All of it adds up to an investigation into how Vancouver—and cities in general—can imagine themselves beyond greed, shopping, capital accumulation, and vulgar self-interest. This city has every opportunity to re-imagine itself as an ethical, ecological place that nurtures a generous and vibrant citizenry that can afford to live here. We have every capacity to start building that city right now.
MAP THANKS TO WIKIMEDIA COMMONS HTTP://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/WIKI/FILE:STADTGLIEDERUNG_VANCOUVER_2008.PNG HTTP://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY-SA/3.0/
THESSALONIKI, GREECE PHOTO BY SELENA COUTURE
KEEPING IT REAL
Thessaloniki, Greece
I’m walking down the hill from the Old Town with Kristos, Stavros, and Kostas. We’re looking for a bar that is somewhere downtown, near the water. We pass a smallish city block that is lazily fenced off, dropping down into what looks like a construction site. I stop and look down. There are a few brick piles of rubble, a few half-built walls here and there, a short dirt road winding around, some more fencing that seems to be fencing off nothing, a truck, and not much else. I ask what it is. The boys look at each other, “Just some Roman ruins.”
I look around more closely and come across a little wooden box zap-strapped to a chain-link fence. The box holds pamphlets describing the area as the remains of a Roman agora, built in the fourth century. What the hell? There is almost no fanfare, no promotion, just a cheap fence and a box of damp brochures. There is virtually nothing to prevent people from wandering down there. Cars are parked densely right up against the fence, roads jammed in tight on all four sides, just short of obvious disrespect for these historic ruins.
It’s kind of staggering for me, coming from the city of Vancouver where history is presumed to have started in the 1870s. Aren’t these the kind of monuments people travel across the world to gape at?
The guys who brought me here are anarchists and social ecologists, so they are appropriately sneering at the remains of empire, and I’m good with that, but c’mon, these are freaking Roman ruins. Shouldn’t they be celebrated a least a little? Shouldn’t there be a big sign up, a tour guide, a kiosk to sell tickets, and audio tour headsets for rent? We have historical markers around Vancouver for shit that happened in the 1950s.
I try to engage my friends on this point. I tell them that in Canada we learn extensively about Greek and Roman cultures in grade school and that people know vastly more about Athenian history than local history. Pretty much everyone I know has a sophisticated understanding of ancient Greek myths but knows virtually nothing of local Native mythology, myself included. Stavros looks at me and shrugs.
There are a few mitigating factors. West Coast indigenous cultures didn’t really build in stone or cement and Vancouver’s relentless climate and precipitation doesn’t let wood structures last long. North American First Nations have also never been written cultures, relying dominantly on oral traditions, leaving more discrete historical trails. Still, though, the lack of knowledge and the lack of interest in preservation of the history of this region are pronounced: Vancouverites know virtually nothing of the history of this place beyond 150 years ago and for the most part do not care much.
There are some grasping attempts at honoring the past here but they tend to come off as reflexive and obligatory. Check out the official tourism Vancouver website (tourismvancouver.com): it takes a little hunting around, but there is a page over in the “About Vancouver” section called “Vancouver’s History.” There is a paragraph about 16,000-11,000 BCE talking about Native people arriving and settling here, including nuggets like “And they liked the forests teeming with wildlife” (I didn’t make that up). Then the story leaps forward twelve-and-a-half thousand years to 1592-1774, when Spaniards start dropping by. The website then carefully documents each critical step of the establishment of the city from Captain Vancouver’s arrival through Gassy Jack to the Canadian Pacific Railway to the opening of the first shopping mall to the opening of the Ford Centre to the first polar bear swim. Natives are not mentioned after the opening paragraph.
By comparison, the first thing that jumps out on any of the major Thessaloniki websites is that the city was founded in 315 BCE by Cassander, King of Macedonia, and was named after his wife, Thessalonike, Alexander the Great’s sister. In 50 CE Paul first spoke of Christianity there, Demetrios was martyred in the city in 303 CE becoming the patron saint of the city, and Salonica (as it was then called) was the second most important Byzantine city after Constantinople. I knew all this after like fifteen minutes of the most vapid kind of browsing. Virtually all of the tourist material about the city prominently features old city walls, the White Tower, ancient churches, Roman baths, and markets. You think about Thessaloniki and you just have to think about its past, both near and very far.
Kostas is patient while I try to articulate this difference. He makes it clear that others are welcome to celebrate these ruins, but for him they are just a reminder of an imperial past that has long since passed, a history that is as much a burden as a source of pride. Thessaloniki is a city where the weight of the past is everywhere: spend half a day wandering the city core and without trying you will bump into at least a score of major historical sites. You couldn’t avoid the past if you tried.
The best book I know of on the city is called Salonica: City of Ghosts. Mark Mazower writes:
[Thessaloniki] is a densely thriving human settlement whose urban character has never been in question, a city whose history reached forward from classical antiquity uninterruptedly through the intervening centuries to our own times.5
But Mazower also makes clear that Salonica has gone through some catastrophic upheavals through the centuries. From the falls of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires to the forced re-locations of Muslims to Turkey in 1923 and the Jews to Auschwitz in WWII, the city has seen a long stream of bloodshed.
Can one shape an account of this city’s past which manages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical discontinuities—the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements, and genocide—which it has also experienced? Nearly a century ago, a local historian attempted this: at a time when Salonica’s ultimate fate was uncertain, the city struck him as a “museum of idioms, of disparate cultures and religions.” Since then what he called its “hybrid spirit” has been severely battered by two world wars and everything they brought with them. I think it worth trying again.6
It strikes me that that is exactly the project Vancouver needs to undertake: to collectively describe its past in a way that does not laminate or soft-sell genocide, but effects a creative reconciliation with the collection of stories that make up the city’s history, especially the substantially ignored indigenous history of this place. Once we learn to acknowledge and speak about this territory’s roots and memory, maybe we will be able to shape a hybrid urban identity in a place where those “radical discontinuities” have been vastly more prevalent than any continuities.
Maybe the best historian of British Columbia is the geographer Cole Harris, who wrote in The Resettlement of British Columbia:
[This is] an immigrant society [that] has hardly come to terms with where it is in the world, this Pacific corner of North