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Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430- 1950 By Mark Mazower - Alfred A. Knopf 528 pp.; $35
Today, all that remains of a once-bustling cosmopolitan Salonika where Jews, Muslims and Christians thrived side by side, are the memories
Yigal Schleifer
Finding the old Jewish cemetery of Salonika is an impossible task. Not a single marker remains of what was once one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe, a necropolis dating back to the 15th century and covering a vast area outside of Salonika's ancient city walls. Today, the city's university stands there.
It's a powerful metaphor for the modern story of Salonika. For five centuries a polyglot metropolis of Ottoman Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Sephardi Jews, modern Salonika is the thoroughly Greek Thessaloniki, a bustling port town on the periphery of the Balkans. The memories and monuments of the city's Muslims, who were forced out as part of the population exchanges between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s, and its Jews, most of whom were murdered in Auschwitz, have for the most part been effectively scrubbed from Salonika's surface and collective consciousness.
In his aptly titled "Salonica, City of Ghosts," Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, pays homage to the city's rich multicultural history, carefully recreating and illuminating its vanished past. In his encyclopedic, yet completely engaging book, Mazower covers some 500 years, from the Ottoman conquest of Salonika in 1430 to the period just after World War II, when the city's last connection to the Ottoman period - the Jewish community - all but disappeared.
Before the arrival of the Ottomans, Salonika was a Greek- speaking Byzantine city whose churches rivaled or even surpassed those of Constantinople. For Salonika's Greeks, the conquest by the Muslim Ottomans was a devastating blow, but something they always viewed as a temporary phase, even as the centuries rolled by. If the conquest by the Ottomans changed the city from an exclusively Greek one, it was the arrival of Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition, in the 15th and 16th centuries, that truly transformed Salonika.
While Jews play bit roles in the Greek histories that he has read, Mazower tells us that was not the case in Salonika. "In Salonica... it would...