Paschalis Xanthopoulos wastes no time recounting the past glories of Xanthi when we meet him at the elegant townhouse where celebrated composer Manos Hadjidakis was born. “If you want to understand this city, imagine this house as a stage: 5-year-old Manos is holding his Cretan father’s hand as they cross the threshold and greet the owner from whom they’re renting the top floor. That’s Isaac Daniel, a French-Jewish banker who moved here for the tobacco business. Manos’ mother, Aliki Arvanitidou, a native of Alexandroupoli, is at the top of the stairs, urging them to hurry up because the boy’s Armenian piano teacher is waiting for him. In the background, we hear the call to prayer from the nearby mosque. Background and religion never divided people here. We’re still very much of an ethnic jazz persuasion. All the churches for the Catholics, Armenians, Evangelists and Old Calendarists, we have mosques for Sunnis and Bektashis; the only thing that’s gone is the synagogue,” he says.
Xanthopoulos is just another colorful piece of this multicultural puzzle that is the capital of Thrace in northeastern Greece. His grandparents came from Asia Minor in 1922 and settled in a village near Abdera. He later studied film and computer science in Athens, before deciding to return to Thrace, where he headed the Xanthi Folk and History Museum, the Foundation of Thracian Art and Tradition, several municipal cultural programs and the Friends of Progress Association of Xanthi.
‘The downturn began with the collapse of once-mighty cooperative factories around 2010… Today, we have the lowest per capita income in the country’
Also a history buff, Xanthopoulos tells us how reforms introduced by the city’s Ottoman sultan in 1840 attracted around a hundred wealthy families and companies from Constantinople, Thessaloniki and the islands who wanted to invest in Xanthi’s tobacco industry and in the city. Ottoman Xanthi was a tobacco trading hub but also a producer, which also brought laborers and technicians. Society was, therefore, organized on the basis of what people did rather than where they came from or what their religion was. Workers flocked from every corner of liberated Greece and beyond looking for a better future, which many succeeded in attaining, until it all came crashing down in all three Bulgarian invasions, which thrust the population into destitution.
“The descendants of those who once came from Epirus, Crete, Central Greece, the Peloponnese and the islands now have active associations, alongside the Sarakatsani, the Asia Minor refugees and the Pontians. When new students first enroll here, they often present themselves simply as Athenians. But before long, you’ll see them joining the associations connected to their ancestral roots. Through performances, volunteer initiatives and traditional dances, they become one with the local community,” says Xanthopoulos.
But what about this gorgeous building where the Oscar-winning composer took his first steps? “The prefectural authority had it and fixed it up but then it passed on to the regional authority, and since no one was really managing it, it only hosts events every so often,” he says, adding that now he is director of the Komotini Concert Hall, he hopes to breathe new life into it by turning it into a branch of that organization.
Literary initiative
Situated in a cool neighborhood with cafes, a bookstore and a small restaurant, the location for such a venture couldn’t be better. The area is also home to Philanagnosia, a creative writing workshop run by 34-year-old Vassiliki Stroli. “I put together this circle of students on my own. One of the great things about living in the country is that people will trust you when they see you doing something with honesty, knowledge and passion. There’s a lot of thirst for new things,” she tells Kathimerini, explaining that she uses literature and poetry to help her students express their feelings and gain more confidence. Writing “is a lot like psychotherapy,” says Stroli, who teaches writing to elementary, middle and high school students, as well as adults.
‘Legacy’ of the crisis
With hard work and a bit of luck, Stroli managed to carve out a professional niche for herself and make a success of it. Many other young professionals, like Panagiotis Bardakis, have not been as fortunate.
“I spent four years as head of the European Information Office for Eastern Macedonia and Thrace – one of 14 such offices acting as a bridge between Brussels and each of the country’s regions. Its role is to inform citizens about EU programs, policies, initiatives and even the structure of the European Union itself. A large part of the people who came through our doors were students looking for job opportunities abroad. The city’s young men and women want to stay, but the job market gives them little choice. My own classmates entered the workforce during the height of the economic crisis and left. Out of a class of 28, only five of us stayed. The downturn began with the collapse of once-mighty cooperative factories around 2010. We ended up with an unemployment rate of 40% – among the highest in the EU. Today, we have the lowest per capita income in the country, making us one of the poorest regions in both Greece and Europe. There’s little room to plan for the future, let alone to dream,” the 34-year-old tells Kathimerini.
“Yet there are so many advantages here,” he continues. “The people of Xanthi come into the world born right beside a Muslim and an Armenian. You will find three ethnic backgrounds and languages in one room. And this is how it goes until you leave at the age of 18. It’s an antidote to the toxicity, hostility and intolerance that poisons this country every so often. After seven centuries of coexistence with Muslims and Jews, the reference point for the people of Thrace is how much they love their home – not God and language. The fact that we have so many volunteer organizations in this city says as much. We’re on the edge of Greece here and deprived of so much that we seek to get these things on our own through these institutions. We are forgotten by the state and that rankles, but it’s probably for the best. When the state has intervened, it hasn’t always been a success. It’s biased by stereotypes and ignores the delicate balances that people here instinctively respect. Because each of us knows the invisible boundaries and the subtle connections that run beneath the surface, linking diverse groups together.”
Bardakis believes that the ideal place for nurturing this kind of coexistence is the university and is eager to take up his new job as a community engagement officer for the Democritus University.
With that in mind, we decided to head to the university campus, home to five schools and a vital source of youthful energy for the city of Xanthi. The School of Architecture facilities are disappointing; not so the enthusiasm of its students.
Eva Kambouta and Theodora Theodorou are from Thessaloniki and are now in their fifth and final year at the school. “We’re going to miss our friends, the sense of security, the tranquility and easy access, and the low cost of living that makes things so much easier,” they say. “The coolest thing about this place was becoming so familiar with multiculturalism, becoming familiar with the sound of the imam. If there’s one thing we would change, it would be to demolish a few really ugly buildings. It’s wonderful to study architecture right next to the old town.”
We met the young women outside the office of the school’s chairman, Dimitris Polychronopoulos. An Athenian, he is one of a handful of academics teaching at the university who decided to settle in Thrace rather than commute back and forth. “I knew nothing of Xanthi when I started teaching here in 2004. I also had a class at the National Technical University of Athens on Stournari Street and would come from the madness of central Athens to here, to see a donkey tied up to a tree in a field outside the window. I’d leave and come back the following week to see the same donkey in the same field. The stillness was striking. But small and medium-sized towns have some incredible advantages. Everything is close by, you get to know the people, you get all your errands done fast and on foot, and you have lots of free time. Xanthi has survived thanks to the university. It’s a growth engine that has been making a difference ever since 1975, when it opened, and has been attracting a critical mass of students since the 1990s,” he says, noting that the School of Architecture has been doing particularly well in the rankings.
Commenting on Xanthi’s lost architectural identity, Polychronopoulos explains how “a building boom swept through the area in the 1990s, replicating the Athenian model at a 30-year delay, and bringing with it the same poor esthetics and construction standards. Developers made quick profits and, in the process, much of the city’s character was destroyed. And yet, a significant architectural legacy remains – such as the 126 tobacco warehouses – which, with the right vision, could offer the city a fresh sense of purpose and renewal.”
The shift to tourism
We make the obligatory stop at the Papaparaskevas pastry shop, founded by a baker from Eastern Thrace who created his own dessert by marrying sponge cake, walnuts and different types of chocolate. The award he was given for this delight by Kathimerini’s Gastronomos culinary magazine graces one of the walls, alongside photographs attesting to the business’ 99-year history. We are treated to a couple of cakes by Efi Arseni and Natasha Papagiannopoulou, stocking up on the calories needed to make the trek to Nestos, one of Greece’s most beautiful rivers and once deified.
At a river beach called Galani, we meet up with Ilias Michailidis from Riverland, a company that offers canoe excursions down the Nestos’ calm waters. He explains that up until 2018 he also offered tours on the train, which was one of the country’s most popular routes for nature buffs, along with the Kalavryta and Pilio trains. But the tracks were old, the train was getting slower and the service was abolished, even though it could have been used seasonally, for tourism only. Now the commute between Drama and Alexandroupoli can only be done by bus. Cargo trains occasionally use the track – which is part of the network connecting the borderland region of Evros to Athens – says Michailidis, adding that they’re often carrying NATO equipment from the port of Alexandroupoli.
The tourism season, he says, runs between two national holidays: March 25 and October 28. “We get around 1,000 visitors in that space of time. We’re the oldest company offering such tours, having been around since the mid-1990s. People didn’t believe that the Nestos could become a destination back then. Now we even offer archery, climbing, short hiking routes and zip-lining. Our visitors include both Greeks and foreigners. Nature alone could be the best reason for someone to visit our region. But Thrace is often left out of national planning, and that deepens our sense of insecurity. The environment is at risk because people are leaving. And when a place becomes deserted, even proper environmental protection becomes impossible,” says Michailidis.
We ask business consultant Dimitris Bardakidis what the local economy would look like without the boost from tourism.
“The productive population has been dwindling since the pandemic years. The region of Thrace has the lowest per capita GDP in Greece and 24% of the population only has an elementary school education precisely because only a small number of educated young people stay on,” says the 47-year-old Xanthi native, who chose to remain in his hometown.
“The cooperative factories manufacturing tomato and potato products, meat, milk, cigarettes, tobacco and sugar generated jobs and capital up until 1990. Because of the governing mentality, though, they were not competitive and they folded. Now there’s only one cooperative left, in tobacco manufacturing, as well as a few big factories like Thrace Plastics and [tech company] Sunlight that employ a few hundred people. The agricultural population in the region comes to around 7,500 people, or 10% of residents, while a much larger number of people are employed by the civil service and the military. There was a time when the state offered incentives for people to invest in Thrace. That changed in 2000 and the situation is now completely reversed. There are now more benefits for investing in Crete, for example, than in the borderlands of Evros – and that’s a purely political decision,” says Bardakidis.
The company he co-founded with a partner, ENA, helps farmers and businesses access European Union and national funding resources, while also advising about financing tools, subsidies and investments. The firm has been focusing on innovative industries, ideas and practices for the last seven years, and one ambitious scheme that is already being implemented, in cooperation with the Democritus University, is the development of Europe’s first digital innovation hub in the agrifood sector.
Agriculture and livestock farming could significantly bolster the population of the mountain areas, where young Pomak men are migrating en masse into physically demanding jobs, mostly sandblasting in shipyards in the Netherlands and Germany. In the villages, 80% of the population consists of women and children. The husbands come back twice a year and leave again, many with health problems from work-related accidents. And the young women who want to work have very limited options.
These young women are the driving force behind the social cooperative company Pleteno, which means “knit” in the Pomak dialect. Even the building where it’s based is symbolic: Up until 1995, it was a guardpost for the restricted crossing into Pomak country. Now, instead of representing division, it is a symbol of creativity.
We visited the knitting workshop and met educators Areti Bofiliou and Bengiul Burbuk, as well as the ever-active founder of the Ethnological Museum of Thrace, Angeliki Giannakidou, and a few of the 13 young women taking part in the endeavor.
“Pleteno, in its original form, began operating in August 2019. The seed for this venture was planted at the Second Chance School in the village of Kentavros, where many of the girls were students. They were back at school to improve their Greek and to get their certificate, but also to gain more confidence and a sense of self,” says Bofiliou, who teaches computer science and math.
“One of the things we did there was a virtual business project through an Education Ministry program and it got the students really excited. But what kind of business could they start when all they knew was their village and their home? There was an old factory that used to dye fabrics and had leftover scraps, which they let us use. So we thought: They can use these scraps to knit something, because knitting is something they already know from their mothers and grandmothers,” she adds.
The team was initially made up of just a small handful of people, but the venture took off in 2020 when Giannakidou became involved.
“For starters, we campaigned to have this state-owned building allocated to the venture, because until then it was showcasing its wares in a completely unsuitable space. It was run down and full of mice; it needed to be painted and fixed up. Then came the challenge of helping it expand its reach. We brought in experts who showed the girls new designs and techniques, and conducted educational workshops. We secured new looms through the Culture Ministry and took Pleteno to the Thessaloniki Fair and to Athens as well,” says Giannakidou, a major force in the region.
For the young women, working for the firm was a game changer. “It opened up another path to us,” they tell Kathimerini. “We have learned to work hard and a lot. We’d come back from the fields and had nothing to do, but here they taught us something that has value. The greatest moment was the exhibition in Athens: We just couldn’t believe that so many people came to see the things we make.”
As we take our leave of Thrace, we feel a warmth in our hearts – because this is the effect it has on people. Alexis Mavridis and Asteris Farinis, the owners of 41, a lovely taverna, say it best at our farewell dinner: “You come a stranger, you leave a friend.”
