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

Abstract

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 laidback attitudes of Greek islands and the bustle of what wants to be a contemporary city, Thessaloniki telescopes twentythree 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 cafes and restaurants, in the hotel 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.