Down painful memory lane

Spectators travel on a bus around the northern port city of Thessaloniki during a performance of “Luna,” a new interactive play directed by Damianos Konstantinidis that is based on Henriette-Rika Benveniste’s award-winning book of the same title. The main character, a Thessaloniki Jew named Luna (Eleni Makisoglu), struggles to reconcile with the changes in her native city following her return from the Nazi death camps. “The city is both the stage and protagonist,” the director told Kathimerini, describing the theatrical experience as a quest for real-life facts amid the city’s layers of history. Ninety-seven percent of the city’s Jewish population perished in the Holocaust.