Domesticating the Tourist Gaze in Thessaloniki's Prigipos

The article examines how Prigipos, a cafe´ 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 flaˆnerie that matches, and is directed towards the cafe´’s physical and symbolic surroundings (notably, the TurkishConsulate, the adjacent paternal house of Turkey’s first President, Kemal Ataturk, butalso the old part of the city, historically populated by Greek refugees from AnatolianTurkey). My ethnographic eye is examined as constitutive of this flanerie, especially sinceI grew up in Thessaloniki. Through the employment of mixed research tools andmethods, I explore how Prigipos’s spectacular self-presentation replaced old migrantkafeneion culture with new aesthetic fusions to enable its global consumerist mobility. Atthe same time, the article argues that old ethno-national formulas are enmeshed inPrigipos’s design and narratives, endorsing a Thessalonikiote permutation of culture.