What makes Thessaloniki such a unique city? New yet already classic, this study seeks the answer in its five hundred years of modern history, during which it emerged first as an Ottoman and later as a Greek metropolis. During the same period, it was also a Jewish city, a refuge for thousands of Sephardim persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. Christians, Muslims, and Jews thus formed one of the most diverse societies in the Mediterranean and Europe.
Masterfully bringing this lost world to life, the author guides us through ruined Roman arches, Byzantine churches, and Turkish mosques, to the taverns and hammams, gardens, palaces, and brothels of the old city; where Egyptian merchants and Ukrainian slaves, Turkish pashas and European travelers crossed paths with Orthodox pilgrims, Catholic missionaries, Spanish-speaking rabbis, and Sufi dervishes, but also with Albanian bandits and spies of the Great Powers, where even the shoeshiners, porters, and street vendors spoke half a dozen languages at the waterfront and the bazaar.
Daily life and ethnic and religious interaction are topics Mazower thoroughly investigates before showing how the city's fate changes in the twentieth century, with the collapse of the empire and the advent of nation-states. War, fire, refugee crises, genocide, and the Holocaust radically change Thessaloniki, which first loses its Muslims with the population exchange, and then its Jews on the way to Auschwitz. What slowly emerges from the ashes is a modern, dynamic Greek "co-capital." However, the city's atmosphere is still haunted by the ghosts of the great historical communities that shared it, by the adventures of the peoples and individuals who met in its turbulent history. This book is dedicated to their vivid memory.