Text & Photography © Stavro Papadopoulos / Magnesium

Thessaloniki: this is where I was born. This is my hometown, a place loaded with memories which feed from nostalgia of all things passed.

Something inside makes me reluctant to talk about this city, as if I am afraid to ruin a deeper bond by using inadequate, crippled words. And so I walk around taking photographs of its surfaces as if throwing beacons, points to recognise my moments in time.

I saw the city ruined and changed, literally building itself anew on the ruins of its history. I remember the icy winds of winter nights, the dead empty streets of summer, the smell of the sea mixed with gasoline, all the houses my family moved. I saw the light disappearing from the streets as the buildings rose in height, the rivers of cars emerging, radios playing foreign stations on rainy days, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, the policeman ringing our doorbell asking why we didn’t hang the Greek flag on national holidays. Everyday things always in the early afternoon light, neighbourhood movie theaters with two features daily, music everywhere in the streets, strange music, brought by immigrants to this Balkan junction. A city with the ruins of three religions, staircases full of the smells of homemade cooking. So many first times, all the first times, my departures, my homecomings and then the night, terrifying at first only to become the only real thing, the essential fascination bare of everything unimportant.

But then again, this memory carpet often dwells on cliches, so let’s forget about them. I am still around, after all, and the city is changing once more. When I walk alone on its streets, trying to be a foreigner and a native at the same time before I press the shutter, I often wonder what the future memories for the new generations will be. The city persistently remains a colossal museum of accidents as every big city by definition is, and I think of what Walter Benjamin said “Not to find one’s way in a city doesn’t mean a thing actually. To lose oneself in a city — as one loses oneself in a forest — that calls for a quite different schooling”.

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