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Saloniki. Miasto duchów. Chrześcijanie, muzułmanie i żydzi w latach 1430-1950
W Salonikach przez wiele stuleci – i najczęściej pokojowo – obok siebie żyli przedstawiciele różnych narodów, religii, języków i kultur: egipscy kupcy, hiszpańscy Żydzi, prawosławni Grecy, suficcy derwisze, Albańczycy… Jak to się stało, że dziś ślady wieloetnicznej przeszłości tej niegdyś tętniącej życiem metropolii łatwiej znaleźć w lokalnych archiwach i bibliotekach niż na ulicach miasta? Co sprawiło, że Saloniki zostały pozbawione (a może wyrzekły się) swojego wielokulturowego dziedzictwa?
Mark Mazower, znakomity brytyjski historyk, opisuje ponad pięćset lat burzliwej historii tego portowego miasta. Imponuje dbałością o szczegóły i empatią, która pozwala mu zrozumieć punkt widzenia mieszkańców Salonik i po raz kolejny udowodnić, że nie ma lepszego klucza do zrozumienia współczesności od poznania przeszłości.
Mark Mazower, znakomity brytyjski historyk, opisuje ponad pięćset lat burzliwej historii tego portowego miasta. Imponuje dbałością o szczegóły i empatią, która pozwala mu zrozumieć punkt widzenia mieszkańców Salonik i po raz kolejny udowodnić, że nie ma lepszego klucza do zrozumienia współczesności od poznania przeszłości.
600 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
Mark Mazower
22 books360 followersMark Mazower is a historian and writer, specializing in modern Greece, twentieth-century Europe, and international history. His books include Salonica City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize; Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, winner of the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History; and Governing the World: The History of an Idea. He is currently the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University, and his articles and reviews on history and current affairs appear regularly in the Financial Times, the Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and New Republic.
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May 31, 2023
The historical Hellenistic Age defines as the period from the death of the Greco-Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the conquest of Egypt by Rome (30 BC). But the Hellenistic religions' influence extended to Constantine's time, the first Christian Roman emperor (d. AD 337); these religions have confined to those active within the Mediterranean world. Alexander and his successors' empire created a fantastic world community that, whether in Macedonian, Greco-Roman, or its later Christian form, established a cultural unity destined to be broken only 1,000 years later with the Muslim advent of imperialism (beginning in the 7th century AD). This empire was so vast as indeed to stagger the imagination. Extending from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Indus River, it took in an area of some 1.5 million square miles (3.9 million square kilometers. Most of Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa, Persia, and the borderlands of India) had a total population of more than 54 million.
Hellenistic religions study the dynamics of religious persistence and change in this vast and culturally varied area. Every faith in this period occurred in its homeland and diasporic centers—foreign cities where its adherents lived as minority groups. For example, they worshipped Isis (Egypt), Baal (Syria), the Great Mother (Phrygia), Yahweh (Palestine), and Mithra (Kurdistan) in their native lands as well in Rome and other cosmopolitan centers. With few exceptions, these religions were initially tied to a specific geographic area, and people had traditions extending back centuries before the Hellenistic period. In their homeland, it inextricably tied them to local loyalties and ambitions. Each persisted in its native land with little perceptible change save for becoming linked to nationalistic or messianic movements. (Centring on a deliverer figure) seeking to overthrow Greco-Roman political and cultural domination. Indeed, many of these native religions underwent a conscious archaism during this period, attempting to recover earlier forms and practices. Old texts in native languages (especially relevant themes such as kingship) recopied, restored national temples, and revived ancient mythic traditions. From Palestine to Persia, one may trace the rise of Wisdom literature (the teachings of a sage concerning the deity's hidden purposes) and apocalyptic traditions. (Referring to a belief in the dramatic intervention of a god in human and natural events) represent these central concerns—i.e., national destiny, the importance of traditional lore, the saving power of kingship, and the revival of mythic images. Likewise, these native traditions underwent Hellenization (modifications based on Greek cultural ideas) but frequently differed from their diasporic counterparts.
These native religions also had diasporic centers that exhibited marked change during the Hellenistic period. There was a noticeable lessening of concern on the part of the dispersed religious group members for the destiny and fortunes of the native land and a relative severing of the traditional ties between religion and the land. Specific cult centers remained sites of pilgrimage or objects of sentimental attachment. Still, it weakened the old beliefs in national deities and the deity's inextricable relationship to certain sacred places. Rather than a god who dwelt in his temple, the diasporic traditions evolved complicated techniques for achieving visions, epiphanies (manifestations of a god), or sacred journeys to a transcendent god. This case changed from concern for a religion of national prosperity to individual salvation, from focusing on a particular ethnic group to respecting every human. The prophet or savior replaced the priest and king as the chief religious figure. There were two circles in the diasporic centers, as is generally characteristic of immigrant groups. The first (or inner circle) was composed of devout, full-time adherents of the cult. The deity retained a separate and decisive identity (e.g., Yahweh, Zeus, Serapis, and Isis). Its membership grew from the ethnic group for whom the Creator was indigenous, and the group continued to speak the native language.
The second (or outer circle) was composed of second and third-generation immigrants or converted from groups the religion was not native. These individuals tended to speak Greek, which began the lengthy reinterpretation of the archaic religion. Ancient sacred books were translated or paraphrased into Greek—e.g., the 4th–3rd-century-BC Babylonian priest Berosus' version of Babylonian materials, the 4th–3rd-century-BC Egyptian priest Manetho's Egyptian accounts, the Jewish Septuagint (Greek version of the Old Testament), or the 1st-century-AD Jewish historian Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, and the ethnic histories of the 1st-century-BC Greek writer Alexander Polyhistor. In each case, the material explains in light of common Hellenistic ideals and accords with the diasporic community's unique traditions and needs. The inner and outer circles fostered esotericism (secrets to be known only by initiates)—the former by its use of native language and its oral recollection of traditions from the homeland; the latter by its use of allegory and other similar methods to reinterpret the sacred texts radically. The difference between these groups was responsible for many shifts in the character of the religion. Most notable was the change from elements characteristic of native faith in its definition of religion. (e.g., local tradition and custom, informal knowledge orally transmitted, and birth) to formulate dogma, creeds, law codes, rules, conversion, and admission characteristics of diasporic religion. It was a shift from "birthright" to "convinced" faith.
The history of Hellenistic religions is rarely the history of genuinely new faiths. Instead, they best understood it as studying archaic Mediterranean beliefs in their Hellenistic phase within their native and diasporic settings. It is usually by concentrating on the diaspora that the Hellenistic character of a cult has described.
Learn more: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hell...
Hellenistic religions study the dynamics of religious persistence and change in this vast and culturally varied area. Every faith in this period occurred in its homeland and diasporic centers—foreign cities where its adherents lived as minority groups. For example, they worshipped Isis (Egypt), Baal (Syria), the Great Mother (Phrygia), Yahweh (Palestine), and Mithra (Kurdistan) in their native lands as well in Rome and other cosmopolitan centers. With few exceptions, these religions were initially tied to a specific geographic area, and people had traditions extending back centuries before the Hellenistic period. In their homeland, it inextricably tied them to local loyalties and ambitions. Each persisted in its native land with little perceptible change save for becoming linked to nationalistic or messianic movements. (Centring on a deliverer figure) seeking to overthrow Greco-Roman political and cultural domination. Indeed, many of these native religions underwent a conscious archaism during this period, attempting to recover earlier forms and practices. Old texts in native languages (especially relevant themes such as kingship) recopied, restored national temples, and revived ancient mythic traditions. From Palestine to Persia, one may trace the rise of Wisdom literature (the teachings of a sage concerning the deity's hidden purposes) and apocalyptic traditions. (Referring to a belief in the dramatic intervention of a god in human and natural events) represent these central concerns—i.e., national destiny, the importance of traditional lore, the saving power of kingship, and the revival of mythic images. Likewise, these native traditions underwent Hellenization (modifications based on Greek cultural ideas) but frequently differed from their diasporic counterparts.
These native religions also had diasporic centers that exhibited marked change during the Hellenistic period. There was a noticeable lessening of concern on the part of the dispersed religious group members for the destiny and fortunes of the native land and a relative severing of the traditional ties between religion and the land. Specific cult centers remained sites of pilgrimage or objects of sentimental attachment. Still, it weakened the old beliefs in national deities and the deity's inextricable relationship to certain sacred places. Rather than a god who dwelt in his temple, the diasporic traditions evolved complicated techniques for achieving visions, epiphanies (manifestations of a god), or sacred journeys to a transcendent god. This case changed from concern for a religion of national prosperity to individual salvation, from focusing on a particular ethnic group to respecting every human. The prophet or savior replaced the priest and king as the chief religious figure. There were two circles in the diasporic centers, as is generally characteristic of immigrant groups. The first (or inner circle) was composed of devout, full-time adherents of the cult. The deity retained a separate and decisive identity (e.g., Yahweh, Zeus, Serapis, and Isis). Its membership grew from the ethnic group for whom the Creator was indigenous, and the group continued to speak the native language.
The second (or outer circle) was composed of second and third-generation immigrants or converted from groups the religion was not native. These individuals tended to speak Greek, which began the lengthy reinterpretation of the archaic religion. Ancient sacred books were translated or paraphrased into Greek—e.g., the 4th–3rd-century-BC Babylonian priest Berosus' version of Babylonian materials, the 4th–3rd-century-BC Egyptian priest Manetho's Egyptian accounts, the Jewish Septuagint (Greek version of the Old Testament), or the 1st-century-AD Jewish historian Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, and the ethnic histories of the 1st-century-BC Greek writer Alexander Polyhistor. In each case, the material explains in light of common Hellenistic ideals and accords with the diasporic community's unique traditions and needs. The inner and outer circles fostered esotericism (secrets to be known only by initiates)—the former by its use of native language and its oral recollection of traditions from the homeland; the latter by its use of allegory and other similar methods to reinterpret the sacred texts radically. The difference between these groups was responsible for many shifts in the character of the religion. Most notable was the change from elements characteristic of native faith in its definition of religion. (e.g., local tradition and custom, informal knowledge orally transmitted, and birth) to formulate dogma, creeds, law codes, rules, conversion, and admission characteristics of diasporic religion. It was a shift from "birthright" to "convinced" faith.
The history of Hellenistic religions is rarely the history of genuinely new faiths. Instead, they best understood it as studying archaic Mediterranean beliefs in their Hellenistic phase within their native and diasporic settings. It is usually by concentrating on the diaspora that the Hellenistic character of a cult has described.
Learn more: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hell...
July 15, 2009
The history of this city contains so many of the Big Human Themes. Exile, nostalgia. The course of empire. The maintenance of collective memory. The ways in which religions in close contact melt into each other. Nationalism vs. the Cosmopolis. The limits of tolerance, and the fated vulnerability of coastal, syncretic cities (I’m thinking of St. Petersburg and New Orleans, too). And most infuriatingly, the ludicrous imposture of the scoundrels who believe in tribal purity and uncomplicated cultural continuity. Mazower calls Salonica a “city of ghosts” because the postwar, self-consciously Greek city of high rises sits on the site of other Salonicas, the Ottoman and Jewish Salonicas that aren’t even touristically visible in attenuated but picturesquely restored quarters—these other Salonicas have vanished, either by natural disaster (a fire in 1917 destroyed 75% of the old Jewish neighborhoods in the city center) or by the deliberate dynamiting of mosques and the bulldozing—done with the Nazi’s approval but not at their insistence—of the one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe (it was 35 times larger than that of Prague’s).
Salonica was also nicknamed “City of Refugees,” which could just as easily have been Mazower’s subtitle. Not only was the city a refuge, over many centuries, for millions of the displaced, huge portions of its citizens were driven away, forced to become refugees. The first were the thousands of Byzantine Christians the Ottomans sold into slavery after the 1430 conquest. The city lay barren and depopulated until 1492, when Sephardic Jews expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in their own homogenizing nation-building project settled in the city. The Ottomans were concerned with taxation and practiced a hands-off kind of governance, the Christians were still a small minority, so Salonica thus became a predominantly Jewish city, and a vibrant center of their learning and commerce. Politically Ottoman, ethnographically Jewish, geographically Bulgarian is how one 19th century observer described it.
With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire the city’s Muslim population became the refugees. The Greek state, which had taken Salonica in the first Balkan War of 1912, and the now-Turkey, agreed in 1923 to exchange populations: the Greeks would send all the Muslims to Turkey, and Turkey would “repatriate” their Christians. Here is religious-tinged nationalism at its most farcical. The “Greeks” expelled from Turkey thought of themselves as “Eastern Christians”—they had no sense of themselves as Greeks, and didn’t usually speak Greek; they spoke Turkish, as one would expect of communities that had existed for centuries in Anatolia, Thrace, and around the Black Sea. The Muslims expelled from Salonica were in a similar position: they’d been rooted in the city and in the Macedonian and Bulgarian hinterlands for centuries, thought of themselves as Ottoman subjects, and did not understand—and when they did, scarcely approved of—the secularist Kemalist nation state of “Turkey.”
The refugees from Turkey now tipped the balance of power in the city, which hadn’t rebuilt after the 1917 fire and now had trouble housing and employing all the newcomers. This scarcity of resources affected the city’s Jews as well: after the Nazis deported 45,000 to Auschwitz, the new “Greeks” wasted no time expropriating Jewish property and destroying the Jewish cemetery, over which a new university was built (its administrators to this day refuse to erect some kind of acknowledgement). The few thousand Salonican Jews who survived to return found it impossible to get much back. In time, after a few generations, the refugees from Turkey assimilated to Greek culture (Mazower writes that there is some nationalist embarrasment at being of refugee stock--and with understandable reason, as the refugees were not Greeks), and the city is now what the nation-builders of early 20th century Greece had envisioned: an ethnically and religiously homogenous “Greek” city, with its statue of Alexander the Great (he died before the city was founded), its Ottoman and Jewish pasts relegated to a hiccup between the imagined continuity of the Byzantine Empire and Modern Greece.
This is the spine of the book but there is much more, of course. Mazower gives a fascinating account of the functioning of the Ottoman Empire, its policies for the ruling of a polyglot, religiously diverse empire. I really enjoyed the picture of the golden age of Salonican Jewry, and of the community’s durably Hispanic character; the chapter on the Orientalisms that fueled European tourism and amateur archeology was excellent as well. There’s also great stuff on Levantine commerce, and its attendant nuisances, piracy on the seas and brigandage in the hills. Mazower knows his Great Powers diplomacy; he also knows urban planning, the psychology of charismatic false messiahs, Balkan cabaret music, and the intricacies of rabbinic controversy. I learned more about the rise of modern Greece and the two Balkan Wars than I had previously suspected. If Salonica was a crossroads of nations, then it follows that its history will embrace much of the world.
Salonica was also nicknamed “City of Refugees,” which could just as easily have been Mazower’s subtitle. Not only was the city a refuge, over many centuries, for millions of the displaced, huge portions of its citizens were driven away, forced to become refugees. The first were the thousands of Byzantine Christians the Ottomans sold into slavery after the 1430 conquest. The city lay barren and depopulated until 1492, when Sephardic Jews expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in their own homogenizing nation-building project settled in the city. The Ottomans were concerned with taxation and practiced a hands-off kind of governance, the Christians were still a small minority, so Salonica thus became a predominantly Jewish city, and a vibrant center of their learning and commerce. Politically Ottoman, ethnographically Jewish, geographically Bulgarian is how one 19th century observer described it.
With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire the city’s Muslim population became the refugees. The Greek state, which had taken Salonica in the first Balkan War of 1912, and the now-Turkey, agreed in 1923 to exchange populations: the Greeks would send all the Muslims to Turkey, and Turkey would “repatriate” their Christians. Here is religious-tinged nationalism at its most farcical. The “Greeks” expelled from Turkey thought of themselves as “Eastern Christians”—they had no sense of themselves as Greeks, and didn’t usually speak Greek; they spoke Turkish, as one would expect of communities that had existed for centuries in Anatolia, Thrace, and around the Black Sea. The Muslims expelled from Salonica were in a similar position: they’d been rooted in the city and in the Macedonian and Bulgarian hinterlands for centuries, thought of themselves as Ottoman subjects, and did not understand—and when they did, scarcely approved of—the secularist Kemalist nation state of “Turkey.”
The refugees from Turkey now tipped the balance of power in the city, which hadn’t rebuilt after the 1917 fire and now had trouble housing and employing all the newcomers. This scarcity of resources affected the city’s Jews as well: after the Nazis deported 45,000 to Auschwitz, the new “Greeks” wasted no time expropriating Jewish property and destroying the Jewish cemetery, over which a new university was built (its administrators to this day refuse to erect some kind of acknowledgement). The few thousand Salonican Jews who survived to return found it impossible to get much back. In time, after a few generations, the refugees from Turkey assimilated to Greek culture (Mazower writes that there is some nationalist embarrasment at being of refugee stock--and with understandable reason, as the refugees were not Greeks), and the city is now what the nation-builders of early 20th century Greece had envisioned: an ethnically and religiously homogenous “Greek” city, with its statue of Alexander the Great (he died before the city was founded), its Ottoman and Jewish pasts relegated to a hiccup between the imagined continuity of the Byzantine Empire and Modern Greece.
This is the spine of the book but there is much more, of course. Mazower gives a fascinating account of the functioning of the Ottoman Empire, its policies for the ruling of a polyglot, religiously diverse empire. I really enjoyed the picture of the golden age of Salonican Jewry, and of the community’s durably Hispanic character; the chapter on the Orientalisms that fueled European tourism and amateur archeology was excellent as well. There’s also great stuff on Levantine commerce, and its attendant nuisances, piracy on the seas and brigandage in the hills. Mazower knows his Great Powers diplomacy; he also knows urban planning, the psychology of charismatic false messiahs, Balkan cabaret music, and the intricacies of rabbinic controversy. I learned more about the rise of modern Greece and the two Balkan Wars than I had previously suspected. If Salonica was a crossroads of nations, then it follows that its history will embrace much of the world.
December 24, 2017
Συγκλονιστικό βιβλίο. Μεγάλος ιστορικός ο Mazower.
January 30, 2020
Το βιβλίο αυτό που λέτε το είχα αγοράσει πριν δέκα χρόνια από την Θεσσαλονίκη. Όλα καλά μέχρι εδώ. Η αλήθεια είναι ότι το πήρα κατά λάθος, γιατί είχα πιει 2-3 καραφάκια τσίπουρο παραπάνω και νόμιζα ότι ήταν ένα άλλο βιβλίο που αναφερόταν σε μεταφυσικές ιστορίες της πόλης. Αμ δε. Αυτό βέβαια θα είχε αποφευχθεί αν έβλεπα προσεκτικά το εξώφυλλο και διάβαζα ότι ο υπότιτλος αναγράφει «Χριστιανοί, Μουσουλμάνοι και Εβραίοι 1430 – 1950».
(ΗΘΙΚΟ ΔΙΔΑΓΜΑ: ΜΗΝ ΑΓΟΡΑΖΕΤΕ ΒΙΒΛΙΑ ΥΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΕΠΗΡΕΙΑ ΑΛΚΟΟΛ.)
Τα χρόνια πέρασαν, άλλαξα διάφορες πόλεις και το βιβλίο με συντρόφευε πιστά. ΧΩΡΙΣ ΝΑ ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕΙ. Μέχρι που ήρθε ο καιρός του και μπορώ να πω ότι είναι ένα από τα ωραιότερα (και πιο αντικειμενικά) ιστορικά βιβλία που κυκλοφορούν. Ή, πιο σωστά, ένα από τα καλύτερα βιβλία γ ε ν ι κ ά. Αν δεν ξέρετε την ιστορία της Θεσσαλονίκης, θα εκπλαγείτε ευχάριστα και θα κρατήσετε π ο λ λ έ ς σημειώσεις. Αν ξέρετε, θα συνειδητοποιήσετε πόσο είναι αυτά που δεν ξέρατε (ναι, θα κρατήσετε και εσείς με τη σειρά σας π ο λ λ έ ς σημειώσεις. Δεν γλιτώνετε έτσι απλά).
Ο Mazower αφουγκράστηκε τους ήχους της πόλης και τους ψιθύρους των φαντασμάτων διαφορετικών εθνικοτήτων, θρησκευτικών/πολιτικών πεποιθήσεων και τους έδωσε φωνή. Και έδειξε σε τι βαθμό αλλάζει μια πόλη όταν αλλάζουν και οι άνθρωποί της. (Εν τέλει, πόσο και πώς αλλάζει κάθε πόλη εξαρτάται από εμάς.)
(ΤΕΛΙΚΟ ΗΘΙΚΟ ΔΙΔΑΓΜΑ: ΟΙ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΕΠΙΛΟΓΕΣ ΥΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΕΠΗΡΕΙΑ ΑΛΚΟΟΛ ΜΠΟΡΕΙ ΝΑ ΒΓΟΥΝ ΣΕ ΚΑΛΟ.)
(ΗΘΙΚΟ ΔΙΔΑΓΜΑ: ΜΗΝ ΑΓΟΡΑΖΕΤΕ ΒΙΒΛΙΑ ΥΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΕΠΗΡΕΙΑ ΑΛΚΟΟΛ.)
Τα χρόνια πέρασαν, άλλαξα διάφορες πόλεις και το βιβλίο με συντρόφευε πιστά. ΧΩΡΙΣ ΝΑ ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕΙ. Μέχρι που ήρθε ο καιρός του και μπορώ να πω ότι είναι ένα από τα ωραιότερα (και πιο αντικειμενικά) ιστορικά βιβλία που κυκλοφορούν. Ή, πιο σωστά, ένα από τα καλύτερα βιβλία γ ε ν ι κ ά. Αν δεν ξέρετε την ιστορία της Θεσσαλονίκης, θα εκπλαγείτε ευχάριστα και θα κρατήσετε π ο λ λ έ ς σημειώσεις. Αν ξέρετε, θα συνειδητοποιήσετε πόσο είναι αυτά που δεν ξέρατε (ναι, θα κρατήσετε και εσείς με τη σειρά σας π ο λ λ έ ς σημειώσεις. Δεν γλιτώνετε έτσι απλά).
Ο Mazower αφουγκράστηκε τους ήχους της πόλης και τους ψιθύρους των φαντασμάτων διαφορετικών εθνικοτήτων, θρησκευτικών/πολιτικών πεποιθήσεων και τους έδωσε φωνή. Και έδειξε σε τι βαθμό αλλάζει μια πόλη όταν αλλάζουν και οι άνθρωποί της. (Εν τέλει, πόσο και πώς αλλάζει κάθε πόλη εξαρτάται από εμάς.)
(ΤΕΛΙΚΟ ΗΘΙΚΟ ΔΙΔΑΓΜΑ: ΟΙ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΕΠΙΛΟΓΕΣ ΥΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΕΠΗΡΕΙΑ ΑΛΚΟΟΛ ΜΠΟΡΕΙ ΝΑ ΒΓΟΥΝ ΣΕ ΚΑΛΟ.)
August 30, 2018
I've been wanting to write a proper review of Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 since I finished it some weeks ago, but have been so sidetracked by other reading that I'm not going to achieve that goal.
Here are some notes:
Salonika’s central paradox – its 2000 years of continuous urban life has been marked by sharp discontinuities and breaks. The Ottoman city has effectively vanished from sight. So has the Jewish presence in the city, whose life, Mazower says, they had dominated for centuries and Jews were still the largest ethnic group in 1912. Some were wealthy business men but many more were poor. Here, as elsewhere, it was the Nazis who brought centuries of Jewish life to an abrupt end.
Although Greeks, Jews and Muslims lived in Salonika simultaneously for centuries, the historians of each community have ignored the other groups, and they have taken sharply different views of the same events, reflecting ethnic and national divisions.
The real challenge, Mazower says, is ‘not merely to tell the story of this remarkable place as one of cultural and religious co-existence - … - but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing narrative’, to include all what he calls ‘the radical discontinuities – the deportations, evictons, forced resettlements and genocide’ as well the long continuities.
He traces arrival and collapse of empires, the shift from identities based on religion into those based on ‘nation’ – Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks, and in the end the Greeks won the territory. The book ends in 1950, by when Salonica’s Muslims had been deported to Turkey, Turkish Christians had been deported to Greece, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans to their deaths.
I have also read Mazower's The Balkans: A Short History in the last couple of weeks, and will review that as it is much shorter, easier to read and deals with all the main themes that set the history of Salonica apart from most histories of individual cities.
I was fascinated most by beginning to see what it meant to be an Ottoman city, with the Ottoman system of government delivered through religious communities as well as the central government.
I was also fascinated to learn of the late rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, in which people identified themselves as Muslims, Christians or Jews rather than Turks or Greeks, until the final collapse of the Empire, with many re-drawing of borders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and forced expulsions of religious groups between territories in the old Ottoman lands.
Mazower pays a lot of attention to the rise of Greek nationalism. I was astonished to learn, for instance, that the Greeks invaded Turkey in 1921, with great notions of reclaiming territories of ancient Greece and the Byzantine empire. Far from winning, they were utterly defeated and the Orthodox Christians who had lived for hundred of years in Anatolia or Thrace were forced to flee to Greece, from which Muslims were expelled in turn.
It's a fascinating book, and one I'm likely to revisit.
August 30 2018 Update
I've just finished reading Mazower's The Balkans: A Short History and would have got more out of the history of Salonika if I'd read the wider, much shorter, history of the region first.
Here are some notes:
Salonika’s central paradox – its 2000 years of continuous urban life has been marked by sharp discontinuities and breaks. The Ottoman city has effectively vanished from sight. So has the Jewish presence in the city, whose life, Mazower says, they had dominated for centuries and Jews were still the largest ethnic group in 1912. Some were wealthy business men but many more were poor. Here, as elsewhere, it was the Nazis who brought centuries of Jewish life to an abrupt end.
Although Greeks, Jews and Muslims lived in Salonika simultaneously for centuries, the historians of each community have ignored the other groups, and they have taken sharply different views of the same events, reflecting ethnic and national divisions.
The real challenge, Mazower says, is ‘not merely to tell the story of this remarkable place as one of cultural and religious co-existence - … - but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing narrative’, to include all what he calls ‘the radical discontinuities – the deportations, evictons, forced resettlements and genocide’ as well the long continuities.
He traces arrival and collapse of empires, the shift from identities based on religion into those based on ‘nation’ – Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks, and in the end the Greeks won the territory. The book ends in 1950, by when Salonica’s Muslims had been deported to Turkey, Turkish Christians had been deported to Greece, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans to their deaths.
I have also read Mazower's The Balkans: A Short History in the last couple of weeks, and will review that as it is much shorter, easier to read and deals with all the main themes that set the history of Salonica apart from most histories of individual cities.
I was fascinated most by beginning to see what it meant to be an Ottoman city, with the Ottoman system of government delivered through religious communities as well as the central government.
I was also fascinated to learn of the late rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, in which people identified themselves as Muslims, Christians or Jews rather than Turks or Greeks, until the final collapse of the Empire, with many re-drawing of borders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and forced expulsions of religious groups between territories in the old Ottoman lands.
Mazower pays a lot of attention to the rise of Greek nationalism. I was astonished to learn, for instance, that the Greeks invaded Turkey in 1921, with great notions of reclaiming territories of ancient Greece and the Byzantine empire. Far from winning, they were utterly defeated and the Orthodox Christians who had lived for hundred of years in Anatolia or Thrace were forced to flee to Greece, from which Muslims were expelled in turn.
It's a fascinating book, and one I'm likely to revisit.
August 30 2018 Update
I've just finished reading Mazower's The Balkans: A Short History and would have got more out of the history of Salonika if I'd read the wider, much shorter, history of the region first.
November 22, 2016
Mazower writes in the introduction that this book is the product of nigh on 20 years of research and writing after a trip to Salonica with the army. His passion for and knowledge of seemingly every aspect of the city’s history was breath-taking. The city’s changing architecture was explored in the same loving detail as the changes in the city’s religious communities.
This wealth of knowledge and detail is even more fascinating when taking into account the fact that parts of the city and their respective histories have been obliterated by successive conquerors and natural disasters (the conquering Greeks back in 1912, a fire in 1917 that wiped out three-quarters of the city, the Nazis who approved of the destruction of mosques and one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe to name but a few).
But Salonica, City of Ghosts, does not just confine itself to the early to mid-20th century (although the 20th century is the era in which Mazower specialises). Instead it encompasses the city’s early years, even straying back to pay homage to a certain memorable Roman before working its way up until (and including) the Balkan conflicts. Mazower brought up issues that the current administration would probably prefer to be swept under the carpet. The destruction of the Jewish cemetery, mentioned above, has still not been acknowledged or apologised for. Ironically a university, a building that should be a beacon of light and knowledge and of truth has been built over it, without a word written about the building’s foundations.
With knowledge like that ringing in my ears, it is at times hard to imagine this now thoroughly Greek place as being the ethnically and culturally diverse place of refuge for groups hounded in other parts of Europe.
To paraphrase Mazower, only ghosts keep the memories now. But in reading this book, the ghosts of the past- of the truth- stirred and walked with me for a while down the streets of memory in a city I may never walk through. Soupy as that may sound, it feels true.
This wealth of knowledge and detail is even more fascinating when taking into account the fact that parts of the city and their respective histories have been obliterated by successive conquerors and natural disasters (the conquering Greeks back in 1912, a fire in 1917 that wiped out three-quarters of the city, the Nazis who approved of the destruction of mosques and one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe to name but a few).
But Salonica, City of Ghosts, does not just confine itself to the early to mid-20th century (although the 20th century is the era in which Mazower specialises). Instead it encompasses the city’s early years, even straying back to pay homage to a certain memorable Roman before working its way up until (and including) the Balkan conflicts. Mazower brought up issues that the current administration would probably prefer to be swept under the carpet. The destruction of the Jewish cemetery, mentioned above, has still not been acknowledged or apologised for. Ironically a university, a building that should be a beacon of light and knowledge and of truth has been built over it, without a word written about the building’s foundations.
With knowledge like that ringing in my ears, it is at times hard to imagine this now thoroughly Greek place as being the ethnically and culturally diverse place of refuge for groups hounded in other parts of Europe.
To paraphrase Mazower, only ghosts keep the memories now. But in reading this book, the ghosts of the past- of the truth- stirred and walked with me for a while down the streets of memory in a city I may never walk through. Soupy as that may sound, it feels true.
June 1, 2010
And here I thought that Los Angeles was a city that flew in the face of history! In its thousand plus year history, Salonica was a Roman city, a Byzantine city, a Muslim city, a Jewish city, and finally a Greek Orthodox city. At several points over the last hundred years or so, a deliberate attempt was made to pave over the past and pretend it did not exist:
This cannot have been an easy book to write. For some half a millenium, Salonica was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the concept of Ottoman historian is something of an oxymoron. (Partly, this is because books were not printed in the empire, according to Lord Kinross's The Ottoman Centuries, until the late 18th century.) Still, Mazower has put together hundreds of sources from European travelers who dropped in and wrote about the strange multicultural city that is now only known as Thessaloniki.
The history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences, the fictions necessary to tell the story of a rendezvous of a chosen people with the land marked out for them by destiny. It is an odd and implausible version of the past, especially for a city like Salonica, most of whose inhabitants cannot trace their connection to the place back more than three or four generations. They know that whatever they are taught at school, their own family experiences suggest a very different kind of story -- a saga of turbulence, upheaval, abandonment and recovery in which chance, not destiny, played the greater role.Mark Mazower has dealt lovingly and in detail with all the pasts of Salonica, even when, like the current official Hellenic version, they represent a wishful falsification.
This cannot have been an easy book to write. For some half a millenium, Salonica was part of the Ottoman Empire, and the concept of Ottoman historian is something of an oxymoron. (Partly, this is because books were not printed in the empire, according to Lord Kinross's The Ottoman Centuries, until the late 18th century.) Still, Mazower has put together hundreds of sources from European travelers who dropped in and wrote about the strange multicultural city that is now only known as Thessaloniki.
December 23, 2023
I can't pretend that reading this book is enough to bring tears to the eyes of the most stony faced, indifferent or deterministic reader of history - not for what was done - history everywhere is is Via Delarosa - but what makes you see is what we lost and will, it seems, never be reborn (what brief shiny moments we felt with the collapse of Cold War boundaries and the seeming coming together of Europe is another long lost moment to weep over. Division is out, proud and celebrated, and by no one more viscously nasty then politicians of all strips in the UK).
Salonica was part of the complex, multi-cultural Balkans that started tearing itself apart in the 19th century and continued with increasing viciousness throughout the 20th. Triumphantly captured by the kingdom of Greece in 1912, more or less physically destroyed in the horrific fire of 1917 which, if not deliberate started was welcomed by 'Greeks' as it made the final expulsion of the Muslim population all that much easier. By the time the Nazis stripped the city of its last Jews in 1943 the city was a pointless husk - purged, purified, Greek, but at the end of a history of such complexity that any real attempt to claim it for a nation was an obscenity because it was denial.
But that denial of subtlety, nuance, complexity has been the curse of the Balkan countries - they made aliens of Muslims and Jews then of each other - what difference was there between Bulgar, Greek or Serb? Not religion, language maybe but in most of the vastly mixed lands people spoke more then one, or at least parts of many languages. Once there were no Muslims to blame or hate or vilify they could kill each other - and the did.
Salonica is a city of ghosts just about apparent in amongst its sanitised cityscape. No one dreams there anymore, no one will sit amongst the toppled glories of Rome or Greece or Byzantium and write poems, books, or think of the past or of anything.
Weep for Salonica and weep for the Europe we threw away and which we continue to throw away. This is a superb tale of what was and reproach to what happened. I can't think of a 19th or 20th century politician or country that comes out of this tale with honour.
We should remember how easy it is to destroy and how impossible to create. This is a brilliant but painful book in which dreams are tread upon with violence.
Salonica was part of the complex, multi-cultural Balkans that started tearing itself apart in the 19th century and continued with increasing viciousness throughout the 20th. Triumphantly captured by the kingdom of Greece in 1912, more or less physically destroyed in the horrific fire of 1917 which, if not deliberate started was welcomed by 'Greeks' as it made the final expulsion of the Muslim population all that much easier. By the time the Nazis stripped the city of its last Jews in 1943 the city was a pointless husk - purged, purified, Greek, but at the end of a history of such complexity that any real attempt to claim it for a nation was an obscenity because it was denial.
But that denial of subtlety, nuance, complexity has been the curse of the Balkan countries - they made aliens of Muslims and Jews then of each other - what difference was there between Bulgar, Greek or Serb? Not religion, language maybe but in most of the vastly mixed lands people spoke more then one, or at least parts of many languages. Once there were no Muslims to blame or hate or vilify they could kill each other - and the did.
Salonica is a city of ghosts just about apparent in amongst its sanitised cityscape. No one dreams there anymore, no one will sit amongst the toppled glories of Rome or Greece or Byzantium and write poems, books, or think of the past or of anything.
Weep for Salonica and weep for the Europe we threw away and which we continue to throw away. This is a superb tale of what was and reproach to what happened. I can't think of a 19th or 20th century politician or country that comes out of this tale with honour.
We should remember how easy it is to destroy and how impossible to create. This is a brilliant but painful book in which dreams are tread upon with violence.
February 8, 2017
In his introduction Mark Mazower writes that he wants to do more than tell the story of Salonica as a remarkable place of cultural and religious co-existence, but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims who competed and cooperated with each other over the centuries "within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative” essentially narrating from no particular point of view except that of the empathetic observer. His history of Salonica evokes the voices of political and religious leaders, peasants and laborers, generals and conscripts. It is an absorbing chronicle, beautifully written and meticulously researched (Mazower seems to have read everything and mastered the sources in three languages) he illustrates the physical, economic and even spiritual aspects of the city over five centuries.
Salonica was a Byzantine city initially, a synthesis of imperial Rome, the Greek language and Orthodox Christianity. Its people called themselves Romans, claiming a lineage that extended back through the Eastern Roman Empire. Roman Catholics, on the other hand, were disdainfully called “Franks”, barely civilized semi-barbarian crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204, set up the Crusader State of Thessalonica and then retreated back to Rome, Venice and Paris.
With the final defeat of Byzantium at Constantinople in 1453 the Ottoman Empire controlled the Greek mainland including Salonica and its hinterlands. The Ottoman sultans belonged to the Hanafi school, the most tolerant and flexible in its attitudes toward non-Muslims. They married Greek and Serbian princesses, built new synagogues, and governed their multi-confessional city lightly so long as tax collectors were regularly paid. The Sultan provided a haven for Jews fleeing the Reconquista and Inquisition in Spain—they were happy to take it and prospered. While there were no Jews on the population register in 1478, by the early 1500's they were Salonika's largest religious group. If the Christians and Jews chafed under the vassalage of the Ottoman they were slow to express it—with freedom to exercise their religion, various niches in the economic life of the Empire and even high positions in the courts of various sultans, Jews and Christians were not unhappy as suzerains of the Sublime Porte.
Mazower sticks with his formula of telling the history of the people of Salonica from various, often competing points of view and in bringing it down to 1950 introduces other players: the Hapsburgs with their own sprawling, multi-ethnic and polyglot empire that was not unlike their deadly and constant rivals in Constantinople. The rise of the Young Turks and the Greek nationalists as well as the rumblings of mono-ethnic nation states throughout the Balkans and the deadly warfare among all three groups before and after World War I had a substantial impact on Salonica. Muslim refugees were followed by Christian refugees into the slums and warrens of the city creating unstable populations who were easily inflamed and prepared to seize what they considered theirs. The discipline of empire that had held the city together--an empire that specifically recognized the right of the three religions to coexist under its aegis –collapsed.
The end came when the Wehrmacht swept all before it during World War II with the Gestapo in its wake. They first imposed restrictions on the Jewish population—loss of property and livelihood, forced into ghettos, wearing the yellow Star of David—and then carried out the Final Solution for Greece. The deportation to death camps of Salonica’s Jews—by far the largest Jewish community in Greece began in March, 1943.
Over the centuries Salonica was beset by bandits, plagues, wicked janissaries, apostates in one direction or another, calamitous fires, floods of impoverished refugees, massacres, famines, vagabond monks little more than bands of criminals, false messiahs, murders and assassination, endemic and open corruption and more than one failed city plan. It was a thriving seaport, an essential way station on the roads that linked Asia and Europe, a center of Jewish learning, the home of fresco laden Greek Orthodox churches that had been turned into mosques and then back again to Christian churches. Mazower does a masterful job in describing the soul of the city.
Highly recommended.
Salonica was a Byzantine city initially, a synthesis of imperial Rome, the Greek language and Orthodox Christianity. Its people called themselves Romans, claiming a lineage that extended back through the Eastern Roman Empire. Roman Catholics, on the other hand, were disdainfully called “Franks”, barely civilized semi-barbarian crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204, set up the Crusader State of Thessalonica and then retreated back to Rome, Venice and Paris.
With the final defeat of Byzantium at Constantinople in 1453 the Ottoman Empire controlled the Greek mainland including Salonica and its hinterlands. The Ottoman sultans belonged to the Hanafi school, the most tolerant and flexible in its attitudes toward non-Muslims. They married Greek and Serbian princesses, built new synagogues, and governed their multi-confessional city lightly so long as tax collectors were regularly paid. The Sultan provided a haven for Jews fleeing the Reconquista and Inquisition in Spain—they were happy to take it and prospered. While there were no Jews on the population register in 1478, by the early 1500's they were Salonika's largest religious group. If the Christians and Jews chafed under the vassalage of the Ottoman they were slow to express it—with freedom to exercise their religion, various niches in the economic life of the Empire and even high positions in the courts of various sultans, Jews and Christians were not unhappy as suzerains of the Sublime Porte.
Mazower sticks with his formula of telling the history of the people of Salonica from various, often competing points of view and in bringing it down to 1950 introduces other players: the Hapsburgs with their own sprawling, multi-ethnic and polyglot empire that was not unlike their deadly and constant rivals in Constantinople. The rise of the Young Turks and the Greek nationalists as well as the rumblings of mono-ethnic nation states throughout the Balkans and the deadly warfare among all three groups before and after World War I had a substantial impact on Salonica. Muslim refugees were followed by Christian refugees into the slums and warrens of the city creating unstable populations who were easily inflamed and prepared to seize what they considered theirs. The discipline of empire that had held the city together--an empire that specifically recognized the right of the three religions to coexist under its aegis –collapsed.
The end came when the Wehrmacht swept all before it during World War II with the Gestapo in its wake. They first imposed restrictions on the Jewish population—loss of property and livelihood, forced into ghettos, wearing the yellow Star of David—and then carried out the Final Solution for Greece. The deportation to death camps of Salonica’s Jews—by far the largest Jewish community in Greece began in March, 1943.
Over the centuries Salonica was beset by bandits, plagues, wicked janissaries, apostates in one direction or another, calamitous fires, floods of impoverished refugees, massacres, famines, vagabond monks little more than bands of criminals, false messiahs, murders and assassination, endemic and open corruption and more than one failed city plan. It was a thriving seaport, an essential way station on the roads that linked Asia and Europe, a center of Jewish learning, the home of fresco laden Greek Orthodox churches that had been turned into mosques and then back again to Christian churches. Mazower does a masterful job in describing the soul of the city.
Highly recommended.
September 8, 2020
Στην ιστοριογραφία θα μπορούσε κανείς να διακρίνει ανάμεσα σε δύο μεγάλες κατηγορίες γραφής. Από τη μια τις αυστηρά ακαδημαϊκές εργασίες που αν και χωρισμένες σε δεκάδες (υπό)κατηγορίες και ειδικότητες μοιράζονται κοινά μεθοδολογικά και τεχνικά εργαλεία προκείμενου να προσθέσουν στο διαρκώς διογκούμενο corpus της έρευνας. Δεν διακρίνονται για ούτε επιδιώκουν την αναγνωσιμότητα από ευρύτερα του "επαγγέλματος" κοινά.
Από την άλλη, υπάρχει η εμπορικά επιτυχημένη popular history, δηλαδή μια ιστορική γραφή που απευθύνεται στον όχι απαραίτητα ειδικευμένο αναγνώστη και που διαβάζεται εύκολα, χωρίς όμως πάντα να σέβεται την ιστορική ακρίβεια ή την ανάγκη η ιστορική έρευνα να θέτει νέα ερωτήματα αντί να αναμασάει βολικά procut συμπεράσματα.
Θα έλεγα ότι μεγάλοι ιστορικοί (για παράδειγμα οι E. Hobsnawm, E.P. Thompson, F. Braudel κ.λ.π) είναι αυτοί που κατορθώνουν να μεταγράψουν μια μεθοδολογικά ενημερωμένη ιστορία σε ένα συναρπαστικό, ευανάγνωστο και κυρίως χρήσιμο κείμενο που μπορεί να διαβαστεί κριτικά από όλους.
Θεωρώ ότι ο Mark Mazower ανήκει σε αυτήν την χαρισματική κατηγορία ιστορικών - συγγραφέων. Η Θεσσαλονίκη του θα ξεβολέψει, ίσως και να εκνευρίσει πολλούς από τους εγχώριους αναγνώστες. Είναι μια πόλη παλίμψηστο, όπου μπλέκονται μυρωδιές, χρώματα, επιθυμίες και γλώσσες πολλών και διαφορετικών πολιτισμών, είναι ένα χαρμάνι αψύ, συχνά επικίνδυνο, αλλά σίγουρα ερωτεύσιμο. Και είναι επίσης μια πόλη - φάντασμα που κάτω από τις σύγχρονες πολυκατοικίες της σίγουρα κρύβει τους τάφους θαυματουργών αγίων, μουφτήδων, Ελλήνων πειρατών και εβραϊκών φαντασμάτων, απομεινάρια μιας εποχής που οι ατομικές και συλλογικές ταυτότητες ήταν ρευστές, διαπραγματεύσιμες και πήγαζαν από την εντοπιότητα. Μια εποχή δηλαδή που εκτός ή ακόμα και πριν από Χριστιανός, Εβραίος ή Μουσουλμάνος ένιωθε κανείς Σαλονικιός!
Από την άλλη, υπάρχει η εμπορικά επιτυχημένη popular history, δηλαδή μια ιστορική γραφή που απευθύνεται στον όχι απαραίτητα ειδικευμένο αναγνώστη και που διαβάζεται εύκολα, χωρίς όμως πάντα να σέβεται την ιστορική ακρίβεια ή την ανάγκη η ιστορική έρευνα να θέτει νέα ερωτήματα αντί να αναμασάει βολικά procut συμπεράσματα.
Θα έλεγα ότι μεγάλοι ιστορικοί (για παράδειγμα οι E. Hobsnawm, E.P. Thompson, F. Braudel κ.λ.π) είναι αυτοί που κατορθώνουν να μεταγράψουν μια μεθοδολογικά ενημερωμένη ιστορία σε ένα συναρπαστικό, ευανάγνωστο και κυρίως χρήσιμο κείμενο που μπορεί να διαβαστεί κριτικά από όλους.
Θεωρώ ότι ο Mark Mazower ανήκει σε αυτήν την χαρισματική κατηγορία ιστορικών - συγγραφέων. Η Θεσσαλονίκη του θα ξεβολέψει, ίσως και να εκνευρίσει πολλούς από τους εγχώριους αναγνώστες. Είναι μια πόλη παλίμψηστο, όπου μπλέκονται μυρωδιές, χρώματα, επιθυμίες και γλώσσες πολλών και διαφορετικών πολιτισμών, είναι ένα χαρμάνι αψύ, συχνά επικίνδυνο, αλλά σίγουρα ερωτεύσιμο. Και είναι επίσης μια πόλη - φάντασμα που κάτω από τις σύγχρονες πολυκατοικίες της σίγουρα κρύβει τους τάφους θαυματουργών αγίων, μουφτήδων, Ελλήνων πειρατών και εβραϊκών φαντασμάτων, απομεινάρια μιας εποχής που οι ατομικές και συλλογικές ταυτότητες ήταν ρευστές, διαπραγματεύσιμες και πήγαζαν από την εντοπιότητα. Μια εποχή δηλαδή που εκτός ή ακόμα και πριν από Χριστιανός, Εβραίος ή Μουσουλμάνος ένιωθε κανείς Σαλονικιός!
November 11, 2016
The author claims that this book was 20 years in the making, and you have to believe him. It is a powerful masterpiece. For a week of my life it has transported me to the Salonica of 1430 to 1949. I can close my eyes and pretend I was there.
As a Greek of Orthodox Christian Vlach provenance I can also attest to the fact that the author's account of my very narrow ethnic group is fair, accurate and sympathetic. My great grandfather moved from the mountains of Pindos and maintained a restaurant in Salonica, though to this day many Vlachs remain nomads and move with their flocks. I do indeed have an uncle Themistocles, just like the author surmises I might, what with Vlachs going out of their way to be truly Hellenized. And my dad learned Greek properly in school, but spoke a Romance-language dialect, Vlach, at home, just like the author describes.
I consider myself conversant with Greek history (it is mandatory back home, and you are taught each period three times) but I learned tons from this book. Incidentally, every fact that I can adjudicate on checks 100%. I picked up the book with some reservations, because I'd been told the author is too harsh on us Greeks, but quite to the contrary I found him to be, if anything, a bit too lenient on us, always giving us the benefit of the doubt and trying to see things from our angle.
Overall, this book was a masterpiece. It's most evidently a labour of love.
The ending is extremely sad, of course. It had me crying. And, of course, it's shameful. But that's history for you.
I think I might read it again.
As a Greek of Orthodox Christian Vlach provenance I can also attest to the fact that the author's account of my very narrow ethnic group is fair, accurate and sympathetic. My great grandfather moved from the mountains of Pindos and maintained a restaurant in Salonica, though to this day many Vlachs remain nomads and move with their flocks. I do indeed have an uncle Themistocles, just like the author surmises I might, what with Vlachs going out of their way to be truly Hellenized. And my dad learned Greek properly in school, but spoke a Romance-language dialect, Vlach, at home, just like the author describes.
I consider myself conversant with Greek history (it is mandatory back home, and you are taught each period three times) but I learned tons from this book. Incidentally, every fact that I can adjudicate on checks 100%. I picked up the book with some reservations, because I'd been told the author is too harsh on us Greeks, but quite to the contrary I found him to be, if anything, a bit too lenient on us, always giving us the benefit of the doubt and trying to see things from our angle.
Overall, this book was a masterpiece. It's most evidently a labour of love.
The ending is extremely sad, of course. It had me crying. And, of course, it's shameful. But that's history for you.
I think I might read it again.
August 5, 2016
A history of Salonica that might be forever lost in the bloody mists of nationalism in the Balkans. A unique and very pleasurable combination of historical writing and prose, it makes imagining life in Salonica of yesteryear, a feeling almost unimaginable if looking at the city today, this much more enticing. It is an ode to a historical period that every country involved seems all too willing to forget.
Salonica City of Ghosts invites us to remember.
Salonica City of Ghosts invites us to remember.
August 22, 2012
It is a great book, in fact it is how I consider history books should be written especially when dealing with areas of the world plagued by nationalist hate. Personally, combining it with my knowledge of history and other books I 've read, I think that this book is as close to the truth as one can get. And as it is always the case with the truth it's not always pleasant for everyone and it tends to dispel various self-assuring myths. The book is about Salonica and its history but the ideas, acts and ideologies it examines, apply to the whole region of Balkans and serve to explain much to the modern reader about how and why things are shaped today.
December 29, 2011
Powerful narration of a true story, that the greek governments really tried to hide. Living in the city of Thessaloniki, i discovered that few people know its history and its great importance. As Mark Mazower pointed that up nicely, only ghosts are left behind to restore these memories..
March 10, 2016
Ο συγγραφέας κάνει μία ανασκόπηση της ιστορίας της Θεσσαλονίκης για την περίοδο 1430-1950 και οδηγείται σε συμπεράσματα αγνοώντας την προ του 1430 περίοδο. Επιλέγει να δώσει έμφαση σε κάποια γεγονότα και να υποβαθμήσει κάποια άλλα χωρίς να στηρίζεται σε στοιχεία ή μη αναφέροντας τις πηγές του. Βρίσκει κανείς ενδιαφέροντα στοιχεία για την ιστορία της Θεσσαλονίκης αλλά του δημιουργούνται και πολλές απορίες και ερωτηματικά. Είναι ένα βιβλίο που πρέπει να διαβάσει κανείς με κριτική σκέψη και να ανατρέξει και σε άλλες πηγές για να μπορέσει να βγάλει τα δικά του συμπεράσματα. Είναι γνωστό εξ άλλου σε όλους ότι η ιστορία μπορεί να γραφτεί με διαφορετικούς τρόπους και ανάλογα από ποιά σκοπιά την βλέπει κανείς.
July 6, 2019
Przyznaję się, długo zeszło mi na przeczytaniu tego dzieła. Było warto! Chyba nie czytałem tak wnikliwego portretu miasta jak Saloniki Mazowera.
October 16, 2022
"Η ιστορία των εθνικιστών είναι φτιαγμένη από πλαστές συνέχειες και βολικές αποσιωπήσεις, από φανταστικές κατασκευές, αναγκαίες ώστε να αφηγηθούν τη ιστορία του ραντεβού ενός περιούσιου λαού με τη γη που του επεφύλαξε το πεπρωμένο. Είναι μια παράδοξη και μη αληθοφανής εκδοχή του παρελθόντος, ιδίως για μια πόλη σαν τη Θεσσαλονίκη, που οι περισσότεροι κάτοικοί της δεν μπορούν να ανιχνεύσουν τη σύνδεσή τους με τον τόπο περισσότερο από τρεις με τέσσερις γενιές πίσω. Ξέρουν πως, ανεξάρτητα από το τι τους μαθαίνουν στο σχολείο, οι δικές τους οικογενειακές ιστορίες υποβάλουν μια πολύ διαφορετική ιστορία: ένα έπος γεμάτο αναταράξεις, αναστατώσεις, ξεριζωμούς και ξαναριζώματα, στα οποία τον μεγαλύτερο ρόλο τον έπαιξε η τύχη και όχι το πεπρωμένο".
August 28, 2014
Para quem gosta de História, um livro imperdível! Fascinante e de leitura verdadeiramente compulsiva.
December 18, 2021
Μια βουτιά σε 500 χρόνια του παρελθόντος της Θεσσαλονίκης, που εξηγεί πολλά και για το παρόν. Δεν είναι το κλασικό "ακαδημαϊκό" βιβλίο ιστορίας, η αφήγηση έχει καλή ροή και παρά το μέγεθος κάνει κοιλιά σε ελάχιστα σημεία.
June 26, 2017
A moving narration of the history of my hometown. It describes how three major communities (Ottomans, Greek Christians and the exiled Iberian Jewish) ended up living together and created one of the major cities in East Europe. The rise of nationalism in the Balkans, two World Wars, two Balkan Wars, the muslim-christian population exchange and the Holocaust put a huge burden on all three communities and brought the city to its knees.
This was both an exciting and a difficult read for me. Born and raised in Thessaloniki, I recognize names and locations mentioned in the book, I have a visual reference of the city and now this book connects all of them to the spectacular history of the city and the tragic stories of its people.
The book itself is a pleasure to read, easy and welcoming. It is clearly written from a Jewish perspective - a very interesting point for me, given that the history of the Salonica Jewish community is not something that is well known, even in Greece. The population exchange of '23 is also approached from a different angle, more humanistic than the regular nationalistic approach you hear about in school.
Eye-opening read. Highly recommended, especially for Greeks and neighbors.
This was both an exciting and a difficult read for me. Born and raised in Thessaloniki, I recognize names and locations mentioned in the book, I have a visual reference of the city and now this book connects all of them to the spectacular history of the city and the tragic stories of its people.
The book itself is a pleasure to read, easy and welcoming. It is clearly written from a Jewish perspective - a very interesting point for me, given that the history of the Salonica Jewish community is not something that is well known, even in Greece. The population exchange of '23 is also approached from a different angle, more humanistic than the regular nationalistic approach you hear about in school.
Eye-opening read. Highly recommended, especially for Greeks and neighbors.
August 30, 2014
Salonica, City of Ghosts, which won the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize, is a wonderful history book especially for readers who are not history buffs but who are interested in European culture in a broad sense.
Salonica (currently Thessaloniki) has legendary status in many cultures. It is the birth-place of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. It is the city whose Christian community received two extremely important epistles from St. Paul Thessalon was also the home of the Ladino language and had the largest Jewish population of any Jewish city on the Mediterranean at the beginning of World War II.
Mazower follows the city through all its many transformations explaining which winds blew away the old and which ones brought in the new. Salonica, City of Ghosts is a great reflection on the course of European history and how cultural, linguistic, political and religious boundaries have shifted over the centuries.
The mood is profoundly elegiac as Mazower finds that the current city is simply not worthy of its great past. This is a good book and a great lamentation.
Salonica (currently Thessaloniki) has legendary status in many cultures. It is the birth-place of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. It is the city whose Christian community received two extremely important epistles from St. Paul Thessalon was also the home of the Ladino language and had the largest Jewish population of any Jewish city on the Mediterranean at the beginning of World War II.
Mazower follows the city through all its many transformations explaining which winds blew away the old and which ones brought in the new. Salonica, City of Ghosts is a great reflection on the course of European history and how cultural, linguistic, political and religious boundaries have shifted over the centuries.
The mood is profoundly elegiac as Mazower finds that the current city is simply not worthy of its great past. This is a good book and a great lamentation.
April 1, 2009
The city now called Thessaloniki already had me completely fascinated before I read this book. I'd visited once in 1994 and still dream of going back. When I do make it there again, it will be a hundred times more interesting to me for having read this book. The subtitle "City of Ghosts" will feel especially apt if you ever go there to experience the modern, thoroughly Greek, city, and consider that until the 20th century it was hardly Greek at all. A cosmopolitan mix of religion and nationality that bears little relation to what one sees now. You'd have been as likely to hear Spanish or Ladhino on the street as you would Greek, or maybe Turkish. The book is readable and fascinating throughout, with some great pics. I had the wildly unexpected pleasure of meeting the author (and his charming Egyptian wife, also a scholar) at a party in Boston. A nice, normal guy, in case an author's niceness matters to you.
Want to read
July 15, 2009Yes yes yes yes, this sounds right up my alley, I must read this!
August 22, 2016
Εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον! Απέκτησα καινούργιες πληροφορίες για την πόλη και άρχισα να προσέχω περισσότερο τα κτίρια γύρω μου! Ήταν πολύ όμορφο να παρατηρώ από την αρχή πράγματα που πριν αγνοούσα.
December 24, 2022
Πέντε αιώνες ιστορίας της Θεσσαλονίκης, άρτια συμπυκνωμένοι σε μία αριστουργηματική μελέτη που διαπραγματεύεται τον τρόπο ζωής των κατοίκων της πολυεθνικής Θεσσαλονίκης, τις σχέσεις μεταξύ των κοινοτήτων με την Οθωμανική και έπειτα την Ελληνική διακυβέρνηση, την επιρροή των πολιτικών εξελίξεων στην ευρύτερη περιοχή και τελικά την ίδια την εξέλιξη της Θεσσαλονίκης μέσα στους αιώνες.
Ο Μαρκ Μαζάουερ, ιστορικός του πανεπιστημίου Κολούμπια της Νέας Υόρκης, με επιστημονική αμεροληψία αλλά και με μία ανεξήγητη(ή μπορεί και όχι) στοργή, προσφέρει ένα έργο το οποίο θεωρώ πως κάθε φίλος της τοπικής ιστορίας θα πρέπει να το διαβάσει καθώς αποδεικνύει πως παρόλες τις στενάχωρες στιγμές και τα δυσάρεστα γεγονότα, η Θεσσαλονίκη είναι μία πόλη με διαχρονική και ιδιαίτερη σημασία που αξίζει τη δέουσα προσοχή.
Και σαν Θεσσαλονικιός και εγώ ο ίδιος, που λατρεύω την ιδιαίτερη πατρίδα μου, πιστεύω πως ο ιστορικός πλούτος που περιέχεται μέσα σε αυτό το εγχείρημα μπορεί να επιτελέσει για μένα και τους συντοπίτες μου, το βασικό ρόλο που θα έπρεπε να έχει το παρελθόν στη ζωή μας και στις κοινωνίες μας.
Να μας διδάξει και να μας εμπνεύσει για το μέλλον.
Ο Μαρκ Μαζάουερ, ιστορικός του πανεπιστημίου Κολούμπια της Νέας Υόρκης, με επιστημονική αμεροληψία αλλά και με μία ανεξήγητη(ή μπορεί και όχι) στοργή, προσφέρει ένα έργο το οποίο θεωρώ πως κάθε φίλος της τοπικής ιστορίας θα πρέπει να το διαβάσει καθώς αποδεικνύει πως παρόλες τις στενάχωρες στιγμές και τα δυσάρεστα γεγονότα, η Θεσσαλονίκη είναι μία πόλη με διαχρονική και ιδιαίτερη σημασία που αξίζει τη δέουσα προσοχή.
Και σαν Θεσσαλονικιός και εγώ ο ίδιος, που λατρεύω την ιδιαίτερη πατρίδα μου, πιστεύω πως ο ιστορικός πλούτος που περιέχεται μέσα σε αυτό το εγχείρημα μπορεί να επιτελέσει για μένα και τους συντοπίτες μου, το βασικό ρόλο που θα έπρεπε να έχει το παρελθόν στη ζωή μας και στις κοινωνίες μας.
Να μας διδάξει και να μας εμπνεύσει για το μέλλον.
November 24, 2011
Mazower's research here across languages and centuries and sources is a wonder and this book is a dense and elaborate delight. In Salonica, he follows the city from its Muslim conquest from the Byzantines in 1430 through the end of WWII. The Byzantine city was remade as Ottoman, but heavily flavored by Sefardic Jews around 1500, so that they were the largest group in the city in the 17th century. Mazower reconstructs this city of competing and cooperating religious and ethnic groups revealing details of more than oriental splendor. The task of reconstruction is difficult because after the city was captured by the Greeks in 1912, its entire Ottoman culture was eliminated. In part by deliberate destruction, but also by fire in 1917, the effective ethnic cleansing of Macedonia and Western Anatolia after World War I (removing most Muslims and adding Turkish-speaking Eastern Christian refugees), and the deportation of most of the large Jewish population to Auschwitz in 1943. He points to the complicity of the city's leadership in the Holocaust and the lack of any repurcussions for that complicity. Mazower does not glorify the Ottoman past, but despite its impotence and crime it seems much more alive than the 20th century state. As in his other books, he finds much to fault in the creation of the modern nation-state, coming as it did in Greece and throughout the Balkans with ethnic-cleansing and the reappropriation of the past. These paragraphs come at the end of the book:
"And yet that older city may turn out to serve the living in new ways only now coming into view. Nation-states construct their own image of the past to shore up their ambitions for the future: forgetting the Ottomans was part of Greece's claim to modernity. But today the old delusions of grandeur are being replaced by a more sober sense of what individual countries can achieve alone. As small states integrate themselves into a wider world, and even the largest learn how much they need their neighbor's help to tackle the problems that face them all, the stringently patrolled and narrow-minded conception of history which they once nurtured and which gave them a kind of justification starts to look less plausible and less necessary. Other futures may require other pasts.
The history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences, the fictions necessary to tell the story of the rendezvous of a chosen people with the land marked out for them by destiny. It is an odd and implausible version of the past, especially for a city like Salonica, most of whose inhabitants cannot trace their connection to the place back more than three or four generations. They know that whatever they are taught at school, their own family experiences suggest a very different kind of story - a saga of turbulence, upheaval, abandonment and recovery in which chance, not destiny, played the greater role." (439)
Overall, an absolutely marvelous book.
"And yet that older city may turn out to serve the living in new ways only now coming into view. Nation-states construct their own image of the past to shore up their ambitions for the future: forgetting the Ottomans was part of Greece's claim to modernity. But today the old delusions of grandeur are being replaced by a more sober sense of what individual countries can achieve alone. As small states integrate themselves into a wider world, and even the largest learn how much they need their neighbor's help to tackle the problems that face them all, the stringently patrolled and narrow-minded conception of history which they once nurtured and which gave them a kind of justification starts to look less plausible and less necessary. Other futures may require other pasts.
The history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences, the fictions necessary to tell the story of the rendezvous of a chosen people with the land marked out for them by destiny. It is an odd and implausible version of the past, especially for a city like Salonica, most of whose inhabitants cannot trace their connection to the place back more than three or four generations. They know that whatever they are taught at school, their own family experiences suggest a very different kind of story - a saga of turbulence, upheaval, abandonment and recovery in which chance, not destiny, played the greater role." (439)
Overall, an absolutely marvelous book.
October 25, 2022
Одна из лучших популярно-исторических книжек, что мне в жизни попадались: история города через взаимодействия его православных, иудеев и мусульман, хотя Мэзауэр, кажется, несколько идеализирует Порту - ну и под конец непростительно полемичен для историка насчет того, как все у нас нынче делается. Раньше-то, знамо дело, м��ре было чище, все газоны зеленее, а Белая башня белее.
И при этом - крайне своевременный учебник изгнания для нас, потому что Салоники - город беженцев. "Городу две тысячи лет". С лишним. Живем не только на перекрестке миров и куче культурных слоев, но и в песне Цоя.
А я еще как будто домой вернулся, в город на сопках у моря.
И при этом - крайне своевременный учебник изгнания для нас, потому что Салоники - город беженцев. "Городу две тысячи лет". С лишним. Живем не только на перекрестке миров и куче культурных слоев, но и в песне Цоя.
А я еще как будто домой вернулся, в город на сопках у моря.
December 29, 2010
Anni fa, in un'intervista, dichiarammo: "[Durante la documentazione per i nostri romanzi] abbiamo allucinazioni. La ricerca storica per noi è come il peyote. Quando ci riprendiamo da tutti gli shock e i flash, cominciamo a scrivere".
Questo libro è stato fondamentale per scrivere Altai.
Questo libro è stato fondamentale per scrivere Altai.
July 1, 2019
Σημαντικό και βαρύ βιβλίο. Ο Mazower εξετάζει την ιστορία της Θεσσαλονίκης από όλες τις σκοπιές, και δεν αφήνει σχεδόν τίποτα ασκάλιστο. Είναι βιβλίο που έχουν γραφτεί γι' αυτό πολλαπλάσιες λέξεις απ' αυτές που περιέχει, και δεν έχω να προσθέσω κάτι ουσιαστικό πέρα απ' τ' ότι το απόλαυσα και ως ύφος, και ως γνώση.
April 30, 2024
This book is a very detailed, very scholarly accounting of 500 years of political, economic and social history of Salonica.
I have attempted to summarize the book, both for my own purpose of remembering some important facts, and for the reader who does not have the interest/time to invest in this dense 450 plus page book, but would like to know a bit about its subject matter.
Salonica, a port city in northern Greece, on the Aegean Sea was first ruled by the Hellenes in antiquity, then by the Romans, then by the Byzantine Empire.
When this book starts, it is 1430 and the city is conquered by the Ottomans.
The locals are Orthodox Christians and most of them get slaughtered or sold into slavery by the Ottoman Muslims.
The Ottomans then settle the city with Muslims and invite Spanish Jews who were expelled during the Spanish Inquisition to settle in the city. The Ladino speaking Spanish Jews soon form more than 50% of the population.
The Muslims build minarets and bath houses, the Spanish Jews build synagogues and the Orthodox Christians keep their churches.
The Ottomans are tolerant of other religions as long as they show loyalty to the Sultan, bow down to the Muslims and pay extra taxes.
A color coded turban and shoe dress code is imposed on each religious group.
Christian and Jewish testimony is not admissible against a Muslim in a criminal trial.
The Ottoman administration is very decentralized. The provinces such as Salonica, are administered by governors, called Pashas, who collect the local taxes. The Sultans curtail their power by frequently rotating them. Pashas stay rarely more than a year in the city.
The real power brokers are the Muslim landed elite (the Beys). They command private armies and form a council to advise the Pasha. They nominate their family members to key judicial, administrative and economic posts.
The private bankers and money lenders who control the supply of credit also hold some power. They tend to be Jews, Christians and Armenians.
Salonica becomes the main provider of grain and wool for Istanbul and the Ottoman army, the renowned janissary corps.
Salonica becomes an important center of Kabbalah. When Sabbatay Zevi from Izmir in Turkey proclaims to be the Messiah in 1666, many Salonica Jews follow him.
Sabbatai Zvi later converts to Islam. Hundreds of his followers in Salonica convert as well and call themselves Ma'amin, a unique sect of Ladino speaking Muslims.
As Salonica prospers, its Muslims, Jews and Christians buy slaves for domestic use from the vast Ottoman Empire: Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Sudan and North Africa are the main sources of supply. The slave market is part of the Ottoman economy until late into the 19th century.
The French Revolution of 1789 inspires independence movements and nationalism in Europe. The Greeks rebel against the Ottoman Empire in 1821.
The rebellion is brutally suppressed by the Ottomans in Salonica, but the southern part of Greece, in the Peloponnesus, gains its independence in 1822. Athens, a small town at that time, becomes its new capital.
The Napoleonic Wars around that time shift the balance of power to Europe.
Europe stands for a set of values: freedom of worship and equal treatment for all; respect for state sovereignty and at the same time, concern for the rights of the individual; the rights of nations to independence, as manifested in the rise of Italy, France and Germany; the redefinition of religion as a matter of private individual conscience. The Ottoman Empire is pressured to sign up to these values and as the 19th century progresses, Salonica changes more dramatically than ever before.
With the advent of the railways, tourists from Western Europe flock to Salonica, looking for picturesque Oriental scenes such as cafés with elderly turbaned men smoking their narghilés, belly-dancers, snake-charmers and street musicians.
Archeologists come for the ruins of ancient Greece, early Christianity and Byzantium.
Visitors are struck by the cosmopolitan aspect of Salonica. One visitor describes Salonica as "historically Greek, politically Turkish, geographically Bulgarian and ethnographically Jewish".
This influx of Europeans quickly leads to the embrace of European culture by the Salonica bourgeoisie.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Salonica's middle class is dressed in European fashions, their children are schooled in European style schools and are taught French. The city builds a modern piping system for running water and widens the main streets.
Serbia and Bulgaria declare independence, Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia, and Crete declares allegiance to Greece.
Greek troops enter the city in October 1912 and so ends the Ottoman era in Salonica.
Following is an excerpt of a review in the July/August 2005 edition of Commentary Magazine:
"At this point, Mazower changes course, providing less a history of Salonica or of the interplay among its ethnic components than an account of the often difficult relations between, in particular, the Greek state and the city’s Jews.
At the time, just 25 percent of Salonica’s inhabitants were Greek Christians, a fact of great concern to its new rulers. As one officer observed, Salonica was a “gaudy city with all the tribes of Israel,” a place with “nothing Greek about it, nor European.” So the Greek government set about “Hellenizing” Salonica with the usual tools of the nationalist state, imposing the Greek language, which was known by few of the city’s residents, and changing street names.
An opportunity to do still more came in 1917, after the last of the great fires. With half of the population homeless, and most Jews without shelter, the Greek authorities swept away the charred remnants of the Ottoman city, replacing it with a French-style metropolis of broad, straight boulevards.
Engineering of a different sort was applied to Salonica’s population. New housing estates were filled with Greek Christian refugees. These had arrived in large numbers after World War I and the failed Greek attempt to resurrect the Byzantine Empire by conquering western Turkey. In 1923, the city’s Muslims were forced to move to Turkey as part of a population exchange. The minarets once vilified by a Greek journalist as “the symbols of a barbarous religion” were demolished, stripping Salonica of the most visible aspect of its Ottoman heritage.
With the Muslims gone, the Jews remained the only substantial non-Greek element in a city whose identity and appearance had changed drastically in just over a decade. Increasingly marginalized, many Jews emigrated. "
The German army invades Salonica in 1941.
In December 1942 the Greek authorities destroy the Jewish cemetery of Salonica, one of the largest and oldest Jewish cemeteries of Europe. They later built a new university campus on that site.
In the spring of 1943, 45,000 Jews are rounded up by the Nazis with the help of Greek gendarmes and collaborators.
Within a few hours of their arrival at Auschwitz, most of them are killed in gas chambers.
There is no sign of the nearly 500 years of Muslim and Jewish presence in the Salonica of today, now renamed Thessaloniki.
The cemeteries were destroyed and paved over, the minarets and synagogues were destroyed and/or burned in fires, and the street names were changed, all in the name of "Hellenization".
The Muslims were expelled and the Jews were murdered.
Of 500 years of Ottoman and Jewish lives in Salonica, only ghosts remain. A city of ghosts.
I have attempted to summarize the book, both for my own purpose of remembering some important facts, and for the reader who does not have the interest/time to invest in this dense 450 plus page book, but would like to know a bit about its subject matter.
Salonica, a port city in northern Greece, on the Aegean Sea was first ruled by the Hellenes in antiquity, then by the Romans, then by the Byzantine Empire.
When this book starts, it is 1430 and the city is conquered by the Ottomans.
The locals are Orthodox Christians and most of them get slaughtered or sold into slavery by the Ottoman Muslims.
The Ottomans then settle the city with Muslims and invite Spanish Jews who were expelled during the Spanish Inquisition to settle in the city. The Ladino speaking Spanish Jews soon form more than 50% of the population.
The Muslims build minarets and bath houses, the Spanish Jews build synagogues and the Orthodox Christians keep their churches.
The Ottomans are tolerant of other religions as long as they show loyalty to the Sultan, bow down to the Muslims and pay extra taxes.
A color coded turban and shoe dress code is imposed on each religious group.
Christian and Jewish testimony is not admissible against a Muslim in a criminal trial.
The Ottoman administration is very decentralized. The provinces such as Salonica, are administered by governors, called Pashas, who collect the local taxes. The Sultans curtail their power by frequently rotating them. Pashas stay rarely more than a year in the city.
The real power brokers are the Muslim landed elite (the Beys). They command private armies and form a council to advise the Pasha. They nominate their family members to key judicial, administrative and economic posts.
The private bankers and money lenders who control the supply of credit also hold some power. They tend to be Jews, Christians and Armenians.
Salonica becomes the main provider of grain and wool for Istanbul and the Ottoman army, the renowned janissary corps.
Salonica becomes an important center of Kabbalah. When Sabbatay Zevi from Izmir in Turkey proclaims to be the Messiah in 1666, many Salonica Jews follow him.
Sabbatai Zvi later converts to Islam. Hundreds of his followers in Salonica convert as well and call themselves Ma'amin, a unique sect of Ladino speaking Muslims.
As Salonica prospers, its Muslims, Jews and Christians buy slaves for domestic use from the vast Ottoman Empire: Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Sudan and North Africa are the main sources of supply. The slave market is part of the Ottoman economy until late into the 19th century.
The French Revolution of 1789 inspires independence movements and nationalism in Europe. The Greeks rebel against the Ottoman Empire in 1821.
The rebellion is brutally suppressed by the Ottomans in Salonica, but the southern part of Greece, in the Peloponnesus, gains its independence in 1822. Athens, a small town at that time, becomes its new capital.
The Napoleonic Wars around that time shift the balance of power to Europe.
Europe stands for a set of values: freedom of worship and equal treatment for all; respect for state sovereignty and at the same time, concern for the rights of the individual; the rights of nations to independence, as manifested in the rise of Italy, France and Germany; the redefinition of religion as a matter of private individual conscience. The Ottoman Empire is pressured to sign up to these values and as the 19th century progresses, Salonica changes more dramatically than ever before.
With the advent of the railways, tourists from Western Europe flock to Salonica, looking for picturesque Oriental scenes such as cafés with elderly turbaned men smoking their narghilés, belly-dancers, snake-charmers and street musicians.
Archeologists come for the ruins of ancient Greece, early Christianity and Byzantium.
Visitors are struck by the cosmopolitan aspect of Salonica. One visitor describes Salonica as "historically Greek, politically Turkish, geographically Bulgarian and ethnographically Jewish".
This influx of Europeans quickly leads to the embrace of European culture by the Salonica bourgeoisie.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Salonica's middle class is dressed in European fashions, their children are schooled in European style schools and are taught French. The city builds a modern piping system for running water and widens the main streets.
Serbia and Bulgaria declare independence, Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia, and Crete declares allegiance to Greece.
Greek troops enter the city in October 1912 and so ends the Ottoman era in Salonica.
Following is an excerpt of a review in the July/August 2005 edition of Commentary Magazine:
"At this point, Mazower changes course, providing less a history of Salonica or of the interplay among its ethnic components than an account of the often difficult relations between, in particular, the Greek state and the city’s Jews.
At the time, just 25 percent of Salonica’s inhabitants were Greek Christians, a fact of great concern to its new rulers. As one officer observed, Salonica was a “gaudy city with all the tribes of Israel,” a place with “nothing Greek about it, nor European.” So the Greek government set about “Hellenizing” Salonica with the usual tools of the nationalist state, imposing the Greek language, which was known by few of the city’s residents, and changing street names.
An opportunity to do still more came in 1917, after the last of the great fires. With half of the population homeless, and most Jews without shelter, the Greek authorities swept away the charred remnants of the Ottoman city, replacing it with a French-style metropolis of broad, straight boulevards.
Engineering of a different sort was applied to Salonica’s population. New housing estates were filled with Greek Christian refugees. These had arrived in large numbers after World War I and the failed Greek attempt to resurrect the Byzantine Empire by conquering western Turkey. In 1923, the city’s Muslims were forced to move to Turkey as part of a population exchange. The minarets once vilified by a Greek journalist as “the symbols of a barbarous religion” were demolished, stripping Salonica of the most visible aspect of its Ottoman heritage.
With the Muslims gone, the Jews remained the only substantial non-Greek element in a city whose identity and appearance had changed drastically in just over a decade. Increasingly marginalized, many Jews emigrated. "
The German army invades Salonica in 1941.
In December 1942 the Greek authorities destroy the Jewish cemetery of Salonica, one of the largest and oldest Jewish cemeteries of Europe. They later built a new university campus on that site.
In the spring of 1943, 45,000 Jews are rounded up by the Nazis with the help of Greek gendarmes and collaborators.
Within a few hours of their arrival at Auschwitz, most of them are killed in gas chambers.
There is no sign of the nearly 500 years of Muslim and Jewish presence in the Salonica of today, now renamed Thessaloniki.
The cemeteries were destroyed and paved over, the minarets and synagogues were destroyed and/or burned in fires, and the street names were changed, all in the name of "Hellenization".
The Muslims were expelled and the Jews were murdered.
Of 500 years of Ottoman and Jewish lives in Salonica, only ghosts remain. A city of ghosts.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 145 reviews