Salonica Terminus. Fred A. Reed
man who for me personified Salonica. In the spring of 1994, the face of the city, while unchanged, had become subtly unrecognizable. I was on my way to present my condolences to his widow, for Kazantzis had died on Christmas day, 1991, from acute internal bleeding brought on by chronic liver disease, his death precipitated by an exhausting series of public lectures in Athens on—what else?—Salonica’s literary heritage and tradition. This was my first trip back to the city he loved so ardently; the city he, unlike many locally-born authors, refused to abandon for the blandishments and the notoriety of the Athenian literary whirl.
Mirror—and sculptor—of Salonica’s identity, its literary tradition springs from a devotion to the particular: to the sweep of the water-line separating sea from land, to the forested hills that ring the town, to the fragility and violence of its history, and to the ephemeral yet enduring nature of its Greekness. Few writers captured these particulars better than Kazantzis, and no one defended them more pugnaciously, researched them more exhaustively, wrote of them with greater insight, affection and sharp-edged irony:
When the wind blows from the south clouds fill the sky. Then, for a few hours, the wind will stop before the rain begins or the Vardari picks up. Whenever the south wind stills, a choking stench rises up from the water. Half the town or more, as far as Koulé-Café and Tsinari, reeks like an open cesspool. But in spite of the thick cloud cover, there are moments when the sun glints through.
On just such an afternoon you may find yourself sitting in a deserted coffee-house at the corner of Apostle Paul and Saint Demetrius streets, just across from the Turkish consulate and Kemal’s house, and the waiter will come up to you. “Tripe soup and coffee don’t really taste good unless they stink a bit,” he’ll say, to head off the observation you were about to make about the half-washed cup.
Still, up from the water rose the stench and me, I was fresh out of observations. Just as I was in no mood to share my thoughts with the shoeshine boy who, as he had buffed my shoes earlier, grumbled on about how prices were going up. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it up to here with concierges and the people who run the sidewalk kiosks Now the shoeshine boys are trying to find out what’s on our minds? What else were we supposed to tell these “specialists” so they could figure out what we were thinking? Subjecting our political beliefs to a kind of urinalysis, that’s what it was. So much for concierges and kiosk proprietors and, nowadays, shoeshine boys . . .
—Tolis Kazantis,
Our last meeting had taken place in Salonica a few months prior to his death. I was passing through the city on a reporting expedition to eastern Thrace, the home of Greece’s Turkish minority. In a smoke-filled café—not literary cliché but inescapable reality, for in winter Greek cafés are, by definition, smoke-filled—Kazantzis regaled me with a rapid-fire succession of stories mixed with hair-raising inside information about infiltration of the minority community in Thrace by the Turkish secret police. This he had gleaned from a distant relative who worked for the Greek intelligence service while ostensibly teaching in a high-school attended by Turkish minority students. But all I could see were his burning, sunken eyes, his drawn face, the furious intensity of his gestures as he fired up one cigarette after another, all the while assuring me with the pride of perversity that he was under strict doctor’s orders not to smoke. The Tolis Kazantzis I knew did not, I was certain, consciously seek death. But the man sitting across from me seemed to have accepted, in his innermost soul, that death was hard upon him, seemed to have decided to hasten its coming. The cutting force of his hands with their abrupt movements, and the fervid brilliance of his eyes spoke it though he did not.
In mourning, her black hair brushed austerely back, Kazantzis’ widow Fani greets me at the door and shows me in. Her eyes have the grief-charged depth of the lamenting Holy Mother in a Byzantine icon but her strong hands are composed, calm. In a halting but firm voice she describes his last days, sparing little detail. I suppose this is what I’ve come to hear: the account of how an avoidable death became inevitable. And if his death was avoidable—if he had only stopped smoking, stopped drinking—why had Tolis Kazantzis defied good counsel? I wondered as I listened.
Perhaps to every man there comes a moment when it becomes clear that life cannot continue. Then he must carry out the bidding of a mysterious voice deep within him. Tolis Kazantzis had done that voice’s bidding. His wife, children and friends buried him in the snow and biting cold on Christmas day, in the heart of the brief Salonica winter. That same day the lead item on the Athens television news featured homeless animals.
A FLOCK OF DIGNITARIES FLUTTERS to and fro outside the Basilica of Saint Demetrius, the glint of Greek full-dress military uniforms vivid against the phalanx of Orthodox clergymen in their black robes, cylindrical hats and full beards. From lamp-posts, flags and bunting in the national colors droop limply in the windless dusk. Police vans have blocked traffic on the street in front of the basilica, home and stronghold of Salonica’s patron saint. Around the entrances squadrons of officers, walkie-talkies in hand, hover alertly, as if expecting a riot to break out at any moment. Any large gathering of Greeks generates a charge of excitement, a human magnetic field that crackles like static electricity in an overheated, dry room. But neither a civil servants’ strike nor a student demonstration—public manifestations which attract anarchist violence as over-ripe fruit draws wasps—is in prospect. The evening’s emanations are peaceful ones.
Inside the Basilica the dignitaries and the faithful have congregated to welcome a miraculous icon of the Holy Virgin transported for the occasion by Greek naval vessel from the island of Patmos to commemorate the feast of Saint Demetrius, holy martyr, warrior, and protector of the city. I select a vantage point near one of the side doors from which I can observe the worshippers as they shoulder their way into the church. Many are welldressed young people and prosperous householders; several are exquisitely groomed women of the kind that turn heads on Tzimiski Street, the city’s main shopping thoroughfare. The response of the multitude signifies this: faith has not yet been narrowed to a dark corridor inhabited by the old, the poor and the uneducated. Like a subterranean current it flows through public—and private—life, rising to the surface on the great festivals and saints’ days, converging in seamless symbiosis with secular power. A blend of liturgical chanting, incense and pious intensity seems to radiate from the Basilica on this warm, humid evening. Was this the elusive sense of the sacred, a notion now floating in semi-respectability on the fringes of Western public discourse, an unavowed inversion of the world cult of the Golden Calf? Would I come upon a link, no matter how tenuous, no matter how deeply embedded in the interstices of collective memory, between the veneration of Saint Demetrius, the Orthodox Church as Authority and Hierarchy, and the resurgent, aggressive nationalism of the Greek state, very much on display this evening? That was another tale, one of the tales I had come to Salonica to hear told. Naively, as I was to discover.
Next morning, at the offices of the Metropolis, the Salonica Archdiocese, my pursuit of the tale began. Perhaps the better to ensure a near organic link between those heavenly Siamese twins of nationalism and religion, the offices are situated just around the corner from the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. Only a few paces separate these two supposedly anachronistic but cantankerous survivors amidst the maelstrom of free-market glitz that would represent the city’s contemporary identity, yet fools no one.
Despite the sanctimonious atmosphere, the place exudes a bureaucratic mustiness as unmistakable as its precise composition is complex: a faintly acrid odor of sweat and oft-worn clothes, rancid floor wax, mothballs, stale cigarette smoke and the cloying scent of false piety. The plastic flowers, crimson carpets and gilt-tipped furniture set up a jarring counterpoint to the expeditiously authoritative, pursed-lipped air of the bearded holy fathers I encounter as they scurry up and down their corridors, heads thrust forward like foraging ravens. Of course, Saint Demetrius’ Day is just around the corner and the offices are busy. Still, would it be possible to speak with someone about him, I enquire of a young pope working at a computer in a room labeled ‘Public Inquiries.’ “Office number one or number four,” he snaps back without lifting his head. “Knock and go right in.”
I knock at the door of office number one and