As recently as 180 years ago, Thessaloniki’s population had been 51% Jewish. As we toured Thessaloniki, the lack of cultural and architectural built memory of this Jewish that was almost impossible to ignore — Thessaloniki was a city of ghosts, where the ghosts were becoming more and more difficult to be seen.
After the breakdown of Yugoslavia, the mayor Yannis Boutaris (2011-2019) tried to define the city of Thessaloniki once again as a multi-cultural, international city, by harking on its ancient history as such. While Thessaloniki appears today as a somewhat international city – with tourists and immigrants – it does not very obviously reflect its multicultural history of years past in its built architectural environment, or people today.
The city of Thessaloniki prior to WWII had a very large Jewish population, with a Jewish section of town that was alive and bustling. Our guest professor Gounaris mentioned that during his childhood, thre was a large jewish population. While he said he did not engage too much as a Macedonian with the jewish children, they were clearly a large part of the city. Our first night walking through the city, a mention of the Jewish came up very quickly. As we passed by lively restaurants and ancient buildings to the formerly jewish area of the city, and a newly renovated market, which the guide called Modiano Market. The guide mentioned that this was a new redevelopment done by a Jewish man in a former Jewish part of town, and I got very excited. Having worked at the Jewish Community Center in my hometown, and having had a real estate internship in which I had worked on development projects similar to this, I wondered if there was a new push from families to revisit and reinvest in their old family home. Having come from recent conversations about investment in my hometown in Arizona, I was excited to hear about any possible ideas on investment and potential foreign investment, especially from groups which had had a home in this city. Hearing about the new market from our tour guide, I imagined a city with a strong Jewish community and a growing Jewish population. But when I asked our class’s guest speaker Professor Gounaris the next day, I learned that this was not so. Today, the Jewish population of Thessaloniki makes up only .27%* of the population (1,200 poeple). In contrast, the jewish community had made up 49% of the population of Thessaloniki, around 62,000 people in 1902.
And while there had been a strong Jewish population in the past, I was not one which he had really engaged with as a Macedonian, the communities had stayed somewhat separate. But since WWII, there had not ben much growth in the jewish population.
As I traveled through Thessaloniki on other walking tours, the memory of other communities and parts of their history were more evident and that of the Jewish history in the city. The memory of church history and the Eastern Roman empire, and that of ancient Greece was built into the structure of the city – large sections of the modern city were carved out to let the ancient Roman and Byzantine ruins show through. Several times walking through the city I found myself accidentally running into some ancient ruin or another.
With the Thessaloniki tourist shops showing scenes of Santorini and Mykonos, with little sculptures of a minotaur or Greek gods, the classical Greek history of the city was very apparent. The architectural museum of Thessaloniki featured mostly classical Greek architecture. A room of Attic pottery from classical Greece, marble busts of ancient Thessalonians who had had some influence in the politics, muted whites and natural stone colors decorating each room in the way we associate with classical Greece (though notably not the original colors of these ancient buildings), all brought back a memory of a classical Greek heritage. Past the busts and pottery was a section with a Greek flute. A flute recording played music quietly through a speaker above the display, and to the left of it were signs talking about ancient Greek scientific philosophy, and the Aristotle school of Philosophers.
Our walking tour took us past a wide open space of the active site of the old Agora, to Churches which reflected the Christian and Ottoman pasts. Though there is only one minaret in all of Thessaloniki (where there had been 40 before 1912), the memory of when the churches had been mosques can be seen in the churches themselves. In one church, the guide pointed out where the old Christian frescoes had been covered in an earlier transition from church to mosque in order to avoid any faces to be seen in the new mosque, and then uncovered as it became a Church again which it would remain. At another church, the guide mentioned that there was not much ottoman influence left, however but my classmate and I both agreed that there was clearly some eastern architectural influence – the patterns in the mosaics on the walls were symmetrical and geometric, reminiscent of an architecture from the east and potentially from its days as a mosque, and an Ottoman Thessaloniki. The guide, while she mentioned the Ottomans numerous times, did not mention this.