Thessaloniki Approves Parks for Boutaris and Savvopoulos Amidst Controversy

The determination to grant Boutaris has sparked aggravated backlash from nationalist groups and the Pontian Greek community.Credit: Greek Reporter

The Thessaloniki City Council has precocious moved guardant with naming 2 metropolis parks successful grant of the precocious erstwhile Mayor Yiannis Boutaris and the legendary singer-songwriter Dionysis Savvopoulos.

While the tribute to Savvopoulos was wide accepted, the determination to grant Boutaris has sparked aggravated backlash from nationalist groups and the Pontian Greek community.

Opposition to Thessaloniki’s Boutaris Park

The Pan-Pontian Federation of Greece (POE) issued a stern “No” regarding the naming of the parkland other City Hall aft Yiannis Boutaris. Their absorption stems from past statements made by Boutaris regarding the Pontian Genocide, which galore successful the assemblage recovered profoundly violative and revisionist.

In their authoritative statement, the Federation argued:

“Honoring a idiosyncratic who publically questioned the humanities information of the Genocide of the Greeks of the East is an insult to the representation of our ancestors and the 353,000 victims.”

They characterized the City Council’s determination arsenic a “provocation” that ignores the corporate trauma of the Pontian people. The hostility was disposable some extracurricular and wrong the City Hall. Demonstrators carrying Greek flags gathered extracurricular the building, demanding the connection beryllium scrapped. The league was concisely suspended erstwhile a typical of the “United Macedonians” radical disrupted the proceedings, scattering leaflets and calling the determination “unacceptable.”

Mayor Angeloudis’s defense

Despite the protests, Mayor Stelios Angeloudis defended the determination arsenic a “debt of honor” to a antheral who served the metropolis for 2 terms. He condemned those attempting to “politicize” the tribute:

“We volition not enactment successful oregon substance this attempted division. The lone motivation heirs of Yiannis Boutaris—his 3 children—requested a elemental abstraction of remembrance with humility.”

In contrast, the naming of “Dionysis Savvopoulos Park” (located betwixt Georgiou Papandreou and Maria Callas streets) was met with praise. Angeloudis described Savvopoulos arsenic a “great ambassador of Thessaloniki,” ensuring that the artist’s bequest remains permanently linked to his birthplace.

Why is Boutaris polarizing Thessaloniki?

To recognize the “Pan-Pontian” reaction, it is adjuvant to enactment that during his mayoralty, Yiannis Boutaris was known for his unconventional and often provocative views. He repeatedly angered hardliners with his arguable statements connected the naming quality with North Macedonia and the past of Greco–Turkish relations.

Boutaris declared his privation to physique an Islamic mosque arsenic good arsenic monuments to Thessaloniki’s Jews and to the Young Turk Revolution. Boutaris claimed that operation of specified monuments would pull Jewish and Turkish tourists to Thessaloniki, arsenic these tourists would privation to sojourn the hometown of their forefathers.

On May 20, 2018, a radical of Greek ultra-nationalists physically assaulted Yannis Boutaris for which helium received aesculapian attraction afterwards. The radical was aggravated implicit his quality astatine a remembrance lawsuit for the Pontic Greek victims of Turkish genocide.

Boutaris believed that Thessaloniki should person embraced the Turks due to the fact that it was the birthplace of the laminitis of Turkish democracy, Kemal Ataturk.