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The Boy Who Learned Greek From Eurovision: On Boycotts, Belonging, and Borrowed Anthems
Five countries are boycotting a song contest. In a Thessaloniki kitchen, a Syrian teenager wonders which Europe he was taught to love.
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EP
Elias Papadopoulos
· 6 min read
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.