When a fire broke out on June 15, near Thessaloniki’s city hall, it could have been just another local misfortune quietly absorbed and forgotten. The blaze tore through a small auto repair shop. Firefighters contained it before it spread to neighboring homes and businesses, but the garage was destroyed and one of its owners suffered minor injuries.
Most people, in such moments, offer their sympathy and move on. The people who run the Apollon, an open-air summer cinema one block over, did not stop at that. “Without a second thought, we visited one of the two owners the next morning and proposed organizing an emergency solidarity screening to support them financially,” the cinema’s owner, Kostas Bakirtzis, told Ta Nea. “He was moved right away.”
By the following day, the cinema had posted an announcement. The garage, it noted, sat just one street over from the Apollon itself. All proceeds from a Thursday screening of “Persepolis,” the animated film, would go directly to the mechanic who lost his business in the blaze. A donation box would sit in the cinema’s courtyard for anyone who wanted to support the impacted business further. “In hard times, solidarity is a neighborhood’s greatest strength,” the announcement read. “Cinema is not just about watching a film. It is a collective experience that continues outside the theater.”
That was enough. The post spread across social media within hours, shared by thousands, including people with no connection to the neighborhood or the cinema, or even the city of Thessaloniki; people who simply wanted to praise one small business helping another.
Three nearby businesses joined in. The wine shop Kava Tzaridi, the cafe Juicy Rita, and the eatery “Fate Skaste” offered drinks and the traditional souvlaki wrap, with all profits going toward their neighbor who needed help. What began as a screening turned into something closer to an act of shared humanity.
On the night of the screening the public’s response went far beyond anything the organizers had expected. People from all across the country bought tickets, despite being unable to attend, just to show their support. Those who could showed up and filled the open-air cinema well past capacity, spilling onto the stairs and into the street outside. More than a thousand people stopped by just to drop a small sum in the donation box. Within a few hours, roughly 8,000 euros had been collected and handed to the family who lost the garage, to help them rebuild.
The cinema posted again afterward. “We don’t know if there are sufficient words to describe what we experienced yesterday,” it said. “It was proof that when one person falls, there are hundreds that will help to lift them up. We have one another. And that is far bigger than anything we can fit on a screen.
This was not the first time a neighborhood cinema had stepped in for someone in need, and it is part of why independent local cinemas draw such fierce public support when they face eviction or closure. The Apollon knows that firsthand. Bakirtzis recalled that a few months earlier, when plans emerged to redevelop the cinema’s plot by handing the land to a developer in exchange for a share of the new building, the historic open-air cinema faced closure. A nationwide mobilization of thousands of people applied enough pressure that the decision was reversed. The Apollon is still running.
“Maybe that is the real meaning of a neighborhood and a community,” Bakirtzis said. “To remind us that solidarity is not just a lovely word, but a living force that can keep people, places and memories standing.”
Source: TA NEA
