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Abstract

The article examines how Prigipos, a café in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, communicates Greek cosmological themes through the way it ‘stages’ urban memories. The staging suggests an ‘Oriental’ tourist-like flânerie that matches, and is directed towards, the café's physical and symbolic surroundings (notably, the Turkish Consulate, the adjacent paternal house of Turkey's first President, Kemal Atatürk, but also the old part of the city, historically populated by Greek refugees from Anatolian Turkey). My ethnographic eye is examined as constitutive of this flânerie, especially since I grew up in Thessaloniki. Through the employment of mixed research tools and methods, I explore how Prigipos's spectacular self-presentation replaced old migrant kafeneion culture with new aesthetic fusions to enable its global consumerist mobility. At the same time, the article argues that old ethno-national formulas are enmeshed in Prigipos's design and narratives, endorsing a Thessalonikiote permutation of culture.

Keywords

cosmology consumption ethnographic travel tourism tourist gaze methods Orientalism

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Domesticating the tourist gaze in Thessaloniki's Prigipos

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