Salonica, City of Ghosts by Mark Mazower

In a very different era, far in the future, archaeologists would assign new values to the statues, columns and sarcophagi they found, and new rulers-after the Ottomans had been defeated in their turn-would use them to reshape and redefine the city once more. The Hippodrome, forum and imperial palace fell into ruins which gradually disintegrated and slipped beneath the slowly rising topsoil, leaving an invisible substratum of catacombs, crypts and secret passages. A few Christian survivors returned and saw their great churches turned into mosques. But of this Greek past, only traces survived the Ottoman conquest.

Throughout it remained a city whose inhabitants spoke Greek. Sometimes it had flourished, at others it was sacked and looted. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.īefore the city fell in 1430, it had already enjoyed seventeen hundred years of life as a Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine metropolis.

This richly textured homage to the world that went with them uncovers the memory of what lies buried beneath Salonica’s prosperous streets and recounts the haunting story of how the three great faiths that shared the city were driven apart. Thousands of refugees arrived from Anatolia, the Muslims were forced out, and the Nazis deported and killed the Jews. In the twentieth century, the Greek army marched in, and fire and world war wrought their grim transformation. Drawing on an astonishing array of primary sources, Mazower’s vivid narrative illuminates the multicultural fabric of this great city and describes how its fortunes changed as the empire fell apart and the age of national enmities arrived.

The historian Mark Mazower, author of the greatly praised Dark Continent, follows the city’s inhabitants through the terrors of plague, invasion and famine, and takes us into their taverns, palaces, gardens and brothels. How this bustling, cosmopolitan and tolerant world emerged and then disappeared under the pressure of modern nationalism is the subject of this remarkable book. Creeds clashed and mingled in an atmosphere of shared piety and messianic mysticism. Egyptian merchants and Ukrainian slaves, Spanish-speaking rabbis–refugees from the Iberian Inquisition–and Turkish pashas rubbed shoulders with Orthodox shopkeepers, Sufi dervishes and Albanian brigands. Under the rule of the Ottoman sultans, one of the most extraordinary and diverse societies in Europe lived for five centuries amid its minarets and cypresses on the shore of the Aegean, alongside its Roman ruins and Byzantine monasteries. Salonica, City of Ghosts is an evocation of the life of a vanished city and an exploration of how it passed away.

Salonica, City of Ghosts by Mark Mazower