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It’s past midnight, but noises of an unremitting spark in Life resound as if it were day. Yellow lights flitter on the sidewalks’ canopies streaming through to the concrete and decorative garlands strung over the traffic reach into infinity like a cosmic journey. The lines of ornamental lights pull at the city’s futuristic lever of style, traveling light-years beyond time.
As Greece’s second city and home to a voluminous crowd of university students, Thessaloniki sleeps solely at the rise of dawn; it lives like a thumping jackhammer the remaining hours. The citizens roll their dice on Life’s board of backgammon. Obsessively, they’re transfixed as leeches desiring to suck the worth out of their rapidly modernizing center.

Midnight In Thessaloniki

Camron Karsten
2006-10-07 12:40:30

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as I roam aimlessly for the purpose of
pure exploration, I’m alone, yet feel a part of the energy. The atmosphere of the city sucks me in, causing me to disappear and become lost within the mass of movement. The harder it thumps, the further I recede by the head of the hammer. Soothing, calming, I take in the lounges as I pass and revel in the art littering the walls.
Besides the fashion of relaxation and shopping, graffiti is an exception. It ornaments the empty walls. But one can hardly call it graffiti. Creative, picturesque—colors are not sprayed in a tagged Greek alphabet, but drawn with a unique sharp nozzle. Instead of a splash and a ray to another balled dab of paint, the paintings match the futuristic culture of Thessaloniki. Faces, robots, designs and letterings are silky with sudden mechanical turns of wrist and arm. Their artists are nameless to my English eyes. Their work is like a sign of who they were, what they represented, before moving on, vanishing into the city’s vastness. And beneath the silhouetted cats against the walls, whether on the sidewalks or in the streets, my footsteps prod further into Thessaloniki.

Then Comes The Light

A city of art. A place of continuous movement. Stirring up the silence to create a virtual reality based on rolling one’s dice and seeing what comes, Thessaloniki arrived and departs in such fashion. It is a fashion of future perception, looking ahead to the relaxation with family and friends after an occupied day, as well as the tag on Life which one makes. Upon any mode of travel, evolution into this aesthetic beatitude gyrates despite the directions of the wind. It is so because eternally—like strung ornamental lights over the city streets—the individual has one’s purpose, one’s will, and one’s belief in Life. The reality is realized and traveled in the very surrendering of it, handing it over to the hands of art, the pulses of a city, the laughter of companions and the surges of the bus regardless of who is driving. A progeny of potential appears in the emerging day and then is it understood and the papers are collected: Already, each person had their understanding perfecting arranged within.

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