Yiannis Boutaris, a plain-talking winemaker, environmentalist and politician who created an organization to protect wild bears and wolves before serving two terms as the progressive, iconoclastic mayor of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, died on Saturday. He was 82.
His death, at a hospital in Thessaloniki, was announced on Saturday by Kir-Yiannis, the winemaking company he founded in 1997. No cause was given.
The chain-smoking, tattooed, earring-wearing Mr. Boutaris cut an unconventional figure in the staid political scene of Thessaloniki, a northeast port city of more than 800,000 people. A recovering alcoholic with a penchant for expletives, he never thought of himself as a career politician and ran for mayor as an independent, breaking a 20-year conservative hold on local government.
During his tenure, from 2011 to 2019, he made waves by trying to reconcile his city’s sometimes painful history with its former Turkish and Jewish communities, and by extending a hand to Greece’s neighbors. Referring to his country’s historic enmity with Turkey, he often said that “Greeks and Turks are siblings, while the Europeans are our partners.”
In 2017, when Greece and the bordering Republic of Macedonia (now the Republic of North Macedonia) were battling over whether that former Yugoslav republic had the right to use a name that also belonged to a Greek region, he invited its prime minister, Zoran Zaev, to spend New Year’s at Thessaloniki.
“I am not expressing national diplomacy or strategy,” he said in an interview with the British newspaper The Observer. “But I do think this bullshit has to end.”
Mr. Boutaris was one of Greece’s most celebrated winemakers, from a prominent winemaking family, before he veered into politics, but his interests ranged broadly.
After witnessing a chained dancing bear on the street in Thessaloniki, he was inspired in 1992 to create Arcturosa, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting bears, wolves and other wild fauna and their natural habitats. The endeavor led Time magazine to recognize him as a Green Team Hero in 2003.
Mr. Boutaris was candid about his 10-year addiction to alcohol and the deleterious effect it had on his life and his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Athena. His drinking led to their divorce in 1981, but they reconciled after he became sober in the early 1990s and remained together until her death in 2007.
He is survived by his partner, Ida Angel; their daughter, Fani; his sons, Stelios and Michalis; and six grandchildren.
After going through a rehabilitation program, Mr. Boutaris devoted himself to helping fellow alcoholics by urging them to contact him, creating a rehabilitation program on the island of Skiathos, off Greece’s central coast, and finding jobs for them in his wine company.
Yiannis Boutaris was born on June 13, 1942, to a wealthy family in Thessaloniki. His father, Stelios Boutaris, was a winemaker, as was his paternal grandfather. His mother, Fani Missiou, was a homemaker whose family was involved in the tobacco trade.
He earned a degree in chemistry at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1968 and a diploma in oenology from the Wine Institute in Athens in 1967. He soon joined Boutari, the winemaking company his grandfather founded in 1879, and ran it with his brother, Konstantinos.
In 1996, Mr. Boutaris left the company to start his own winemaking business, Kir-Yiannis. That company, now run by his sons, is one of the most profitable wineries in Greece.
Mr. Boutaris always had an interest in politics but was never a stalwart of any particular political party. In 2002, he was elected to Thessaloniki’s municipal council as a member of the Communist Party. In 2004, he was listed on the ballot as belonging to the Panhellenic Socialist Movement. In 2009, he was a founding member of Drassi, an economically neoliberal party.
He first ran for mayor, in 2006, as an independent, and lost. But running again four years later, he won by a narrow margin. When he ran for re-election in 2014, again as an independent, he won with more than 58 percent of the vote. In 2019, he voted for New Democracy, the conservative governing party.
“Regardless of what they vote for, I think there exist two kinds of people,” Mr. Boutaris wrote in his autobiography, “60 Years of Harvest” (2020). “The conservatives, whom you will find not only in rightist parties but in all of them without exception, and the progressives, who can also be found on all sides.”
On taking office as mayor, he hired an auditor, a novel move in Thessaloniki, whose previous mayor was found guilty two years later of having embezzled millions in public money. “Now we know exactly how poor we are,” Mr. Boutaris told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in 2012.
He went on to visit Istanbul, the start of a campaign to repair the historically testy relations between Greece and Turkey and to bring Turkish visitors back to Thessaloniki. He promoted the city as the birthplace of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey.
In a controversial interview, he said he didn’t care if Atatürk had “killed Greeks.”
“What I know is that the Turks love Kemal Atatürk,” he said, “and I said, in the same way that we go to Istanbul and visit our holy land, the land of our fathers, the Turks who left from Thessaloniki during the exchange of populations, they want to come to Thessaloniki.”
The remarks drew the ire of hard-line conservatives and ultranationalists, a group of whom physically attacked him in 2018. Mr. Boutaris was briefly hospitalized with head, back and leg injuries.
He also tried to heal the city’s relationship with Jews. Before World War II, the city boasted the largest Jewish community in Greece. Of the 46,091 Jews deported to concentration camps from Thessaloniki, only 1,950 returned.
Mr. Boutaris frequently criticized the destruction of the city’s old Jewish cemetery and fought for a central square to be transformed into a memorial park for Thessaloniki Jews who were killed in the Holocaust — plans that were scrapped by his successor. He was also instrumental in the creation of the Holocaust Museum of Thessaloniki.
At the height of Greek-German tensions over the Greek financial crisis in 2012, Mr. Boutaris visited Berlin, saying he needed to learn from the Germans how to keep Thessaloniki clean, at a time when its waste disposal system wasn’t functioning. He adopted Berlin’s approach to recycling, leading to a surge in recycling in his city.
Mr. Boutaris was a vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ rights; in 2014, he appeared semi-naked in a photograph in a Greek magazine heralding World Aids Awareness Day. He was instrumental in organizing the annual Thessaloniki Pride Parade. “It has to do with my worldview,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I cannot just tolerate any type of diversity, I have to also accept it.”
Time and again, Mr. Boutaris was pilloried by conservatives and ultranationalists for his views, but he remained undaunted.
In life, he said, there is no point in worrying about the paths that others follow. “No matter what you do in this world, decide that it should give you pleasure,” he said in a TEDx talk in 2013. “Don’t think about what will happen in the future. While you’re here, at least make sure to have a good time.”
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