after Constantinople, with a key location on trading routes between West and East as well as a major port; many of the most important excavations date from the Byzantine era. It became a major part of the Ottoman Empire after 1430, with a Jewish presence reaching fifty percent of the population after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, and for several centuries it was the largest Jewish city in the world, although under Ottoman rule. Ataturk, the founder of the modern Turkish state, was born in Thessaloniki, and the city played a major role in the Balkan wars of the early twentieth century. Much of the city was destroyed by an accidental fire during World War I, and it is this destruction along with the resultant rebuilding of the city according to a European modern plan by Ernest Hebrard, and the flight of much of the Jewish population, that has largely shaped contemporary Thessaloniki.

It is a city with a major historical past, but...