Thessaloniki

• 1. Introduction

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  Thessaloniki is now the second-largest city in Greece. In 1912, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos was asked whether the Greek army should march on it or on Monastir. His reply was "Θεσσαλονίκη με κάθε κόστος!", which means "Thessaloniki, at all costs!" The city sits on the Thermaic Gulf, at the northwest corner of the Aegean Sea. Its metropolitan area holds slightly over one million people. Why did emperors, sultans and generals want this one port so badly? Who gave the city its name, and who lived inside its walls? How does a place with churches, mosques and synagogues side by side lose so much of itself, and what stands there now?

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• 2. A Name With Many Spellings

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  The princess Thessalonike gave the city her name, and the name itself means "Thessalian victory." It joins the Greek word Thessalos with Nike, the word for victory. The victory in question was the Macedonian win at the Battle of Crocus Field, fought in 353 or 352 BC. Thessalonike was a half-sister of Alexander the Great. A popular Greek legend says she became a mermaid in the Aegean after Alexander died.

  The shorter form Saloniki is first recorded in Greek in the Chronicle of the Morea, from the 14th century. It must be older, because al-Idrisi was already calling the city Salunik in the 12th century. That form travelled widely. Turkish speakers say Selanik and Italians say Salonicco. Judeo-Spanish speakers said Saloniko, and South Slavic languages use Solun.

  English has been just as unsettled. Until the early 20th century, printed texts most often used Thessalonica, matching the Latin name. Through most of the rest of that century, Salonika took over. When the city joined the Kingdom of Greece in 1912, Thessaloniki was revived as its official name. By about 1985 it had also become the most common single spelling in English. Locals pronounce the L with a dark, deep sound, a trait of the modern Macedonian dialect of Greek.

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• 3. Roman Crossroads

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  Around 315 BC, King Cassander of Macedon founded a city on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and 26 other local villages. He named it for his wife Thessalonike, a daughter of Philip II of Macedon. Pella, about 40 km away, stayed the capital of the kingdom until its fall. Even so, the new city kept its own autonomy and parliament and became the most important in Macedonia.

  In 128 BC, twenty years after the Macedonian kingdom fell, Rome made the city capital of its province of Macedonia. In 41 BC, Mark Antony made it a free city of the Roman Republic. Its fortune rested on the Via Egnatia, the road linking Dyrrhachium with Byzantium. That road carried trade toward Rome and other great centres of commerce. The city also lies at the southern end of the main north-south route through the Balkans, along the valleys of the Morava and the Axios.

  About 50 AD, Paul the Apostle visited the city's chief synagogue on three Sabbaths during his second missionary journey. He sowed the seeds of its first Christian church and later wrote letters to it. Two of them appear in the Biblical canon as First and Second Thessalonians. Some scholars hold that the first is the earliest written book of the New Testament.

  In 306 AD the city acquired a patron saint, Demetrius, a Christian whom Galerius is said to have put to death. Most scholars accept Hippolyte Delehaye's theory that Demetrius was not a native of the city. His veneration was transferred there when Thessaloniki replaced Sirmium as the main military base in the Balkans. A basilica named Hagios Demetrios was first built in the fifth century AD and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Under the tetrarchy, the city became the administrative capital of one portion of the empire, ruled by Galerius. He commissioned an imperial palace, a new hippodrome, a triumphal arch and a mausoleum.

  In 379 the city became capital of the new Prefecture of Illyricum. The following year, the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. In 390, troops under Emperor Theodosius I carried out a massacre of the inhabitants, who had risen in revolt over the detention of a favorite charioteer. By the Fall of Rome in 476, Thessaloniki stood as the second-largest city of the Eastern Roman Empire.

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• 4. Second City of Byzantium

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  The Greek nickname Symprotévousa means "the co-capital." It echoes Symvasilévousa, the "co-reigning" city, a title that reflects the rank Thessaloniki held beside Constantinople in the Byzantine Empire. In the mid-12th century about 150,000 people lived there, which made it second only to Constantinople in wealth and size. In the 14th century its population was put at 100,000 to 150,000, larger than London at that time.

  In the sixth and seventh centuries, Avars and Slavs besieged the city several times without success, as told in the Miracles of Saint Demetrius. Many Slavs settled in the hinterland, which became known as Macedonian Sclavinia. In the ninth century, the missionaries Cyril and Methodius, both natives of the city, created Old Church Slavonic, the first literary language of the Slavs. It was most likely based on the Slavic dialect spoken in the hinterland of their hometown.

  A naval attack in 904, led by Byzantine converts to Islam including Leo of Tripoli, ended in the sack of the city. Normans from the Kingdom of Sicily sacked it again in 1185. In 1204 the forces of the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople and folded Thessaloniki into the Kingdom of Thessalonica, the largest vassal of the Latin Empire. In 1224 Theodore Komnenos Doukas of the Despotate of Epirus overran the kingdom and crowned himself Emperor. The city became capital of the short-lived Empire of Thessalonica. After his defeat at Klokotnitsa in 1230, it became a vassal of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The Nicaean Empire recovered it in 1246.

  In 1342 the Commune of the Zealots rose, an anti-aristocratic party of sailors and the poor, now described as social-revolutionary. The city ran its own government, a form of republic, and was practically independent. The movement was overthrown in 1350, and the city rejoined the Empire. After a lengthy siege from 1383 to 1387, it surrendered to the forces of Sultan Murad I. It returned to Byzantine hands in 1403 under the Treaty of Gallipoli, after Emperor Manuel II backed Süleyman in the Ottoman succession struggle that followed the Battle of Ankara. Peace did not last, and Ottoman pressure grew again. In 1423, Despot Andronikos Palaiologos ceded the city to the Republic of Venice, hoping to shield it from the Ottomans who were besieging it.

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• 5. Ottoman Mosaic

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  On the 29th of March 1430, Sultan Murad II captured Thessaloniki, using artillery to bypass its double walls. Contemporary reports estimated that about one-fifth of the population was enslaved. Some residents escaped, among them the intellectuals Theodorus Gaza and Andronicus Callistus. Still, the city kept its standing. With Smyrna, it was among the most important trading hubs of the Ottoman Empire, strong in shipping and manufacturing. Most of its tradespeople were Jewish.

  The 1478 census of Selânik, as the city was now called, counted 6,094 Christian Orthodox households and 4,320 Muslim ones, plus some Catholic. It recorded no Jews. Soon after the turn of the 16th century, nearly 20,000 Sephardic Jews arrived from the Iberian Peninsula after the Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelled them from Spain. Ottoman archives for 1519 list 3,143 Jewish households and 530 bachelors, a total of 15,715 people, or 54% of the city. Some historians think the Ottoman invitation to settle was a strategy to stop the Christian population from dominating.

  In the 16th century Thessaloniki was the largest Jewish city in the world and the only one with a Jewish majority. Its Sephardic community nicknamed it la madre de Israel, "Israel's mother," and "Jerusalem of the Balkans." Many residents spoke Judeo-Spanish, the Romance language of the Sephardic Jews. In the 1680s, about 300 families who followed Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam and moved to the city. Known as the Dönmeh, they built an active community that thrived for about 250 years.

  In the spring of 1821, the Greek War of Independence broke out, and the governor Yusuf Bey held more than 400 hostages in his headquarters. On the 18th of May, learning of the uprising in the villages of Chalkidiki, he ordered half of them slaughtered before his eyes. The mulla of Thessaloniki, Hayrıülah, wrote: "Every day and every night you hear nothing in the streets of Thessaloniki but shouting and moaning." The Greek community needed until the end of the century to recover. Thessaloniki was also a Janissary stronghold where novices were trained. In June 1826, regular Ottoman soldiers destroyed the Janissary base and killed over 10,000 Janissaries, an event called the Auspicious Incident. From 1826 the city served as capital of Selanik Eyalet, renamed the Selanik Vilayet after 1867.

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• 6. Revolution and Handover

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  In 1888 the Oriental Railway tied Thessaloniki to Central Europe through Belgrade, and the first tram service started the same year. A line to Monastir followed in 1893, and the Thessaloniki-Istanbul Junction Railway reached Constantinople in 1896. The city walls were torn down between 1869 and 1889. Electric lamp posts lit the streets in 1908. New public buildings in the eclectic style, along with a Government House, were meant to show a European face for both the city and the empire.

  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern republic of Turkey, was born in the city in 1881. His birthplace, at what is now 17 Apostolou Street, is today the Atatürk Museum, part of the Turkish consulate complex. As a soldier he joined the Young Turks, a reform movement that wanted a constitutional government in place of the sultan's absolute monarchy. In 1908, after starting as an underground movement, they launched the Young Turk Revolution from Thessaloniki. It brought them control of the empire and ended the sultan's power. Eleftherias (Liberty) Square, where they gathered at the outbreak, is named after the event.

  In 1890 the city held 118,000 people, of whom 47% were Jews, 22% Turks, 14% Greeks and 8% Bulgarians. By 1913 the population stood at 157,889, with Jews at 39%, Turks at 29% and Greeks at 25%. Many religions were practiced and many languages spoken in its streets.

  On the 31st of October 1912, the Ottoman ironclad Feth-i Bülend was sunk in Thessaloniki harbour. The loss was militarily negligible but further damaged Ottoman morale. The Greek Navy blockaded the naval base, Greek forces fought a rearguard action at Yenidje, and Bulgarian troops were advancing nearby. General Hasan Tahsin Pasha concluded the defence was untenable. The garrison negotiated with the Greek and Bulgarian armies separately. It chose Greece partly because the Ottoman side believed Greek troops would be more lenient toward residents. Talks concluded at the village of Topçin.

  On the 8th of November 1912, the feast day of Saint Demetrius, the Greek Army accepted the unconditional surrender of the 25,000-strong Ottoman garrison. Almost five centuries of Ottoman rule were over. The Bulgarian army arrived a day later. Hasan Tahsin Pasha told its officials: "I have only one Thessaloniki, which I have surrendered." The Treaty of Bucharest formally annexed the city in 1913. On the 18th of March 1913, Alexandros Schinas assassinated George I of Greece there.

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• 7. Fire and Exchange

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  In 1915 a large Allied expeditionary force set up a base at Thessaloniki for operations against pro-German Bulgaria. This became the Macedonian Front, also called the Salonika front. The Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service ran a temporary hospital in a disused factory. In 1916, pro-Venizelist officers and civilians, backed by the Allies, formed the Provisional Government of National Defence. It controlled the "New Lands" won in the Balkan Wars, while the king's government in Athens held "Old Greece." The two governments were unified under Venizelos in 1917, after King Constantine abdicated.

  On the 18th of August 1917, an unattended kitchen fire started the Great Thessaloniki Fire. It burned uncontrollably for 32 hours and destroyed most of the old centre. The Pallis Report counted 72,000 people homeless, about 50,000 of them Jewish. Seventy percent of the population lost their work. Two churches and many synagogues and mosques were lost, and Hagios Demetrios burned before being rebuilt. Many Jews emigrated to the United States, Palestine and Paris rather than wait for the city to rebuild.

  The government forbade quick rebuilding so that it could impose a new European-style plan. A group of architects, including the Briton Thomas Mawson, prepared it under the French architect Ernest Hébrard. They took the Byzantine era as their basis and laid out axes, diagonal streets and monumental squares. The plan reserved sites for public buildings and provided for restoring Byzantine churches and Ottoman mosques. Property values fell from 6.5 million Greek drachmas to 750,000. The upper district of Ano Poli, north of the centre, escaped the flames and keeps its stone-paved streets.

  After Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, a population exchange with Turkey remade the city. Over 160,000 ethnic Greeks from the former Ottoman Empire, particularly Asia Minor and East Thrace, were resettled there. About 20,000 of the city's Muslims were deported to Turkey. The Jewish population became a minority for the first time since the 16th century, at about 20% of residents. In March 1926 Greece restated that all its citizens enjoyed equal rights, and a considerable proportion of the city's Jews decided to stay.

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• 8. Occupation and Rebuilding

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  In November 1940 alone, Italian bombing killed 232 people in Thessaloniki, wounded 871 and damaged or destroyed over 800 buildings. German forces took the city on the 8th of April 1941. Hitler had at first planned to incorporate it directly into Nazi Germany. On the 15th of May 1941, in the district of Eptalofos, the first Greek resistance organization, Eleftheria, was founded. It produced the first anti-Nazi newspaper in an occupied territory anywhere in Europe. The Germans also ran a camp known as Konzentrationslager Pavlo Mela, where resistance members and other anti-fascists were held.

  On the 15th of March 1943, the deportation of the city's Jews to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen began, after the Nazis forced them into a ghetto near the railroads. Of the 45,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz, only 4% survived. The occupiers also bulldozed the ancient Jewish cemetery, which held around 500,000 tombs, and reused the marble gravestones in roads and new construction. Greeks of the Resistance helped save some Jewish residents. A Holocaust memorial built in 1997 in Eleftherias Square marks the place where Jews were rounded up before the trains. About 1,200 Jews remain in the city. The Israeli singer Yehuda Poliker recorded a song about them called "Wait for me, Thessaloniki."

  On the 30th of October 1944, ELAS forces entered the city as liberators under Markos Vafiadis, who ignored orders from the leadership in Athens not to do so. In the 1946 referendum on the monarchy, the city's majority voted for a republic, unlike the rest of Greece. Large-scale building of infrastructure and industry followed through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. On the 19th and the 20th of June 1978, a series of earthquakes measuring 5.5 and 6.5 struck. One apartment building in the centre collapsed, and the death toll reached 51.

  Several early Christian and Byzantine monuments were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1988, and Thessaloniki now has 15 listed monuments, more than any other Greek city. Wartime damage had left some of them unrestored until the 1980s. In 1997 the city was European Capital of Culture, and in 2004 it hosted football events of the Summer Olympics. In 2010 more than 15.8 million tons of goods passed through its port, the second-largest in Greece after Aghioi Theodoroi. Aristotle University is the largest in Greece and the Balkans. Thessaloniki Airport was upgraded and expanded in 2021, and Thessaloniki Metro opened in 2024.

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