Salonica, City of Ghosts By Mark Mazower (1430-1950) [PDF]

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.”
--The New York Times

“An exhaustive, affectionate biography of the city, a deeply researched account that becomes a portrait of the singular, vanished cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire.”
--The Baltimore Sun

“A masterpiece.... A masterly synthesis of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history.... A book to bring one to tears.”
--The Boston Globe

“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.”
--The New York Review of Books

“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.”
--The Nation

“[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
knowledge.”
--Jan Morris, The Guardian

Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University and Birkbeck College, London. His books include Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44, 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.

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