How that city changed

Abstract

After its portrayal byMarkMazower, the sprawling conurbation on the Thermaic Gulf will never be quite the same again, and almost everybody who lives in that place, or is concerned by its future or past, has been feeling the difference. Last year, when the book was being presented, in Greek translation, to a distinguished audience in the city it describes, the social anthropologist Effie Voutira described her own experience of the ‘Mazower effect’. When travelling abroad, especially in the USA, a conversation with fellow academics about where she lived would quickly lead to the question: ‘So you’re from Mazower’s Salonica . . . ?’ And she was happy to answer in the affirmative. Mazower’s narrative begins with the Ottoman takeover of the battered Byzantine port, after a three-day siege, in 1430; he then describes the influx of Sephardic refugees from Spain at the beginning of the 16th century and explains how one of the city’s numerous titles was ‘Madre de Israel’—for at least two centuries, it was the biggest Jewish metropolis in the world. The issue of nomenclature, Mazower points out, was never simple. In medieval times, at least 13 variants of Salonicco/Selanik/Solun were recorded. In opting for ‘Salonica’, the author has chosen, and in a way re-popularized, the nearest thing that has ever existed to a standard English rendering of the city known in Greek (and in many international contexts) as Thessaloniki. In addition to re-stamping Salonica on the mental map of the global chattering classes, the appearance of Mazower’s wonderful book, and the mainly positive reception it has received in Greece, has had some important political consequences. Mazower hasmade it much harder for anyonewho expects to be taken seriously to read that city’s history in the light of nationalist stereotypes, or any other form of crude essentialism. Rather than telling us what conclusions we should draw from the extraordinary story of Salonica’s ever-changing ethnic composition and cultural life, it helps readers to avoid certain tempting but deeply wrong ways of thinking. The book does not impose any specific theory about the mechanics of inter-religious or inter-ethnic coexistence, but it does knock certain foolish yet persistent ideas on the head, and that in itself is a hugely valuable service. For a start, it will hardly be possible now for any serious historian to imply that Salonica always existed ‘for’ any one particular ethnic group, with the