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Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Mazower
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 63281
Media: Paperback
Pages: 544
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 4.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0375727388
Dewey Decimal Number: 949
EAN: 9780375727382
ASIN: 0375727388
Publication Date: May 9, 2006
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Condition: very clean barely read book fast shipping
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Product Description
Salonica, located in northern Greece, was long a fascinating crossroads metropolis of different religions and ethnicities, where Egyptian merchants, Spanish Jews, Orthodox Greeks, Sufi dervishes, and Albanian brigands all rubbed shoulders. Tensions sometimes flared, but tolerance largely prevailed until the twentieth century when the Greek army marched in, Muslims were forced out, and the Nazis deported and killed the Jews. As the acclaimed historian Mark Mazower follows the city’s inhabitants through plague, invasion, famine, and the disastrous twentieth century, he resurrects a fascinating and vanished world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
Once a city with three communities May 30, 2005
mschwindt@hotmail. (Washington state)
35 out of 42 found this review helpful
Thessalonika, or "Salonica," in this book, is the second city of Greece and-as in Athens, the capital-there has been a self-conscious attempt to bring the classical and Byzantine past to the forefront. In the center of the city is the ancient arch built to honor the Roman Emperor Galerius who defeated the Persians. There is a new museum devoted to the Byzantines and when a traveler departs from the train station, the locals might ask if "Constantinople" is the destination.
There are some hints of a less homogenized past. For example, there are places that serve Anatolian food or Turkish-style ice cream and there is the Ottoman-built White Tower near the waterfront as well as some disused Turkish baths. And, of course, the boyhood home of Mustafa Kemal, or Atatuerk, is a great tourist attraction. Still there are few remnants of the Ottoman Turks and even fewer of a Jewish community that was one of the largest in Europe. Today Salonica appears to be purely Greek and Christian. Symbolic of this is the university built on the site of the old Jewish cemetery.
So, it is ironic that in recent years Salonica has been praised for its "multicultural" history. Mark Mazower writes about the period from 1430 to the 1950s when the city really was multicultural; when this historically Christian city was ruled by Muslims and the largest community was Jewish.
Ottoman rule began when Sultan Murad II conquered the city after, legend says, a dream in which Allah told him that Salonica was his to take. Christians watched as the Ottomans changed Byzantine churches into mosques and welcomed in large numbers of Sefardim Jews who were fleeing persecution in Spain. By the 16th century, the city was divided among the Christians, Muslims and Jews, with the last group being the largest in number.
There are many tragic episodes to tell. After the Ottomans arrive, many of the conquered Greeks are sold in the slave market or reduced to begging for alms. Centuries later, after the Ottoman Empire had ended, the Muslims were forced to leave the city and Greece as a condition of the Balkan wars. As the Muslims left, millions of Christian and mainly Greek-speaking refugees arrived: they had also been expelled from their homes in the new republic of Turkey. Finally, the Nazis took away the Salonica Jews in the Second World War.
Most of this book is about the city under Muslim rule. The three communities identified themselves more by religion than by race, yet the Ottomans didn't attempt to extinguish the Christian and Jewish communities. Mazower writes that "for contrary to what our secular notions of a religious state might lead us to believe, the Ottoman authorities were not greatly interested in policing people's private beliefs. In general, they did not care what their subjects thought so long as they preserved the outward forms of piety." So Turks, Greeks, Jews, Albanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Vlachs were able to live together.
Often the different faiths shared curious similarities. Salonica became a center of Mevlevis, who followed the ideals of the Muslim teacher Haci Bektasi, and were "always to be found in the company of Greek monks." In fact, among the Albanians who followed the faith, there was the legend that Haci Bektasi had invented Bektashism as a bridge between Christianity and Islam. .There was also the Ma'min sect of Judeo-Spanish speaking Muslims. These were followers of Sabbatai Zevi, who proclaimed himself the Messiah for the Jews before converting to Islam in the 18th century. Mazower writes "in short, the city found itself at the intersection of many different creeds."
The book also describes other aspects of the city and its history. How the Ottoman Jannisaries became a law unto themselves in the 18th century. How Greek merchants became wealthy despite Ottoman rule. How a British national and Salonica resident Jackie Abbott became rich selling leeches to the local healers. There is also much about the 19th century rush to excavate and haul away archeological treasures from the city and the effect of the Muslim women on European visitors.
To Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, Salonica was the orient. However, at the same time, the city residents began to build and dress in "the Frankish style." This period also saw the decline of Ottoman power in the region. In the first part of the 19th century, the new state of Greece was created. The presence of an independent Greek speaking country nearby greatly exacerbated the tensions between Christians and Muslims in Salonica. A wider-spread tension resulted in a series of wars between the Greek state and the Ottomans and eventually brought Salonica into the Greek state. Finally, the new republic of Turkey defeated Greece in the 1922 Balkan War and the two governments agreed on exchange of Muslim and Christian populations. Greece received over a million Orthodox Christians from Asia Minor while Turkey received over 500,000 Muslims. The Muslim presence in Salonica was gone.
Twenty years later, with the Nazi occupation, the Jewish presence would disappear as well. Salonica had been one of the great centers of Jewish culture, Alfred Rosenberg reminded Martin Bormann in a letter; so the Nazis gave the city special attention. (The Nazis were surprised to learn that the city had never had a Jewish ghetto.) The occupiers looted the synagogues and sent the Jews to the concentration camps. This part of the book makes chilling reading.
Mazower's book could be seen as a counterpart to Philip Mansel's book on Istanbul, "Constantinople: City of the World's Desire 1453-1924." That book covers roughly the same period and ends with a lament for the Greeks that once lived in that now almost entirely Muslim city. And many Turks today will express a wish to see Salonica, which was the birthplace of Ataturk, the poet Nazim Hikmet, and very often, their grandparents.
Mazower`s book has some dry pages but also some interesting anecdotes about this once cosmopolitan city. And it is a valuable book because it covers a period of European history that is unknown to many readers. In 2004, many people watching the Olympic games in Athens wondered why "The Greeks" only referred to Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great and what had happened after the classical era. This book will fill in some of that gap.
Pretty good, interesting history November 12, 2005
Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel)
21 out of 33 found this review helpful
This book covers Salonica, a city in North East Greece, where once thrived a more diverse community. It covers the mostly Ottoman period and then into the period of nationalism, war and the present.
A few significant items are brought to light through this read. The book tries to reconstruct and explain how this city thrived with so many diverse peoples as a trading center in the Mediteranean. Unlike many books published today on the region this book does not cover up the Ottoman Muslim slave trade that invovled 11 million Africans and millions of Russians and Slavic peoples, many of whome passed through Salonica as it was a center of the slave trade in the Mediteranean. This book also tells the truth regarding the fact that it was the British and the West that stamped out slavery in the Mediteranean.
The most significant proposal of this book is to try to look at the interplay within a city that was at one time almost 1/3 Jewish with large Greek and Turkish populations and the resulting three religions. The idea here is to try to create a picture of Spain before 1492. In doing so certain negative apsects of Ottoman Muslim imperialism in the region and colonization of Greece are swept under the carpet to make for a more politically correct read. However no punches are pulled relating the population exchange whereby Greekse were forcibly removed from Turkey in 1922 and settled in Salonica and Turks left the city for Turkey. In the 1940s the Nazis came to Salonica and the once thriving ancient community was brutally deported and destroyed almost to a man. THis is the modern world, and Salonica only serves as a good example of the evils of modernity and runaway social extremes and political 'solutions'.
Seth J. Frantzman
 Christians, Muslims and Jews Lived Together June 3, 2005
John Matlock (Winnemucca, NV)
18 out of 28 found this review helpful
500 years of a city in the Balkans makes for an awful lot of history. Salonica (or Thessaloniki as it is known today) is located at one of the crossroads of the world. It is Greek at the moment, but has at times been Turkish. As a crossroads it had strong Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities. It was not without conflict, but they lived together for centuries. Only in fairly modern times were the Muslims forced to leave, and during World War II the Germans rounded up the Jews as part of the final solution (which makes for tragic reading).
This is an area far from the mainstream of most modern American history books. Most of our history comes from other areas of the world. So this book opens new areas to study for the first time. It is exhaustively researched and provides an insight into a world, a culture far from our own. For many years, this was considered the orient, where east meets west.
A fascinating place, a fascinating read.
History Matters August 5, 2005
J. Paul Martin (NYC)
14 out of 19 found this review helpful
Mazower captures in remarkable ways the history of Salonica, a town which is today in northern Greece. At the same time many events that took place at Salonica were repercussions and optics on European and Middle Eastern history as a whole. For very different reasons at different epocs, Salonica found itself responding to events far beyond its shores. In the fifteenth century it became the home of many Jews expelled from Spain. After centuries under Ottoman rule, in the twentieth century it saw the return of Greek rule and then the forced removal of its large Jewish population under German occupation. The story of Salonica is an illustration of the ways in which a single physical place has seen whole communities come and go, typically under tragic circumstances. The book reminds us of how difficult it is for human beings with different beliefs and ideologies to live peacefully together. For many centuries this was achieved in Salonica, but then something changes and persecutions and emigrations follow. Mazower tells these stories without any attempt to prove a thesis about inter-faith or even human relations. There are interesting individuals but no heroes or saints. Communities do good things and do bad things. It is a story of many human lives that would otherwise have been buried with the communities that over the years have been forced to leave and officially left out of the city's history. After reding it Salonica will be on my next trip to Europe!
Forgetting and remembering the past. May 14, 2006
C. Gilbert (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
Salonica, City of Ghosts functions well both as a history of Thessaloniki and as a meditation about nationalism. There is a lot to learn, particularly in Europe, from this city which has served as a home for so many cultures.
Mazower's book begins with the Hellanistic origins of Salonica and takes it and the reader through years of conquest and recapture beginning with the Ottoman victory in 1430. The book ends with the aftermath of World War II and the birth of the city which we know today. Mazower has a very clear point to make about the way in which conquest becomes an act of erasure and forgetting. The subject of national identity is the thread that ties the pages of the book together.
Salonica is very complete and thorough. The pictures selected are appropriate and illustrative and the notes helpful. Mazower is a good writer. I was not as engaged with the book as the material warranted-- Mazower can have a very dry tone which does not always welcome the reader into the work.
Recommended for anyone with an interest in Greek or Turkish history. This should also appeal to readers with a general interest in the subject of nationalism and national identity.
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