Former mayor of Thessaloniki, businessman and oenologist Yiannis Boutaris has passed away at the age of 82. He breathed his last breath in a private clinic in the city he loved, where he had been hospitalised for serious health problems.
Yiannis Boutaris visited Melbourne several times, both as mayor and in other capacities, and maintained very close relations with expatriate and community organisations,
Yiannis Boutaris was born on 13 June 1942 in Thessaloniki, Greece. He graduated in Chemistry from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, held a degree in Oenology and continued his family tradition in winemaking through the company “I. Boutaris & Son”, founded by his grandfather in 1879.
He left the Boutaris company in 1996 and founded the Kir-Yianni company – with its namesake wines and wineries in privately owned vineyards in Giannakochori Naoussa and Amyndeon – which is now run by his two sons.
He was president and member of the boards of numerous professional, environmental and cultural organisations. Indicatively, the International Wine Academy, Greek Wine Association, Interprofessional Organisation of Vine & Wine, Thessaloniki Tourism Organisation, Thessaloniki Film Festival, WWF Greece.
He was elected as the 60th mayor of Thessaloniki in 2010 and remained in office for two consecutive terms, until 2019. In the recent municipal elections, held in October 2023, he was re-elected with Spyros Pega’s party as the first councillor, receiving a record number of votes. He was also the president of the Holocaust Museum of Greece.
He was a founding member of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the ‘Oasis’ Addiction Support Centre, and a founder of ‘Arcturus’, an organisation for the protection of the brown bear and wildlife. He was honoured with many international and national awards.
The unconventional former mayor described his life in the book entitled “Sixty years of harvesting” published in 2020. With his characteristic frankness, Yiannis Boutaris reflected on his predestined – due to family tradition – involvement with wines, his collective action, innovations and conflicts that marked the sector in Greece from the post-war period to the present day. He described the monster of alcoholism that he managed to conquer and the help he deserved to give to other addicts.
What he told Neos Kosmos
Twelve years ago, on his last trip to Melbourne, Yiannis Boutaris told Neos Kosmos how moved he was by Melbourne’s strong Greek presence, which he described as much more vibrant than other Greek cities abroad. In a way, he saw Melbourne as a model centre for the coexistence of different nationalities and cultures – something he envisioned Thessaloniki to develop into in the future.
“It pains me to say that in Greece, lawlessness is almost the norm. We have to tolerate the existence of different things and freedom of expression if we want to say that we respect ourselves,” said the then mayor of Thessaloniki.
“Melbourne and the quality of life here is out of this world compared to Thessaloniki. Australia is a country created by immigrants, so by definition it is tolerant of other ethnic communities. Its legal framework is efficient and the citizenry has acquired a social conscience that respects the freedom and diversity of others,” he continued.
He had also spoken then about the importance of the dynamics of the Jewish community, which in both Thessaloniki and Melbourne is numerous and extremely active socially. Referring to his visit to the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, where he met with Holocaust survivors, he said he was moved.
“We met a 95-year-old lady, Maria Curtis, who is from Thessaloniki. Once you are born in Thessaloniki you are always a Thessaloniki citizen, nothing changes. It was a very moving meeting. Also the fact that we as a city are highlighting the historical Jewish past of the city, with the history of the Holocaust as the apotheosis. The disappearance of 1/3 of the city by the Nazi troops is not forgotten. It ought not to be forgotten.”
Yiannis Boutaris did not fail to take a stand in relation to his much-discussed “difference”.
“First of all? I don’t do things to promote myself. What I do is projected in a special way by the press because I am not the classic politician who will embellish situations and say pompous words and the typical ‘well done’. When I go somewhere and I don’t have a good time, I say I didn’t have a good time.”
“Let’s not forget,” he stressed, “that I come from private initiative. “I,” he said, “got into politics after I was 60.” Obviously, that creates a curiosity in people of ‘what is this fruit that has come to us now’. I don’t consider myself any different. I don’t have horns.”
Yiannis Boutaris to the Athens Macedonian News Agency
His lines were typical… “I lived it, I had enough… Goodbye!” and “History will judge whether I was a good mayor for Thessaloniki”. This is how Yiannis Boutaris had responded in the last interviews he gave to the Athens Macedonian News Agency, after his final decision not to run again for a third term as a candidate for the municipality of Thessaloniki and just before he packed up his things from the mayor’s house and handed over to the next candidate, Konstantinos Zervas.
At the time, Boutaris, despite the irritation he said the move caused him, had no regrets about his decision not to run. He believed that through his nine years in the mayor’s office, Thessaloniki had gained ‘recognition’ thanks to its ‘unconventional’ mayorship. “Everyone started talking about the city and there were publications”, he had said.
Of the meetings he had in his office throughout his two terms, he singled out those with the German ambassador, Jens Plotner, Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, historian Mark Mazower and British best-selling author Victoria Hislop.
“The benefit is that the contacts I had with various people highlighted Thessaloniki. People started talking and there were publications all over the world about the city and its supposedly ‘unconventional’ mayor. We highlighted its past, as we have many Roman, Turkish and extinct Jewish monuments. No one paid attention to the history of Thessaloniki. The Rotunda is a copy of the Pantheon of Rome and is unique. The history and the whole package with Kemal was brought out. We highlighted the history of the Jews, which was hidden under the carpet,” Yiannis Boutaris had said.
He said he was proud as mayor of the project of creating the Holocaust Museum in Thessaloniki, an idea for which he fought hard and claimed financial resources, stressing that “it will mark Thessaloniki and the centuries to come. It will give the city a new glamour, an internationalisation”.
In his interviews with Athens Macedonian News Agency he had also answered the question whether the savage attack on the White Tower during an event on the Pontian Genocide had influenced him to withdraw from local government. “Not at all. The incident barely convinced me. It made me think about how I could, from my position, expose these scoundrels. It didn’t scare me at all,” he had stated.
The Boutaris family on the death of the former mayor
“Mr – Yiannis will always be in our hearts”
“Yiannis Boutaris is no longer with us. He passed away tonight, at the age of 82, with his family by his side,” reads a post by the Boutaris family on the Kir-Yianni estate page on the death of the former mayor of Thessaloniki, the businessman and winemaker.
“Visionary, charismatic, pioneering, unconventional, Yiannis Boutaris is the history, but also the source of inspiration for the renaissance of Greek wine. And not only. An inexhaustible force of nature that responded to its first name. Mr Giannis will always be in our hearts,” the same post adds.
