Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower

Jul 15, 2009 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

The history of this city contains so many of the Big Human Themes. Exile, nostalgia. The course of empire. The maintenance of collective memory. The ways in which religions in close contact melt into each other. Nationalism vs. the Cosmopolis. The limits of tolerance, and the fated vulnerability of coastal, syncretic cities (I’m thinking of St. Petersburg and New Orleans, too). And most infuriatingly, the ludicrous imposture of the scoundrels who believe in tribal purity and uncomplicated cultur...more The history of this city contains so many of the Big Human Themes. Exile, nostalgia. The course of empire. The maintenance of collective memory. The ways in which religions in close contact melt into each other. Nationalism vs. the Cosmopolis. The limits of tolerance, and the fated vulnerability of coastal, syncretic cities (I’m thinking of St. Petersburg and New Orleans, too). And most infuriatingly, the ludicrous imposture of the scoundrels who believe in tribal purity and uncomplicated cultural continuity. Mazower calls Salonica a “city of ghosts” because the postwar, self-consciously Greek city of high rises sits on the site of other Salonicas, the Ottoman and Jewish Salonicas that aren’t even touristically visible in attenuated but picturesquely restored quarters—these other Salonicas have vanished, either by natural disaster (a fire in 1917 destroyed 75% of the old Jewish neighborhoods in the city center) or by the deliberate dynamiting of mosques and the bulldozing—done with the Nazi’s approval but not at their insistence—of the one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe (it was 35 times larger than that of Prague’s).

Salonica was also nicknamed “City of Refugees,” which could just as easily have been Mazower’s subtitle. Not only was the city a refuge, over many centuries, for millions of the displaced, huge portions of its citizens were driven away, forced to become refugees. The first were the thousands of Byzantine Christians the Ottomans sold into slavery after the 1430 conquest. The city lay barren and depopulated until 1492, when Sephardic Jews expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in their own homogenizing nation-building project settled in the city. The Ottomans were concerned with taxation and practiced a hands-off kind of governance, the Christians were still a small minority, so Salonica thus became a predominantly Jewish city, and a vibrant center of their learning and commerce. Politically Ottoman, ethnographically Jewish, geographically Bulgarian is how one 19th century observer described it.

With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire the city’s Muslim population became the refugees. The Greek state, which had taken Salonica in the first Balkan War of 1912, and the now-Turkey, agreed in 1923 to exchange populations: the Greeks would send all the Muslims to Turkey, and Turkey would “repatriate” their Christians. Here is religious-tinged nationalism at its most farcical. The “Greeks” expelled from Turkey thought of themselves as “Eastern Christians”—they had no sense of themselves as Greeks, and didn’t usually speak Greek; they spoke Turkish, as one would expect of communities that had existed for centuries in Anatolia, Thrace, and around the Black Sea. The Muslims expelled from Salonica were in a similar position: they’d been rooted in the city and in the Macedonian and Bulgarian hinterlands for centuries, thought of themselves as Ottoman subjects, and did not understand—and when they did, scarcely approved of—the secularist Kemalist nation state of “Turkey.”

The refugees from Turkey now tipped the balance of power in the city, which hadn’t rebuilt after the 1917 fire and now had trouble housing and employing all the newcomers. This scarcity of resources affected the city’s Jews as well: after the Nazis deported 45,000 to Auschwitz, the new “Greeks” wasted no time expropriating Jewish property and destroying the Jewish cemetery, over which a new university was built (its administrators to this day refuse to erect some kind of acknowledgement). The few thousand Salonican Jews who survived to return found it impossible to get much back. In time, after a few generations, the refugees from Turkey assimilated to Greek culture (Mazower writes that there is some nationalist embarrasment at being of refugee stock--and with understandable reason, as the refugees were not Greeks), and the city is now what the nation-builders of early 20th century Greece had envisioned: an ethnically and religiously homogenous “Greek” city, with its statue of Alexander the Great (he died before the city was founded), its Ottoman and Jewish pasts relegated to a hiccup between the imagined continuity of the Byzantine Empire and Modern Greece.

This is the spine of the book but there is much more, of course. Mazower gives a fascinating account of the functioning of the Ottoman Empire, its policies for the ruling of a polyglot, religiously diverse empire. I really enjoyed the picture of the golden age of Salonican Jewry, and of the community’s durably Hispanic character; the chapter on the Orientalisms that fueled European tourism and amateur archeology was excellent as well. There’s also great stuff on Levantine commerce, and its attendant nuisances, piracy on the seas and brigandage in the hills. Mazower knows his Great Powers diplomacy; he also knows urban planning, the psychology of charismatic false messiahs, Balkan cabaret music, and the intricacies of rabbinic controversy. I learned more about the rise of modern Greece and the two Balkan Wars than I had previously suspected. If Salonica was a crossroads of nations, then it follows that its history will embrace much of the world.
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Jul 11, 2011 Chrissie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: greece, history, kirkus, text-checked, turkey

This is an absolutely excellent book - engaging and clearly written. Fascinating study of the relationship between the three religions Christianity, Islam and Judaism and the people in Thessaloniki, Greece. It covers history of the area from about the 1300s. It IS detailed, very detailed, but not dry.

But I need something lighter right now, so I am putting this aside. I will finish the remaining 2/3 when I am more up to it.

I am giving it 4 stars for the portion I have read. When I pick it up agai...more

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May 04, 2013 Zach Schulz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Mark Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 is a micro historical study of Thessaloniki. The monograph, broken into three parts, begins with the 1430 conquest of Salonica by Sultan Murad II and concludes in 1950. Mazower exhibits “a history of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded.” (p. 439) Salonica, he argues with “more than two thousand years of continuous urban life,” was a culturally and religiously diverse city. (

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Mark Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 is a micro historical study of Thessaloniki. The monograph, broken into three parts, begins with the 1430 conquest of Salonica by Sultan Murad II and concludes in 1950. Mazower exhibits “a history of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded.” (p. 439) Salonica, he argues with “more than two thousand years of continuous urban life,” was a culturally and religiously diverse city. (p. 7) However, he contends contemporary Greek nationalism has obscured the rich history of Ottoman Muslim and Jewish influence in the city’s past.

The first part of the monograph, “The Rose of Sultan Murad,” establishes a dynamic urban community where commerce and culture are dominated by Sephardic Jews. After the Spanish Reconquista concluded in 1492, Sultan Bayezid II welcomed the commercially skilled Sephardic tribe into the Ottoman Empire. Mazower advocates that this immigration of Spanish Jews to Salonica in the mid-sixteenth century “succeeded in revitalizing the city” after its 1430 conquest. (p. 63) In exchange for the economic prosperity, the Ottomans did not intervene in Jewish affairs. Therefore, Mazower ascribes that Rabbis then became a strong political force influencing the daily operations of the city. In addition to exploring the revitalization of the city, Mazower posits that the Ottoman Empire’s decline was a symptom of its decentralized structure. As power was not concentrated in Istanbul, regional Ottoman elites were forced to negotiate locally in order to maintain their position. Consequently, Mazower maintains the Sephardic presence in Salonica resulted in the “Hispanization of its culture [and] was long lasting… felt right up to the end of the empire.” (p. 63)

Mazower’s second part, “In the Shadow of Europe,” then explores the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s integration into Europe while simultaneously facing the threat of growing Greek nationalism. Following the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which acknowledged the Ottoman Empire for the first time as privy to the “Public Law and System of Europe,” Mazower argues that “Salonica changed faster and more dramatically than ever before.” (p. 173-174) Salonica, considered exotically romantic, experienced increasing numbers of Western tourists. According to Mazower, the tourists believed “the real city of Salonica lay beneath the Ottoman surface” and the Ottomans were to be “blamed for the city’s squalor, and openly doubted [for] their ability to modernize and reform.” (p. 207-208) In addition, social stratification of the city became further delineated, resulting in an increasing anti-Ottoman Greek nationalism reinforced by these European tourists’ critiques. Unable to forcefully assert control, the Ottoman governor of the city could do nothing to counter this movement toward Greek reunification. The long held tradition of decentralized rule and accommodation would lead to eventual loss of the city.

Mazower’s third part, “Making the City Greek,” chronicles the end of the Ottoman Empire’s rule in Salonica with the 1912 “coordinated offensive by the Balkan states [that] resulted in the loss of almost all [Ottoman] European territories.” (p. 276) In addition, he continues to discuss other pivotal events that changed Salonica following the Ottoman defeat; a massive city-wide fire in 1917, the ‘Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations’ in 1923, the arrival of the Nazis in World War Two and the extermination of the Sephardic Jews starting in 1942. Mazower’s overarching theme in this final part follows the narrative of the city from an Ottoman holding, with a large diverse population, to the modern city of Thessaloniki, with an overwhelmingly Greek Orthodox population and little recall of a Turkish past.

Mazower’s monograph establishes that Salonica was once a cosmopolitan city consisting of Jews, Muslims, and Greek Orthodox Christians. However, he holds that modern Greek nationalistic history in Thessaloniki “is all about false continuities and convenient silences” (p. 439) that ignores the diverse Ottoman past. His sources are predominately Sephardic memoirs and Ottoman court proceedings which highlights the Jewish experience. The monograph serves as a micro study, displaying the diverse minutiae of Salonica’s society. Mazower then employs his microcosm of the Ottoman Empire in Salonica to counter the various nationalist movements that designate a convenient history in the creation of nationalistic propaganda. Illuminating a ghostly past, whispering and not completely forgotten, Mazower’s monograph shines light in the dark crypts of the dead: the ignored history of Salonica.

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Nov 24, 2011 Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars

Mazower's research here across languages and centuries and sources is a wonder and this book is a dense and elaborate delight. In Salonica, he follows the city from its Muslim conquest from the Byzantines in 1430 through the end of WWII. The Byzantine city was remade as Ottoman, but heavily flavored by Sefardic Jews around 1500, so that they were the largest group in the city in the 17th century. Mazower reconstructs this city of competing and cooperating religious and ethnic groups revealing de...more Mazower's research here across languages and centuries and sources is a wonder and this book is a dense and elaborate delight. In Salonica, he follows the city from its Muslim conquest from the Byzantines in 1430 through the end of WWII. The Byzantine city was remade as Ottoman, but heavily flavored by Sefardic Jews around 1500, so that they were the largest group in the city in the 17th century. Mazower reconstructs this city of competing and cooperating religious and ethnic groups revealing details of more than oriental splendor. The task of reconstruction is difficult because after the city was captured by the Greeks in 1912, its entire Ottoman culture was eliminated. In part by deliberate destruction, but also by fire in 1917, the effective ethnic cleansing of Macedonia and Western Anatolia after World War I (removing most Muslims and adding Turkish-speaking Eastern Christian refugees), and the deportation of most of the large Jewish population to Auschwitz in 1943. He points to the complicity of the city's leadership in the Holocaust and the lack of any repurcussions for that complicity. Mazower does not glorify the Ottoman past, but despite its impotence and crime it seems much more alive than the 20th century state. As in his other books, he finds much to fault in the creation of the modern nation-state, coming as it did in Greece and throughout the Balkans with ethnic-cleansing and the reappropriation of the past. These paragraphs come at the end of the book:

"And yet that older city may turn out to serve the living in new ways only now coming into view. Nation-states construct their own image of the past to shore up their ambitions for the future: forgetting the Ottomans was part of Greece's claim to modernity. But today the old delusions of grandeur are being replaced by a more sober sense of what individual countries can achieve alone. As small states integrate themselves into a wider world, and even the largest learn how much they need their neighbor's help to tackle the problems that face them all, the stringently patrolled and narrow-minded conception of history which they once nurtured and which gave them a kind of justification starts to look less plausible and less necessary. Other futures may require other pasts.

The history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences, the fictions necessary to tell the story of the rendezvous of a chosen people with the land marked out for them by destiny. It is an odd and implausible version of the past, especially for a city like Salonica, most of whose inhabitants cannot trace their connection to the place back more than three or four generations. They know that whatever they are taught at school, their own family experiences suggest a very different kind of story - a saga of turbulence, upheaval, abandonment and recovery in which chance, not destiny, played the greater role." (439)

Overall, an absolutely marvelous book. (less)

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Apr 01, 2009 Dave O'Neal rated it 5 of 5 stars

The city now called Thessaloniki already had me completely fascinated before I read this book. I'd visited once in 1994 and still dream of going back. When I do make it there again, it will be a hundred times more interesting to me for having read this book. The subtitle "City of Ghosts" will feel especially apt if you ever go there to experience the modern, thoroughly Greek, city, and consider that until the 20th century it was hardly Greek at all. A cosmopolitan mix of religion and nationality...more

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Dec 03, 2012 Kim rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: freshman-in-college

A book review I wrote for a History class:
In a country where most young adults don’t read for pleasure anymore, to read a book about a foreign city’s history isn’t common. For a majority of high school or college students, reading a book like Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower is unheard of unless doing so is required for a class. I love books, but stick rigorously to fiction. To read Salonica sounded like a bore to me; however, once I began readin...more A book review I wrote for a History class:
In a country where most young adults don’t read for pleasure anymore, to read a book about a foreign city’s history isn’t common. For a majority of high school or college students, reading a book like Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower is unheard of unless doing so is required for a class. I love books, but stick rigorously to fiction. To read Salonica sounded like a bore to me; however, once I began reading the book, the 500-year history of a city on the other side of the world suddenly intrigued me.
Before Salonica was invaded by the Ottoman Empire in 1430, it was a prosperous city full of peaceful diversity. After the Ottoman Empire took control of Salonica, the city remained fairly diverse, but tensions grew high. Throughout the rest of Salonica, those tensions rage in the form of massacres, revolts, gangs, house raids, and more. Some of the people discussed in this history book include: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, leader of the Young Turks; Saint Dimitrios, a Roman officer who’s legend lived on hundreds of years after his death; an important, but rather stupid archeologist, Emmanuel Miller; and a false Messiah named Sabbatai Zevi.
The rest of the book is full of more interesting facts about how life in Salonica developed over the next few hundred years. Janissaries, or military gangs, practically ruled the city for over a hundred years. Trade with Europe greatly increased since the city was on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, which brought brothels and family feuds in the modernization of the 1930’s. Robbers and murderers, as well as the causes/results of the two Balkan wars are just two more of the many interesting topics found in Mazower’s book.
Mazower wrote Salonica well. In one chapter, he covers multiple points, creates a mostly smooth flow, uses an incredible amount of sources, and manages to not bore the reader despite his wordiness. All of these traits are fantastic for a history book. They worked together to keep me engaged in the text, even though I don’t have a good memory to remember names, places, and some events.
One section of the book (in chapter six) stood out to me as I read because of a nice transition made between an event’s occurrence, use of a primary source of the event, and how the primary source was found. The man who was the Muslim judge of Salonica at the time of the 1821 massacre was “briefly imprisoned” but then released, and wrote about the event he’d witnessed. The way that Mazower used that piece was brilliant! Certainly, it was the best account of what happened in 1821 (and therefore probably the only one he would have used), but his placement of the judge’s story and narrative could not have been positioned into a better spot.
Throughout the entire book, a scad of sources are used to effectively communicate all that the author has to say. Despite Mazower using up to fifty-seven sources in a single chapter, he still manages to keep the flow of the story steady and, frankly, beautiful. Accompanying the story were interspersed maps of Salonica, and almost seventy photographs, paintings, and drawings showing styles of dress, people mentioned in the book, and basic city life.
The only two qualms I have about the book are the way its pages are cut (jaggedly) and how I don’t always know for sure what year I am reading about. I get frustrated flipping back in the story a few pages to find a map because of how the pages are cut (I read Knopf’s hardback version), and because Mazower’s book covers so many topics, I can be reading about events twenty years apart in time, but only three pages apart in the book.
Even though I am an avid (yet slow) reader, I would recommend this book to people who aren’t too keen on reading! Perhaps a well-written history book will appeal to them instead of the usual angst book or lengthy classic. I wouldn’t recommend people below the age of sixteen reading this simply because anyone younger may not be at the proper reading level yet. Also, to have even a smidgen of a background on some of the topics would be good; my history class helped me understand what was going on in certain parts of the book.
This book can be purchased new for $13.14 on Amazon in paperback or for $13.99 at either Amazon or Barnes and Noble for Kindle and Nook, respectively.
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Feb 21, 2013 Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars

Rather unexcitedly, religious and/or ethnic minorities throughout most of history have typically gotten on rather well with each other, not even excluding fucking each other from time to time. Mazower's book on the now-Greek city of Salonica showcases this mutual inclusion and fuckability between the disparate population of that city. Once a Byzantine fortress town, then an Ottoman city, now a crappy Greek metropolitan area which tries hard to ignore the Jews and Turks, Salonica is a great case...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Stella rated it 3 of 5 stars

I red the conclusion to this book today on a friend’s balcony in Athens, in Paleo Faliro, a suburb populated by Greeks from Constantinople-‘urbanised people’ as described to me. The night before I had a long conversation with a relative regarding Greece’s fate and the continuing battle between the ‘Western’ Greek, European in thought and measuring success based on individual achievement-what she identified as a minority in the country- and the pervasiveness of the ‘Anatolian’ or Ottoman culture...more

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Oct 10, 2009 Heather rated it 4 of 5 stars

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, with a few minor misgivings. This is an incredibly dense book which is to be expected given the breadth and width of the history being covered. Mazower does a lovely job of including first-hand accounts from the journals, letters, and other surviving documents of this famous city's various inhabitants, breathing life and soul into the historical account. Like many recent history books dealing with Muslim rule, Mazower tends toward a rosier view of Ottoman rul...more

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May 31, 2010 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars

And here I thought that Los Angeles was a city that flew in the face of history! In its thousand plus year history, Salonica was a Roman city, a Byzantine city, a Muslim city, a Jewish city, and finally a Greek Orthodox city. At several points over the last hundred years or so, a deliberate attempt was made to pave over the past and pretend it did not exist:

The history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences, the fictions necessary to tell the story of a rende

...more

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Aug 25, 2009 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, non-fiction

I recommend this book for anyone who enjoys reading history, particularly anyone interested in East European history. This book gives a fascinating account of the complex city of Salonica over five centuries. In the fifteenth century, the Byzantine city of Salonica was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Not long after that, wave after wave of Jews from western Europe began arriving in Salonica to escape persecution, and the Jewish inhabitants were soon the largest population segment in the city. M...more

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Apr 08, 2009 Nicholas Whyte added it · review of another edition

http://nhw.livejournal.com/702231.html[return][return]It is very good - an excellent story of the city through waves of depopulation and resettlement: the Greeks leave when the Ottomans take over in 1460, the Jews come in from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, the city becomes one of the centres of the Ottoman empire and (I guess) the largest Jewish city in the world, and then is captured by the Greek kingdom in 1912, the Turks are kicked out in 1923, the Jews deported and almost all killed in 19...more

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Jan 18, 2008 Theo Stamatiadis rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mazower unfolds the history of Salonica from the early otoman era to the aftermath of the second world war. Salonica, or Thessaloniki, is nowadays the second biggest city of Greece, situated in the north of the country. In most of the period covered by Mazower, it welcomed people with many different origins, languages and religions.

The reader discovers much about the history of the Balkans, but also about this unique combination of religions and ethnicities. Mazower structures his book in an fr...more

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Aug 22, 2012 Michael Kotsarinis rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reference

It is a great book, in fact it is how I consider history books should be written especially when dealing with areas of the world plagued by nationalist hate. Personally, combining it with my knowledge of history and other books I 've read, I think that this book is as close to the truth as one can get. And as it is always the case with the truth it's not always pleasant for everyone and it tends to dispel various self-assuring myths. The book is about Salonica and its history but the ideas, acts...more

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Nov 24, 2011 Dimitris Hall rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: lent

A history of Salonica that might be forever lost in the bloody mists of nationalism in the Balkans. A unique and very pleasurable combination of historical writing and prose, it makes imagining life in Salonica of yesteryear, a feeling almost unimaginable if looking at the city today, this much more enticing. It is an ode to a historical period that every country involved seems all too willing to forget.

Salonica City of Ghosts invites us to remember.

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Dec 29, 2011 NickdjSero rated it 4 of 5 stars

Powerful narration of a true story, that the greek governments really tried to hide. Living in the city of Thessaloniki, i discovered that few people know its history and its great importance. As Mark Mazower pointed that up nicely, only ghosts are left behind to restore these memories..

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Nov 09, 2009 Alex Ginsberg rated it 4 of 5 stars

An amazing look at a city in a time and a place I knew next to nothing about. What is now called Thessaloniki, the second-city of an almost entirely Christian and ethnically homogenous country, was once Salonica, a mishmash of cultures and languages under Ottoman rule - with the three major religions existing side-by-side: the Muslim ruling class, the conquered Greek Christians whose religious practices were tolerated (with limits) and Sephardic Jews who were invited by the Ottomans to resettle...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Ruhi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Scholarly, yet highly readable, history of one of the most fascinating cities in the world. My maternal ancestors were Turks descended from Salonica and were forcibly resettled in Istanbul during the infamous "exchange" in 1923. Many a Greek citizen of Istanbul died of heartbreak in Athens, and many Muslim citizens of Salonica never recovered from leaving their hometown, which they considered to be the most civilized city in the world. With fluent prose and amazing objectivity Mazurek tells the...more

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Sep 09, 2012 Mayer Grashin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting and sweeping read about a city and society that has changed beyond recognition. War, famine, plague, religious tolerance and intolerance, it's got it all.

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Apr 12, 2012 Filitsa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Almost a five star here. Great research, clear and evocative style, many perspectives on the same issues, but the Jewish perspective is slightly predominant.

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Mar 02, 2009 Adam Morris rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: anatolia-balkans, history

Oh for a time when men and women of all faiths lived together in abject squalor! A truly wonderful book about a city being pulled in all directions.

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May 08, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

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 t...more

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Jul 24, 2012 Melania rated it 4 of 5 stars

Best city in the world, if you buy a good book that describes it well you'll want to travel there instantly...so buy this book.

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Oct 01, 2009 srevans marked it as to-read

(added to amazon.com "Curious About These" list, c. March 2007.)

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Jul 15, 2009 Kelly marked it as to-read

Yes yes yes yes, this sounds right up my alley, I must read this!

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Aug 11, 2008 Andy rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Balkans, the Sephardim, the Ottoman Empire. You know you don't know enough about any of them. The eastern Med. was a very different place before Greeek, Turkish, Arab, and Jewish nationalism emerged in the 19th century. Poor, sometimes squalid, but not as riven as today, the region gave a home to the Jews chased from Spain and nourished a Spanish speaking Hebraic culture that lasted four hundred years. Now disappeared almost without a trace following fire, war and relentless reinvention unde...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Brian rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well-written history of a city whose history has always fascinated me. Salonika has been at the crossroads of geographic, politics and culture straddling a divide that waxed and waned in the last five hundred years. A must read for anyone interested in Greece, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, the Balkans and Jewish history.

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Feb 20, 2009 Jsb rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is one of the rare books that I have read twice.

A superior urban history of this polyglot, multiconfessional second city of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately Mazower throws in some needless criticisms of Israel and he lacks knowledge of Ladino and Turkish, but overall an excellent read.

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Jan 25, 2010 George rated it 4 of 5 stars

Incredibly thorough and a thoughtful way to piece together such an interesting and rich history. If you ever really wanted to know a whole lot about Thessaloniki, this is the book. Impressively documented while written to read like a narrative.

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Sep 20, 2010 Evan L. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: general-history

Read this one a while back in grad school. Great work of history. You would never know about all of the people exchanges in the Balkans if it weren't for books like this. Nationalism has done so much to try to erase the memory of the way that the Mediterranean world really operated in the Ottoman times, and we would do well to learn from the way these people got along (for the most part).

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