The best hotel in all my travels to African capitals was the Acropole. It has made an indelible impression on thousands of guests whose lives it has enriched in a way that is hard to imagine with such a small and simple hotel. The Acropole was one of Khartoum’s oldest hotels, owned by three Sudanese-born Greeks: Thanassis, George and Mike, who inherited it from their father Pagoulatos in 1967. This icon of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum has now been looted since fighting broke out between two generals and the family fled to Greece. With that, a piece of history has come to an end.
The Acropole was more an inn than a hotel, looking like a private house from the outside. Khartoum owes its brownish yellow appearance to the bricks made from the sediment of the Nile; the Acropole also had that mustard-colored face. The rooms and hallways were decorated in an airy, almost ornate Art Deco style, with blue-painted Mediterranean-style shutters and tiled balconies. In the cool corridors, yellowed photographs brought the past to life: pyramids of Nubian civilization before the arrival of Islam and a white rhinoceros whose species has been wiped out; a man in turban and saber high on a camel; dancing, jeweled women in colorful clothes; and also a large Christ in the dining room, where each day began with the pulp of a grapefruit.
Hibiscus juice
Acropole was the place to stay and socialize for scientists, archaeologists, aid workers, journalists and writers of all colors and creeds. The three brothers, of whom George died last year, welcomed you with a glass of hibiscus juice, helped you with your papers and whatever you needed in the hopelessly bureaucratized Sudan. In the 1980s, the pop stars of ‘We are the world’ and ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ also camped there, who descended there with their suitcases full of money for the drought and war victims in the Horn of Africa.
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The three brothers and their wives then placed mattresses on the flat roof for the excess of guests, handed out ice creams and put a toffee on your pillow. They created a sense of family, a feeling that later, much to George’s chagrin, was compromised by technologies such as the Internet, which moved guests from lounging about in the lobby to locked themselves in their rooms. The brothers would never tell me how they kept the secret service at bay, but it was clear that in successive regimes they built up good contacts to protect their clients. A journalist felt safe in the Acropole.
Nightclubs
The hotel was located in the old center of the capital, on Zubeir Pasha Street, named after the notorious black slave merchant who, around 1874, had made South Sudan and Darfur his hunting grounds. In addition to the Presidential Palace, the narrow streets of the Old Town used to house many nightclubs with live music and Sudan’s oldest bookstore. Father Pagoulatos founded the hotel in 1952, after leaving his poverty-stricken homeland of Greece in the last years of World War II. He started a nightclub there, but had to close it because the governor couldn’t sleep. The brothers endured all the recent turbulent times in Sudan, their hotel barely escaped nationalization and with the rise of the Islamic fundamentalists in the 1980s, their adjoining liquor store had to close because all alcoholic beverages were given up to the Nile. In 1988, a Palestinian terror group detonated a bomb in the dining room, killing seven people and causing Thanassis to lose part of his hearing. But despite all these misfortunes, the brothers continued to welcome us to the Acropole, which had changed little since their father’s time.
The hotel can no longer be burned out of the image of Khartoum. Every correspondent these days already imagined how he would soon seek refuge there, when the country opens again. So last week I stared in disbelief at a relative’s message on my computer screen: “Acropole has been destroyed and looted.” And a few days later, the video followed showing Thanassis (80) arriving in Athens. With a sob and a tear he expressed that painful, that tormenting double feeling that everyone experiences these days who managed to escape from Sudan. “It’s not easy,” he said. “I am sorry… for the Sudanese, because the people are really suffering.”