The Boy Who Learned Greek From Eurovision: On Boycotts, Belonging, and Borrowed Anthems

Karim is seventeen years old and he knows the Greek lyrics to every Eurovision entry from 2018 onward.

He sings them while he washes dishes in his uncle's restaurant in Thessaloniki, a kitchen that smells of oregano and frying onions and something distantly like Aleppo. When I visited last week, he was halfway through a Cypriot ballad from a few years back, getting the vowels almost right, missing the consonants the way all of us miss the consonants of languages we learned too late.

He arrived in Greece at thirteen. He learned Greek, he tells me, from three sources: school, his uncle's customers, and Eurovision.

"The school taught me grammar," he says. "The customers taught me arguments. Eurovision taught me how to feel things in Greek."

I have been thinking about Karim all week, because Al Jazeera is reporting that five nations are boycotting this year's Eurovision Song Contest over Israel's conduct in Gaza. I have been thinking about him because the contest he learned a continent through is now, for many people, a stage where that continent's contradictions are being argued out in sequins and key changes.

And I have been thinking about him because the question underneath the boycott is, in a strange way, the same question underneath migration policy: what does it mean to belong to Europe, and who gets to decide?

Let me back up.

I met Karim's family in 2022, on assignment near the Evros border, where I had gone to write about pushbacks. His uncle Hossam was running a small aid kitchen out of a church basement, feeding people he did not know in a language he was still learning. He had been a math teacher in Syria. In Greece, he was a man with a ladle.

Hossam was the one who first told me about Eurovision in their household. He said it with a kind of embarrassed laugh, the way people confess to watching reality television. Every May, the family gathered around a laptop and watched the semi-finals. They voted, theoretically, though Hossam was never sure if their votes counted, given the complicated rules about which countries' viewers could support which entries.

"It is the only night," he told me then, "when my nephew feels European without anyone asking him to prove it."

I wrote that line down. I have carried it for four years.

Because here is the thing about Eurovision that the policy columns rarely capture: it is one of the very few European institutions that a refugee child can love without permission. You do not need papers to watch it. You do not need a passport to have an opinion about the Norwegian entry. You do not need to pass an integration exam to argue, at three in the morning, that the Portuguese ballad was robbed.

It is, for all its absurdity, a continent's living room. And living rooms are where belonging is rehearsed before it is official.

Which is why the boycott matters, and why it hurts in a particular way for people like Karim.

I want to be careful here. I am not arguing against the boycott. Al Jazeera's reporting on the genocide in Gaza is unambiguous, and the moral logic of artists and nations refusing to share a stage with a state accused of mass atrocity is a logic I understand. Cultural boycotts have a long, serious history. South Africa is the obvious example, but not the only one.

What I am arguing is something smaller and more uncomfortable. The boycott is a message sent by states and broadcasters to other states and broadcasters. The people who receive it most acutely, I suspect, are not the ones it is aimed at.

They are people like Karim, who learned a continent through its songs, and who are now watching that continent argue, in public, about which of its members deserve to sing.

"Every May was the only night my nephew felt European without anyone asking him to prove it."

I asked Karim what he thought about the boycott. He shrugged in that specifically teenage way, the shrug that contains an entire essay.

"I understand why," he said. "My friends in Idlib, they ask me how I can watch a show with Israel in it. And my friends here, the Greek ones, half of them say boycott and half of them say it is just music. I do not know. I just know I learned the word 'agapi' from a song."

Agapi. Love.

He said it the way he might say the name of a street he used to live on.

This is the texture migration policy never captures. The EU spends — according to publicly available data and recent reports — significant sums on integration programs: language classes, civic orientation, vocational training. These are necessary. I have written in their defense before. But integration, real integration, the kind that makes a seventeen-year-old sing in his second language while doing the dishes, almost never happens in the classrooms we fund. It happens in the cultural spaces we do not think of as policy at all.

Football stadiums. Music contests. Television dramas dubbed badly into four languages. Reality cooking shows. The small, ridiculous, shared rituals that make a continent feel like a place rather than a treaty.

When those rituals fracture — and Eurovision is fracturing, whatever happens this year — something happens to the people who were just beginning to feel at home inside them. They do not lose their legal status. They lose something subtler: the sense that the room they had quietly walked into is a room that still exists.

I think about this in the context of the wider news cycle this week. The headlines tell me Trump is in Beijing, the first sitting US president to visit in nine years. They tell me Iran is hardening its conditions for talks, that the Strait of Hormuz is again a phrase in diplomats' mouths. They tell me Russia's foreign minister is accusing the West of distracting from Palestine. They tell me a Qatari professor has invented an eye scan that detects disease before symptoms appear.

And they tell me five nations will not be sending songs to a competition.

In the hierarchy of geopolitics, the last item is the smallest. In the hierarchy of how ordinary people experience the world, I am not sure it is.

The euro is trading at 1.17 against the dollar today. Markets are doing what markets do. None of this will appear in the story of Karim's adolescence. What will appear, I think, is a year when the songs got quieter, when the arguments at the dinner table got sharper, when his uncle Hossam stopped putting the laptop on the kitchen counter in May.

Integration is not built from above. It is assembled, piece by piece, from the soft materials of shared culture. When we tear those materials — for reasons that may be entirely justified — we should at least be honest about what we are tearing, and who feels the rip first.

Karim is applying to university next year. He wants to study sound engineering. He wants, he tells me with a seriousness that briefly makes him look forty, to one day work on a Eurovision broadcast.

I did not know what to say to that. I still don't.

So I will end where I began, in a kitchen in Thessaloniki, with a boy singing a Cypriot ballad over a sink full of plates. What continent is he singing himself into? And will it still be there to receive him when he is done?