Thessaloniki History

History

Thessaloniki was named in honour of a woman who herself had been named to commemorate a military victory, that of her father, Philip II, over a tribe in Thessaly with the help of crack Thessalian horsemen. This royal daughter grew up to marry the Macedonian general Kassandros, and after he named the city for her in 316 BC, Thessaloniki’s name would forever be on the lips of all who would ever experience the city.

In 168 BC, the Romans conquered Macedon, making it a subordinate province with its capital in Thessaloniki. The city’s ideal location on the Thermaic Gulf and the east–west Via Egnatia, plus its proximity to the Axios/Vardar River valley corridor leading north into the Balkans, all helped turn it into a leading commercial centre. Under Emperor Galerius in the early 4th century AD, Thessaloniki became the eastern imperial capital, and with the empire’s division later that century, it became Byzantium’s second city, a flourishing Constantinople in miniature.

However, Thessaloniki’s attractiveness led to frequent attacks by Goths, Slavs, Saracens and Latin Crusaders. Nevertheless, the city flourished culturally and contributed greatly to the creation of Southeastern Europe with the missionary work of the 9th-century Thessaloniki monks Cyril and Methodius (creators of the Glagolitic, precursor to the Cyrillic alphabet), who expanded Orthodox Byzantine literary culture among the Slavs of the Balkans.

In 1430, Thessaloniki was captured by the Ottomans, under whom it remained a major city. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Sephardic Jewish exiles fleeing the Spanish Inquisition transformed Thessaloniki, which would become one of the most important Jewish cities in Europe.

Although much of Greece was liberated after the 1821 War of Independence, Thessaloniki and Macedonia remained Ottoman. Both before and after the period Greeks call the ‘Macedonian Struggle’ (1904–08), Thessaloniki was the base for mutually antagonistic rebel groups and reform movements, including the Young Turks, which sought to introduce Western-style reforms to save the dwindling Ottoman Empire. One notable Young Turk and Thessaloniki native, Mustafa Kemal, would later become the founder of modern Turkey, and be deemed Atatürk (Father of the Turks).

The world wars were darkly decisive for Thessaloniki. A great fire in August 1917 burned down most of the city. The population exchanges of 1923 with Turkey were followed by a smaller one with Bulgaria in 1926. Then most of Thessaloniki’s Jewish population was deported when the city (and the rest of Greece) was occupied by the Nazis. The character and complexity of the city changed almost overnight, the result today being a mostly Greek city built according to the avenue scheme of a French architect in 1920. Finally, in 1977, a destructive earthquake damaged many buildings.

Thessaloniki’s next major innovation, the long-promised metro, is currently being dug along Egnatia. Peering into the trenches there beside the sidewalk reveals much older layers of Thessaloniki just beneath the surface.