{"product_id":"salonica-city-of-ghosts-isbn-9780375727382","title":"Salonica, City of Ghosts","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.“Remarkable. . . . Mazower reconstructs a society of dazzling ethnic complexity and exoticism . . . .a thriving port and a crossroads between Europe and Asia.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An exhaustive, affectionate biography of the city, a deeply researched account that becomes a portrait of the singular, vanished cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Baltimore Sun\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A masterpiece. . . . A masterly synthesis of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history. . . . A book to bring one to tears.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A history of a fascinating, turbulent city by one of the most distinguished historians of his generationÉMazower has provided a brilliant guide to Salonica’s rich past.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Timely, magnificent and sometimes unbearably poignant . . . Brings alive a lost world, one with much to teach contemporary Europe about the nature of identity and nationality.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] tremendous book about a city unique not just in Europe, but in the entire history of humanity. . .What [Mazower] does to perfection is to express the historical meaning of Salonica down the generations, authenticating his story with a multitude of contemporary quotations, from the 15th to the 20th century, and scrupulously explaining it all out of his profound scholarly \u003cbr\u003eknowledge. ”—Jan Morris, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Mark Mazower's new book is a necessary masterpiece; necessary because it fills a gap, and a masterpiece because it fills that gap so well. It is written in bite-sized pieces that make the book a pleasure to read, and, since one cannot resist reading the next section, curiously moreish. It sustained me recently during a long trip to the US, continually delivering small pleasures whenever I had a moment in hand.\"-—Louis de Bernieres, \u003ci\u003eTimes of London\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Enthralling new history . . . In a brilliant chapter on popular culture in the interwar years, Mazower shows how the development of a modern urban culture -- in dance, music, art, literature and, most importantly, sex -- began to turn a city of exiles and refugees into a place that could be called home. . . Tragic, hopeful and beautifully written, \u003ci\u003eSalonica, City of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e shows how cities, as much as people, can be seduced by the prospect of escaping their own past and remaking themselves in ways unrecognizable to old friends.\"  —Charles King, \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Mazower] sensitively analyses the internal debates and divisions which could be found within all the major communities.\" —Noel Malcolm, \u003ci\u003eSunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Masterly . . . draws on many new sources: the diary of a Ukraninian refugee in the 1720s; consuls' despatches; the files of the Jewish Museum of Greece. This is a brilliant and timely reminder that cities have played as important a role as states in the lives of their inhabitants.\"—Philip Mansel, \u003ci\u003eThe Spectator\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A brilliant reconstruction of one of Europe's great meeting places between the three monotheistic faiths.\"—\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Mazower is a formidable historian. Two of his earlier books, \u003ci\u003eInside Hitler's Greece\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Balkans: A Short History\u003c\/i\u003e, rank as definitive works. He has produced a majestic work: the biography of a city, complete with soul and ichor.\"—Moris Farhi, \u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Salonica, City of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e, is a wonderful evocation of the complex, glorious and tragic history of a city, with lessons both positive and negative for our present age. The author, as always, writes with compelling clarity and penetrating eye for detail. If the past is another country, the author allows us to travel there.\" —Anthony Daniels, \"Books of the Year,\" \u003ci\u003eSunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"This exploration into the soul of a Balkan ciy is both evocative and profound, a masterful addition to Mazower's work.\" —Jad Adams, \u003ci\u003eBBC History\u003c\/i\u003e (Salonica was their book of the month for October.)\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University and Birkbeck College,  London. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eInside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44\u003c\/i\u003e,  winner of the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and the Longman\/History Today  Award for Book of the Year. He lives in New York City.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eConquest, 1430\u003cbr\u003eBeginnings\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore the city fell in 1430, it had already enjoyed seventeen hundred  years of life as a Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine metropolis.  Sometimes it had flourished, at others it was sacked and looted.  Foreigners had seized it and moved on. Throughout it remained a city  whose inhabitants spoke Greek. But of this Greek past, only traces  survived the Ottoman conquest. A few Christian survivors returned and  saw their great churches turned into mosques. 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. 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. One thing, however,  always survived as a reminder of its Greek origins, however badly it  was battered and butchered by time and strangers, and that was its  name.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSalonicco, Selanik, Solun? Salonicha or Salonique? There are at least  thirteen medieval variants alone; the city is an indexer’s nightmare  and a linguist’s delight. “Is there really a correct pronunciation of  Salonika?” wrote an English ex-serviceman in 1941. “At any rate nearly  all of us now spell it with a ‘k.’ ” His presumption stirred up a  hornet’s nest. “Why Saloneeka, when every man in the last war knew it  as Salonika?” responded a certain Mr. Pole from Totteridge. “I disagree  with W. Pole,” wrote Captain Vance from Edgware, Middlesex. “Every man  in the last war did not know it as Salonika.” Mr. Wilks of Newbury  tried to calm matters by helpfully pointing out that in 1937 “by Greek  royal decree, Salonika reverted to Thessaloniki.” In fact it had been  officially known by the Greek form since the Ottomans were defeated in  1912.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is only foreigners who make things difficult for themselves, for the  Greek etymology is perfectly straightforward. The daughter of a local  ruler, Philip of Macedon, was called Thessaloniki, and the city was  named after her: both daughter and city commemorated the triumph (niki)  of her father over the people of Thessaly as he extended Macedonian  power throughout Greece. Later of course, his son, Alexander, conquered  much more distant lands which took him to the limits of the known  world. There were prehistoric settlements in the area, but the city  itself is a creation of the fourth-century BC Macedonian state.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday the association between the city and the dynasty is as close as  it has ever been. If one walks from the White Tower along the wide  seafront promenade which winds southeast along the bay, one quickly  encounters a huge statue of Megas Alexandros—Alexander the Great.  Mounted on horseback, sword in hand, he looks down along the five-lane  highway (also named after him) out of town, towards the airport, the  beaches and the weekend resorts of the Chalkidiki peninsula. The statue  rises heroically above the acrobatic skateboarders skimming around the  pedestal, the toddlers, the stray dogs and the partygoers queuing up  for the brightly lit floating discos and bars which now circumnavigate  the bay by night. It is a magnet for the hundreds who stroll here in  the summer evenings, escaping the stuffy backstreets for the  refreshment of the sea breeze as the sun dips behind the mountains.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut in 1992, after the collapse of Yugoslavia led the neighbouring  republic of Macedonia to declare its independence, Alexander’s Greek  defenders took to the streets in a very different mood. Flags  proliferated in shop-windows, and car stickers and airport banners  proclaimed that “Macedonia has been, and will always be, Greek.” Greeks  and Slavs did battle over the legacy of the Macedonian kings, and  Salonica was the centre of the agitation. In the main square, hundreds  of thousands of angry protestors were urged on by their Metropolitan,  Panayiotatos (His Most Holy) Panteleimon (known to some journalists as  His Wildness [Panagriotatos] for the extremism of his language). The  twentieth century was ending as it had begun, with an argument over  Macedonia, and names themselves had become a political issue in a way  which few outside Greece understood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe irony was that Alexander himself never knew the city named after  his half-sister, for it was founded during the succession struggle  precipitated by his death. He had a general called Cassander, who was  married to Thessaloniki. Cassander hoped to succeed to the Macedonian  throne and having murdered Alexander’s mother to get there, he founded  a number of cities to re-establish his credentials as a statesman. The  one he immodestly named after himself has vanished from the pages of  history. But that given his wife’s name in 315 BC came to join  Alexandria itself in the network of new Mediterranean ports that would  link the Greek world with the trading routes to Asia, India and Africa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs events would prove, Cassander chose his spot well. Built on the  slope running down to the sea from the hills in the shadow of Mount  Hortiatis, the city gave its inhabitants an easy and comforting sense  of orientation: from earliest times, they could see the Gulf before  them with Mount Olympos across the bay in the distance, the forested  hills and mountains rising behind them, the well-rivered plains  stretching away to the west. Less arid than Athens, less hemmed in than  Trieste, the new city blended with its surroundings, marking the point  where mountains, rivers and sea met. It guarded the most accessible  land route from the Mediterranean up into the Balkans and central  Europe, down which came Slavs (in the sixth century), and Germans (in  1941) while traders and NATO convoys (on their way into Kosovo in 1999)  went in the other direction. Its crucial position between East and West  was also later exploited by the Romans, whose seven-hundred-kilometre  lifeline between Italy and Anatolia, the Via Egnatia, it straddled.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePoised between Europe and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, the  interface of two climatic zones brings Salonica highly changeable air  pressure throughout the year. Driving winter rains and fogs subdue the  spirits, and helped inspire a generation of melancholic modernists in  the 1930s. The vicious north wind which blows for days down the Vardar  valley has done more damage to the city over the centuries than humans  ever managed, whipping up fires and turning them into catastrophes. A  bad year can also bring heavy falls of snow, even the occasional ice in  the Gulf: freezing temperatures in February 1770 left “many poor lying  in the streets dead of cold”; in the 1960s, snowdrifts blocked all  traffic between the Upper Town and the streets below. Yet the city also  enjoys Mediterranean summers—with relatively little wind, little rain  and high daytime temperatures, only slightly softened by the afternoon  breeze off the bay.2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis combination of winter rains and summer sunshine makes for  intensive cultivation. Apricots, chestnuts and mulberries grow well  here, as do grains, potatoes, cucumbers and melons. Fringed now by the  Athens motorway, vegetable gardens still flourish in the alluvial  plains—“our California,” a farmer once happily told me. “There is  excellent shooting in the neighbourhood,” noted John Murray’s Handbook  in 1854, “including pheasants, woodcocks, wildfowl etc.” Cutting wide  loops through the fields the Vardar river to the west runs low in  summer, sinuous and fast in the winter months, too powerful to be  easily navigable, debouching finally into the miles of thick reedy  insect-plagued marshes which line its mouth. All swamp and water, the  Vardar plain in December reminded John Morritt at the end of the  eighteenth century of nothing so much as “the dear country from  Cambridge to Ely.” For hundreds of years it emanated “putrid fevers,”  noxious exhalations and agues which drove horses mad, and manifested  themselves—before the age of pesticide—in the “sallow cheeks and  bloodless lips” of the city’s inhabitants.3\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“From water comes everything” runs the inscription on an Ottoman  fountain still preserved in the Upper Town. Fed by rivers and rains and  moisture rising from the bay, water bathes the city and its  surroundings in a hazy light quite different from that of parched  Attica, softer, stranger and less harsh, shading the western mountains  in grey, brown and violet. After days of cloudy and stormy weather, the  Reverend Henry Fanshawe Tozer realized “what I had never felt  before—the pleasure of pale colours.” Artesian wells are dug easily  down to the water table which sits just below the surface of the earth,  and there are plentiful springs in the nearby hills. Winter rains have  etched beds deep into the soil on either side of the town, torrents so  quick to flood that well into the nineteenth century they would carry  away a horse and rider, or sluice out the poorly buried bones of the  dead in the cemeteries beyond the walls.4\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e From earliest times, too, fresh water has been channelled through  fountains, aqueducts and underground pipes, attracting the rich and the  holy, plane trees, acacias and monasteries, wherever it bubbles to the  surface. Archaeologists have traced the remains of the Roman, Byzantine  and Ottoman mills which dotted the water-courses leading down into the  city’s reservoirs. Until the 1930s, villagers on nearby Mount Hortiatis  produced ice from water-bearing rocks in the thickly forested slopes  above the town, kept it in small pits cut into the hillside and brought  it down by donkey into the city each summer. With nearby salteries  vital for preserving cod and meat, abundant fish in the bay, partridge,  hare, rabbits and tortoises in the nearby plain, and oaks, beech and  maple in the hills above, it is not surprising that the city  flourished.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRomans\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Hellenistic dynasty gave Salonica birth but it was under the Romans  that it prospered. Shrines to Macedonian and Roman rulers intermingled  with temples to Egyptian gods, sphinxes and the city’s own special  tutelary deities, the mysterious Samothracian Kabirii. They were  probably worshipped in the Rotonda, the oldest building still in use in  the city, whose holy space has since attracted saints, dervishes and  devotees of modern art and jazz. Even before the birth of Christ  Salonica was a provincial capital with substantial municipal  privileges. Later it became the base of Emperor Galerius himself. By  the side of the main road running through town the carved pillars of a  massive triumphal arch still commemorate Galerius’s defeat of the  troublesome Persians. His own urban ambitions, influenced by Syrian and  Persian models, were extensive. Today students sun themselves on the  walkways above where his now vanished portico once connected the  triumphal arch with an enormous palace and hippodrome. Meanwhile, in  what is still the commercial heart of the city, archaeologists have  uncovered a vast forum, a tribute to Greco-Roman consumerism, with a  double colonnade of shops, a square paved in marble, a library and a  large brothel, complete with sex toys, private baths and dining-rooms  for favoured clients.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis was, in short, a flourishing settlement of key strategic  significance for Roman power in the East. We may find it puzzling that  Greeks even today will call themselves Romioi (Romans). But there is  nothing strange about it. The Roman empire existed here too, among the  speakers of Greek, and continued to exert its spell long after it had  collapsed in the West. Yet we need to be careful, for when Greeks use  the term Romios, they do not exactly mean that they are “Roman.” Hiding  inside the word is the one ingredient which has shaped the city’s  complex cultural mix more strongly than any other—the Christian faith.  The Ottomans understood the term this way as well: when they talked  about the “community of Romans” (Rum millet) they meant Orthodox  Christians, not necessarily Greeks; Rum was Byzantine Anatolia; Rumeli  the Orthodox Christian Balkans. Until the age of ethnic nationalism, to  be “Greek” was, for most people in the Ottoman world, synonymous with  belief in the Orthodox Christian faith.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith this Christianization of the Roman Greek world few cities are as  closely identified as Salonica. In the days when the Apostle Paul  passed through, Christians were merely a deviant Jewish sect, and  members of the two faiths were buried side by side. By the late fourth  century, however, Christianity had triumphed on its own terms and  turned itself into a new religion: the Rotonda had been converted from  pagan use, and chapels, shrines and Christian graveyards were spreading  with astonishing speed across the city.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe figure who came to symbolize Christ’s triumph in Salonica,  eventually outshining even the Apostle himself, was a Roman officer  called Dimitrios who was martyred in the late third century AD. A small  shrine to him was built alongside the many other healing shrines which  studded the area around the forum. After a grateful Roman prefect was  cured by his miraculous powers, he built a five-aisled basilica to the  saint, which quickly became the centre of a major cult, attracting Jews  as well as Christians and pagans. The adoration of Dimitrios swept the  city, and by the early nineteenth century—the first time we have a  name-by-name census of its inhabitants—one in ten Christians there were  named after him.5\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike the other major early Christian shrines—the massive, low-sunk  Panayia Acheiropoietos (the Virgin’s Church Unmade by Mortal Hands),  the grand Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda itself—Dimitrios’s church shows  how deeply the city’s Greco-Roman culture had been impregnated with  Christian rituals and doctrines. Although the fire of 1917 caused  irreparable damage to the priceless mosaics that line its colonnades,  enough has remained following its restoration to illuminate the  imperial-Christian synthesis: the saint is shown heralded by toga-clad  angelic trumpeters, receiving children, or casting his arms around the  shoulders of the church’s founders. Another saint, Sergios, is depicted  in a purple chiton with military insignia around his neck. The city’s  devoted inhabitants are Christians, but they are also recognisably  Romans. Incorporated into the church’s structure is part of the  original baths, the place of the saint’s martyrdom, which became a site  of pilgrimage in the following centuries. And crowning the pillars  which line the nave are marble capitals whose writhing volutes and  acanthus leaves, doves, rams and eagles, sometimes taken from earlier  buildings, sometimes carved specially for the church, cover the entire  range of Roman design in the centuries when Christianity began to take  hold of the empire. Byzantium is the name we have given to a  civilization which regarded itself, and was regarded by those around  it, as the heir to the glories of imperial Rome. Its character was  defined by its cultural synthesis of the traditions of Greece, Rome and  Christianity, and Salonica was one of its bastions.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304460275941,"sku":"NP9780375727382","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375727382.jpg?v=1767736062","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/salonica-city-of-ghosts-isbn-9780375727382","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}