Love City

"Erotic City"
If you are Greek, you know it: it's Thessaloniki!
This is the taboo-belief that my city carries literaly for centuries...For the rest of Greeks-especially for the Athenians-, Thessaloniki is the synonym of amorous mood.

Historians relate it to the Port and all that...erotic activity that all cities with ports had.
Some people believe that it's the University Campus that feeds the city with so much warm, impassioned, youthful blood, that romance is just inevitable!
Some put the blame on its women that have always been sharp and pretty.
Some others think it's the fact that this city never sleeps. Just like all the lovestrucks.
Others that it's a small city and the faces become easily familiar.
Or that maybe all cities are erotic when you're just a visitor.

Most people that live here smile ironically when they hear this characterization and I know a lot that absolutely doubt it. I know a few that get really mad! And I'm sure there are some that are secretly kind of proud!!

And we've all had those moments we have furiously mumbled "what an erotic city!!" stuck in he traffic or when the Thermaikos Gulf has "that" smell or being packed like sardines on the bus...

Dress: Sewed by Mrs Despoina

Fabric: "Love City" by Alexander Henry from Fabrics and Trimmings, Etsy

Coat: FORNARINA

Earrings: from SHOPHULLABALOO, Etsy

Ring: from Lilians Treasure, Etsy

( I've added the colors. The ring was originally brass)

Shoes: Miss L Fire

(...and Nicole, thanks for the heart-shape-clutch!!!)

Photos by PyThEuS

And I? I just want to believe it. Because I always try to see it through the eyes of the new student, the tourist, the nightbird and the freshly-in-love.

Because this city's sunshines have a dazzling light and the cloudy misty days have an unexplicably poetic sadness. As for the sunsets and the sunrises, words are so poor to describe them. Just like Love...

But above all, it's the sea... A great poet of this city had said it: nothing is more similar to love than the sea.

"Sea is like Love:
You fall in, not knowing whether you'll ever come out [ ]
Alas, we won't give up on swimming
Just because a few have been drowned.
Alas, if we betrayed the sea
Because it has ways to swallow us.
Sea is like Love.
A thousand relish it- one pays for it."
                                             
DINOS CHRISTIANOPOULOS (1962)

And there's also the view of Agnes who has lived in several cities of central Europe. When she comes to town and we walk the streets together, she always says "At last! I came again to the only city that makes me feel like a woman, because men here stare like men!"

A photo of the '60s I came across, affirms it's always been like that!!!

At Michael's Gate in Bratislava, Slovakia