Tassos

Tassos is a street musician in Thessaloniki who plays a hand-cranked laterna and inherits the instrument from his friend Panagiotis. Yet inheriting the machine does not mean inheriting its former owner’s vocation: Tassos plays without Panagiotis’s visible joy and argues that street vendors should not have to pay tax. Through the narrator’s encounter with him, the laterna becomes both a bearer of personal memory and the point of departure for a sharp dispute about individual obligation and social need.

Identity and Encounter

The narrator meets Tassos in a square in the Ladadika district, after following music that seemed at once like a piano, strings, and the occasional chime of a triangle. The sound evokes an era the narrator had never lived through, giving the encounter a note of nostalgia before Tassos has told his story. The musician is around seventy, smartly dressed, and playing a decorated wooden box on wheels. After the narrator puts five euros into his upturned tambourine, Tassos answers questions about the instrument and explains that it had belonged to Panagiotis before it came to him.

The laterna’s music depends on an old mechanical process: turning a handle rotates a wooden cylinder studded with steel pegs, which lift spring-loaded hammers and set strings sounding. The instrument had once been popular before the gramophone, but by the time the narrator encounters Tassos it is a comparatively rare sight. On its side is a black-and-white photograph framed with carnations, which Tassos identifies as sentimental and important to its original owner. The picture makes visible what the machine alone cannot convey: its value is not only musical, but bound up with the life and memory of the person who played it before him.

Panagiotis and the Inherited Instrument

Tassos presents Panagiotis as the happiest man he had ever known. His account begins in 2010, when Greece’s finances were already in disorder. Tassos was then going around tavernas selling packets of tissues and cigarette lighters, but people had so little cash that they could no longer spare money even for those small purchases. Panagiotis was the exception: people still put coins into their pockets for the music of his laterna. In this recollection, the instrument is not simply a possession or a means of earning; it is what could draw a contribution from people even when money was scarce.

Panagiotis’s death eventually makes Tassos the laterna’s heir. A few years after Panagiotis died, his landlady found a note in his room directing that the instrument go to his friend Tassos. She had to work out which of the street sellers was meant, but found the right man. The transfer thus depended on a written instruction and on the landlady’s search; it was not presented as an automatic inheritance. Tassos’s place in the story begins with Panagiotis’s trust, and with the practical act of identifying the friend to whom he had entrusted his instrument.

Inheritance Without the Same Vocation

For Tassos, playing the laterna is a step up from selling paper handkerchiefs, but the work does not become a calling. The narrator distinguishes his connection to the instrument from Panagiotis’s: Tassos lacks the visceral attachment and does not play with a smile. He cannot transport listeners back to a lost time in the way Panagiotis apparently could. The contrast is not that the inherited laterna has ceased to make music; rather, its emotional force is not reproduced simply by passing the machine from one player to another.

That gap between possession and vocation gives the inheritance a quiet poignancy. The laterna carries Panagiotis’s memory, but Tassos does not become a substitute for him. Tassos can continue to play in the street and can explain the instrument’s history, yet the narrator registers the difference between keeping an old practice alive and making it one’s own. The instrument therefore links the two men while also marking what cannot be transferred with it.

Tax, Public Responsibility, and Conflict

The music is interrupted when a Ferrari roars past with its windows open, drowning out the sounds around it. Tassos raises his voice to lament the old days. He clarifies that he means more than the convenience of being able to hear music anywhere and at any time: he is also objecting to the government’s insistence that street vendors pay their dues. The interruption turns the earlier nostalgia into a present-day political complaint, and the narrator and Tassos end up in a heated discussion about taxation.

Tassos says he should not have to pay even a cent of his earnings, however small the percentage. In his view, politicians are corrupt and money paid to the government will end up in someone’s pocket. He does not connect his own income to public provision—to schools, hospitals, roads, or street cleaning—and does not regard himself as part of the system that pays for them. The narrator recognizes that this distrust has reasons behind it, pointing to the theft, waste, and squandering of public money that have deepened the country’s debt. But understanding the source of Tassos’s suspicion does not settle the disagreement: when the narrator asks how things can improve, Tassos has no answer, and his shrug leaves the narrator with the impression that he cares for himself rather than society.

Narrative Role and Significance

The encounter reaches an impasse quickly. Nearby, overflowing bins stand beside a man lying on the ground, whom the narrator cannot tell to be asleep or dead. The narrator connects this image to Tassos’s sense of being an individual without responsibility and to the state’s apparent inability to offer the man any help. By the end, the narrator resents having given Tassos even a euro. That reaction belongs to the narrator’s judgment of the encounter; it also shows how a small act of payment has acquired a larger meaning after the argument.

Tassos’s role in the episode is therefore deliberately divided. He is a keeper of a fragile musical tradition, entrusted with a distinctive instrument by a friend, but he is also an outspoken defender of keeping his own earnings outside the public system. The contrast between the laterna’s power to gather coins and his refusal to contribute taxes makes the instrument’s social function newly charged: music draws people together, while his account of civic life insists on separation. The narrator does not resolve the contradiction. Instead, the music, the Ferrari, the argument, and the man beside the bins leave the question of shared responsibility open—and make Tassos’s inherited instrument part of a wider story about memory, poverty, and disconnection.