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

SALONICA's ghosts emerge in many ways. There are rumours about the spirits of the Sufi saint, Mousa Baba roaming the upper town; of unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea; and stories of Jewish treasure guarded by the spirits that have outwitted the exorcist; Mossad agents, former Nazis and anyone who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they protect.

But the ghosts emerge in other ways as well - through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city's multifarious past has not been for the lack of sources.

Mark Mazower begins with the city's conquest by Sultan Murad II in 1430, delineating its daily life under his successors, and traces its passage from the multi-confessional, extraordinarily polyglot ottoman world - as late as the first world war, Salonican porters and lemonade sellers commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages - to its role as an ethnically and linguistically homogenised bastion of the twentieth century nation state in which by 1950, more than ninety five per cent of the inhabitants were, by any definition, Greek.

The old empires collapsed and the nations fought their way into being, identities changed and people were labelled in new ways: Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks. It was in Ottoman Salonica where one of the most diverse societies in Europe has lived on the shore of the Mediterranean amid the city's minarets and cypresses, its ruined roman arches and the Byzantium churches. Under the sultans, Christians, Muslims and Jews alike had endured the terrors of plague and famine. In the docks and bazaars Egyptian merchants and Ukrainian slaves, Spanish-speaking rabbis and Turkish pashas rubbed shoulders with orthodox pilgrims, Sufi dervishes and Albanian brigands. Creeds clashed and mingled in an atmosphere of shared piety and messianic mysticism.

By 1950's when this book ends, Salonica's Muslims had been resettled in turkey, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans and most of them killed. The Greek civil war had just ended in the triumph of the anti-communist Right, and the city was set for rapid and entirely unexpected post-war expansion and transformation which saw its population double and treble within thirty or forty years. A forest of densely packed apartment blocks and giant advertising billboards sprouted where in living memory there had been cypresses and minarets, stables, owls and storks. Its transformation continues, and today Russian computer whiz-kids, Ghanaian doctors, Albanian stonemasons, Georgian labourers, Ukrainian nannies and Chinese street peddlers are entering Salonica's bloodstream.

In this remarkable evocation of a vanished word, Mark Mazower takes us into the bath houses and taverns, the palaces, gardens and brothels of the ottoman city, he describes how its fortunes changed as the empire fell apart and the age of national enmities arrived. The birthplace of the Young Turk revolution and its most famous son, Ataturk, Salonica was reshaped in the twentieth century by fire, war, refugee and genocide. First the Muslims were forced to depart, then the Jews, and a modern Greek metropolis emerged into the light of Europe under the guiding hand of politicians and urban planners. This book uncovers the memory of what lies beneath its prosperous streets, and recounts the haunting story of how the three great faiths that shared the city were driven apart.

Faisal Dawjee