Thessaloniki municipal authorities on Tuesday offered an olive branch to two street musicians who took to social media to complain after being fined for busking with amplifiers beside the northern port city’s iconic White Tower.
Giorgos Dimarellos, the deputy mayor in charge of the municipal police that levied the €300 fine, said that he would invite the two to his office “to discuss what had happened.”
“We are in favor of warnings instead of fines,” Dimarellos said in a social media post. “Our priority is not to punish people.”
The two musicians were fined on Sunday for using amplifiers and microphones in their act on the seafront near the White Tower, a popular spot for strollers and cyclists.
They complained Monday that municipal police asked them to switch off their amplifiers “so that the people around us would not hear what they were saying to us,” and claimed they didn’t know what they were doing was illegal.
Dimarellos stressed that the ban on amplifiers was decided months ago, due to “the large number of microphones along the seafront and the slew of complaints from members of the public.”
“It has to be made clear that nobody is preventing music from being played, but it is forbidden to use a mike,” he added.
Dimarellos said municipal officials would reach out to street musicians to register on a database and discuss a mutually acceptable framework on how such performances should be regulated.
