“History will judge if I was a good mayor” – Yiannis Boutaris has recently been facing serious health problems – The announcement of his family
Unconventional, straightforward, generous, daring, a lover of good wine, the good life and Thessaloniki. These, and many more, were Yannis Boutaris, who passed away on Saturday night at the age of 82.
The former mayor of Thessaloniki, businessman and oenologist Giannis Boutaris breathed his last in a private hospital of the city, where he had been hospitalized for the last time with serious health problems.
Giannis Boutaris was born on June 13, 1942 in Thessaloniki. Graduated in Chemistry from AUTH, qualified Oenologist and continuation of the rich family tradition in wines, through the company “I. Boutaris & Son”, which was founded by his grandfather in 1879.
He left the “Boutari” company in 1996 and founded the “Kir-Yiannis” company -with the namesake wines and wineries in privately owned vineyards, in Giannakochori Naoussa and Amyntaio-, which is currently managed by his two sons.
He was the president and board member of many organizations, professional, environmental and cultural. Examples: International Academy of Wine, Greek Wine Association, Interprofessional Vine & Wine Organization, Thessaloniki Tourism Organization, Thessaloniki Film Festival, WWF Greece.
He was elected as the 60th mayor of Thessaloniki in 2010 and remained in the mayoralty for two consecutive terms, until 2019. In the recent municipal elections, held in October 2023, he was re-elected with the faction of Spyros Pegas as the first municipal councilor, receiving a record votes. He was president of the Holocaust Museum of Greece.
He was a founding member of the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the Addiction Support Center “Oasis”, as well as the founder of “Arkturos”, an organization for the protection of the brown bear and wild life. He was honored with many international and national distinctions.
The unconventional former mayor described his life in the book entitled “Sixty years of vintage” which was released in 2020. With his characteristic directness, Yiannis Boutaris retold his prescribed -due to family tradition- involvement with wines, his collective action , the innovations and conflicts that marked the sector in Greece from post-war period to the present day. He described the monster of alcoholism that he managed to defeat and the help he was credited with giving to other addicts.
“History will judge if I was a good mayor”
His remarks were typical… “I lived it, I had enough… Goodbye!” and “History will judge if I was a good mayor for Thessaloniki.” This is how Yiannis Boutaris responded in the last interviews he gave to the Athenian/Macedonian News Agency, after his final decision not to stand again as a candidate for a third term in the municipality of Thessaloniki and shortly before he packed up his things from the mayor’s office palace handing over to the next, Konstantinos Zervas.
At that time, Mr. Yiannis, despite the irritation that, as he mentioned, the relocations caused him, he did not regret at all about his decision not to run for office. He believed that through his nine-year presence in the mayoral office, Thessaloniki gained “recognizability” thanks to its “unconventional” mayor. “Everyone started talking about the city and there were reports,” he said characteristically.
Of the meetings he had in his office throughout his two terms, he singled out those with German ambassador Jens Plotner, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, historian Mark Mazauer and British best-selling author Victoria Hislop.
“The profit is that the contacts I had with various people highlighted Thessaloniki. They started talking and there were reports 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. Nobody paid attention to the history of Thessaloniki. The Rotunda is a replica of the Pantheon in Rome and is unique. The story and the whole package with Kemal was revealed. We highlighted the history of the Jews, which was hidden under the carpet”, said Yannis Boutaris.
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, emphasizing that “it will seal Thessaloniki for centuries to come. It will give another glamor to the city, an internationalization”.
In his interviews with APE – MPE, he also answered the question of whether the savage attack he received at the White Tower at an event about the Pontian Genocide influenced him to withdraw from self-governing affairs. “At all. This incident kind of made me stubborn. It got me thinking about how I’m going to be able to expose these bums from my position. It didn’t scare me at all,” he said.
The announcement of the Boutaris family on his death: “Mr. Giannis will be in our hearts forever”
“Yiannis Boutaris is no longer with us. He passed away this evening, at the age of 82, with his family by his side,” says a post by the Boutaris family on the page of the Kyr-Yiannis estate about the death of the former mayor of Thessaloniki, the businessman and winemaker.
“Visionary, charismatic, pioneer, unconventional, Yiannis Boutaris is history, but also the source of inspiration for the renaissance of Greek wine. And not only. An inexhaustible force of nature that lived up to its first name. Mr. Giannis will forever be in our hearts,” the same post added.
Source: Skai
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