Yiannis Boutaris, Vintner, Animal Defender and Greek Mayor, Dies at 82

Europe|Yiannis Boutaris, Vintner, Animal Defender and Greek Mayor, Dies at 82

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.”