Thessaloniki: Past and present

When I first went to Thessaloniki (shortened by many simply to 'Thess'), it seemed unprepossessing. It was the summer of 1981 and I'd been studying Ancient Greek. The British Council was offering scholarships to go abroad and learn a foreign language. The two places that interested me were Cluj in Transylvania, to learn Romanian, and Thessaloniki, to learn modern Greek. I've still never been to Cluj.

From the outskirts, Thessaloniki appears to be surrounded by concrete post-war buildings. But the minute I crossed into the older part of town I was fascinated. I remember the contrast with Athens, which I thought at the time was an urban monstrosity. I've since come to like Athens, but back then I thought it was a strange city in that there didn't seem to be anything that had survived from the end of the classical period to about 1840. Thessaloniki wasn't like that at all. Once you go from the station area into the centre of town you can see much older buildings than you are likely to see in Athens.

For a start, many of the 19th-century warehouses that had survived the great fire of 1917 are still standing, though in a very dilapidated condition. Further into town you'll find what's left of some of the Ottoman architecture, which was a revelation to me - the hammams, in particular, and these fantastic Byzantine churches. I like Byzantine art a great deal and Thessaloniki has the most glorious church mosaics and frescoes in Greece.

There were two other things that made a haunting impression on me. I remember vividly the first time I wandered into the upper town. Today, it has been largely restored (sometimes very beautifully and sometimes not so beautifully) but at that time it was still extremely dilapidated. There were some formerly very grand Ottoman townhouses, where the walls had fallen in and you could look right through the skeleton of the house and down to the lower town. You could see right over the bay and across towards Olympus. I will never forget that fantastic panorama.

The other thing I remember well is wandering on the other side of town, out towards the airport, and coming across some magnificent late 19th- to early 20th-century villas. You couldn't help wondering what they were doing there: these Art Deco buildings with various kinds of baroque ornamentation, all extremely ostentatious but now crumbling into ruins and surrounded by vegetation that had, it seemed, been lost among the polikatoikies (apartment blocks) on either side.

I soon realised that this was a real city in a way that Athens wasn't - and that it had preserved these traces of its past. Even in the centre of town where the fire had destroyed almost everything, it had been rebuilt between the wars in a rather grand neo-Byzantine style. You can see this on Plateia Aristotelous (Aristotelous Square) and in the Stoa Modiano (Modiano Market) where they have preserved something of the rhythm of the place.

Then there was this incredibly vibrant atmosphere, which made a big impression on me. Mainly, it seemed such a far cry from the kind of life I had been used to in England - a Mediterranean society, different in almost every way one could imagine from growing up in London or studying at Oxford. So I fell in love with Thessaloniki and started to think about writing about it.

I wrote a short essay based mostly on travel accounts of the city in the late 19th century and how the city had changed. That was my attempt to understand how the Ottomans had their own idea of modernity: the Ottoman Modern I had glimpsed in those rather grand villas on the outskirts of town. Their Europeanness was quite deliberate, since their Ottoman owners felt themselves culturally to be the western access point for the empire to Europe. When you looked at Athens from the perspective of these grand villas, what you saw was a kind of upstart little state that couldn't compare in any way with what was still this vast empire on whose western fringes Thessaloniki lay.

The period of the late 19th century was a time when the city had achieved a very different kind of significance from anything in its past. It was where the Young Turk revolution emerged, which was, in a way, the attempt to make a modern Ottoman empire strong enough to defend itself against Europe and, of course, it was where Kemal Ataturk - who had been on the fringes of that movement - was born. The city is, in a sense, where the idea of the modern republic of Turkey was incubated.

Today, you can still go and see the Villa Allatini, the grand house in which the representative of the old empire, Sultan Abdul Hamid, was exiled and imprisoned by the Young Turks. So while I had gone there to learn Greek, it was quickly becoming clear to me that this wasn't just a Greek city. I became aware of how much energy the Greeks had put into exploring the Greek identity of the city since 1912, and in a sense making it Greek again. It had been a great Byzantine city as well as an important possession of the Ottoman Empire, and you could sense everywhere this tension between past and present.

Some years later, I answered an advert for researchers to help to make a television programme about Kurt Waldheim. The scandal about his wartime past had just blown up. It had been discovered he had not told the whole truth about his wartime experiences and that, in particular, he had said nothing about the 18 months he had spent as an intelligence officer in Thessaloniki.

So I went back to Greece for three months with instructions to find out whatever I could about Waldheim's time there. In the course of looking into this I went along to the central body of Jewish communities in Greece and asked if they had any documents. They said that they had just taken delivery of these two very large jute sacks from the Ministry of Justice. They were filthy and no one had opened them yet. So we opened one up; they were crammed full of papers, in no particular order.

I took some out and could immediately see they were on very flimsy wartime paper. Mostly, they were documents that ran: "I the undersigned, finding myself here without work and with a family to support, request the property of..." and then you added the details from the stock of properties available to the Service for the Disposal of Jewish Properties. I knew enough about the historiography of the Holocaust to feel that this was quite important, because not much had been written about what the effect was on cities themselves when large numbers of people were deported from them.

As I started working out the story of the city, the war in former Yugoslavia broke out and like many others I became involved in trying to tell people what was going on there. It was an important moment for a lot of people because it introduced into our minds this new category of "ethnic cleansing", and one then looked back to the past to see that this was not new.

At that point I realised I didn't just want to focus my book on the material from the archive. It seemed that rather the Holocaust was the culmination of a process that had been going on for a long time. You can see Thessaloniki as a kind of exemplar of a certain trend in modern European history: what had happened during the Second World War was linked to earlier mass flights and expulsions of the Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire. There was thus a whole chapter in Thessaloniki's life that corresponded to a chapter in Europe's life, culminating in the Greco-Turkish exchange of 1922-23. And this population exchange was not a one-way process, nor was it a story with a clear villain or hero.

In some ways, writing the history of a city such as Thessaloniki is very different from writing a history of Paris or London; you have so much less information. There are, for example, no street maps from before the 1880s. Yet Thessaloniki tells us so much about other places - Vilnius, Odessa, Istanbul, Jaffa - where the city has stayed much the same but the population has changed dramatically. And though we always want to learn from the past, on the broader issue of multiculturalism, I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn. Some would say that it shows how much better the empires managed multiculturalism than we do now. But then these empires didn't have politics; they didn't do democracy, and democracy, in its early stages, is often highly nationalistic.

In Greece today there is a lot of interest in this period, I think because people got a bit bored after three or four generations with hearing the same sort of nationalistic version of the past. Greece today and most other countries in the world are much more aware of how important their neighbours are to them; whether it's because of business, immigration or environmental concerns. So a certain phase in the history of the nation state looks as if it's coming to an end, and writing the history of Thessaloniki seemed to put that into perspective.

In a minimal sense, too, we also have many stereotypes about other parts of the world and other religions. But were all the Jews of Thessaloniki rich? No, the problem in most of the community was poverty. Were the Muslims of the city mired in the past and unable to adapt? No, the 19th-century city was actually becoming more modern than ever. As always, the reality is a challenge to stereotypes.

Today, wander through the Bey Hamam in the centre of town or round the tomb of Mousa Baba in the upper town to come closest to the city that was destroyed by fire and urban resettlement. Further down the hill, there is a wonderful taverna - one of the few still functioning that's been there since about 1900. It's a great spot to glimpse what the street life would have been like here before the First World War.

The rest of the city is very cosmopolitan now. That's been the biggest change over the past 20 years. There's a vibrant street life, thriving nightlife and this fascinating history. I'm not sure what else anyone could want from a city. And that's not to even mention the food ...

Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University and Birkbeck College, London. His book 'Salonica: City of Ghosts' won both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Runciman Award. It is published by HarperPerennial at £8.99

My favourite restaurants

Myrovolos Smyrni - in a passage in the Modiano Market - is the place for mussels in cheese sauce (mydia saganaki), strong ouzo and other delights. Then it is a short walk to Plateia Aristotelous for coffee. I used to go to Tottis on the far right-hand side. But the whole square is one big café, really, looking out over the bay. If you are there in spring, you can sit out early in the morning and see Olympus on the other side.

My favourite clubs

Thessaloniki has some very good jazz venues. But if you drive just out of town, behind the port, they have turned some of the old warehouses into a huge complex of clubs, restaurants and concert venues called Mylos. By 2am on any summer's night it will be packed. There will also be excellent music. The city is full of modern music. The problem here is more in finding the older, rembetika-style tavernas.

My top shop

Another place that really captures the feeling of the past is Molho Bookshop, on Tsimiski. Until around a year ago they had preserved the inside as it had been from the 1930s or 1940s. It has had a facelift now, but it is still a fantastic building as well as a wonderful bookshop. It is a link with the past because it is still in the hands of the original family and it is one of the last cultural manifestations of the late Ottoman city.

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