Letter from Thessaloniki Patrick ComerfordSecond cities exude an air of elegant confidence that lets everyone know that, unlike their pushy rivals in the capital, they have nothing to prove - Milan, Alexandria, Kyoto, even Cork.
Thessaloniki is a confident and elegant Greek second city, happy to play Olympic host to soccer alone. Instead, Thessaloniki is content to continue attracting visitors each year to events such as the flower show in May, the book festival in June, the international trade fair in September, the wine festival in October, or the film festival in November.
This is a city with thoughtful town planning, pedestrianised plazas, arcades, elegant shopping streets such as Tsimiki, Mitropolis, Aghias Sofias and Aristotelous; a seafront that invites strollers; Roman agoras and arches and Byzantine churches and rotundas. Early Greeks boasted that this was the "first city of Macedonians, protected by God, co-kingdom, mother of all Macedonia and supreme over other cities". They were followed by imperial Romans, invading Goths, Saracen pirates, Normans Crusaders and Venetian traders, until the city eventually fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1430, so that the Macedonian capital acquired a true Balkan flavour - the mixture that gave the French the rich name for a fruit salad.
This was once the busiest port of the Ottoman empire, and the birthplace of Ataturk. But Thessaloniki's most colourful and enduring minority was its Jewish community, who arrived not as invaders or conquerors, but as traders and refugees. Now, sadly, it appears that the city is danger of losing the community that once gave Thessaloniki the title "Mother of Israel".
The coffee shops and stalls in the Modiano Market and the elegant villas lining Queen Olga Street are reminders that this city was once home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. For generations they kept Thessaloniki the hub of trade, culture and politics in northern Greece, but today there are few Jews left in the city to tell their story.
Close to the Modiano Market, the Jewish Museum tells the stories of this community from Biblical days to the Holocaust. The first Jews in Thessaloniki arrived generations before the birth of Christianity, and the Apostle Paul once visited their synagogue. During the Byzantine era, there were 500 Greek-speaking Jewish families in the city. When the Ottomans captured the city they offered a safe refuge to the Sephardic Jews of Spain fleeing the Inquisition and the new arrivals soon distinguished themselves throughout Europe as traders, manufacturers and rug merchants.
By the mid-17th century, 56 of the city's 120 neighbourhoods were Jewish, each with its own synagogue, rabbi and collected mystics. But a crisis arose in 1655 when Sabatai Zvi, a self-declared messiah from Smyrna, arrived and persuaded many that he was the long-awaited king of kings. When Zvi enticed his followers into an uprising, he was taken captive to Constantinople, where he was offered the choice between conversion or martyrdom. He promptly chose Islam, and hundreds of Jewish families became Muslims too.
Sabatai's apostasy divided the Jews of Thessaloniki, and the Islamicised Jews formed a separate community, building their own mosque, the Yeni Tzami, where Jewish heritage, Muslim traditions and eclectic elements combined to make it one of Thessaloniki's most beautiful old buildings.
The loss of Venice's political influence and trading power brought a further decline in the fortunes of the Jewish merchants and traders. But inspired by a new awakening in 1848, the community regained control of the city's economy and intellectual life. In the 1890s, the Allatini, Fernandez-Diaz, Modiano and Mordoh families built the Renaissance and neo-classical villas that line Queen Olga Street, still known as the Avenue of the Mansions. The Villa Allatini was used by the Young Turks as a prison for Sultan Abdul Hamit II.
Thessaloniki became part of the modern Greek state in 1912. The Great Fire of 1917 destroyed the Jewish Quarter but failed to destroy the Jewish community, which continued to prosper in the new state, and in 1922 Eli Modiano built a city centre market that continues to thrive under his name. A year later, in the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey after the Asia Minor catastrophe, the descendants of Sabatai Zvi's Jewish Muslims were sent to Turkey. The Yeni Tzami would become one of the many museums in the city, but in a peculiar twist of history, their deportation saved them from a greater calamity.
When the Germans invaded Thessaloniki in 1941, the Jewish community still numbered almost 50,000. But their Greek neighbours managed to save only a few of the city's Jews as they were rounded up and sent to Poland - even the city's ancient Jewish cemetery was destroyed. There were poignant tales of survival: Alini fell in love with a Greek Orthodox army officer, Spyros Alibertis, to the distress of her parents who owned the Villa Bianka, but was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.
When the Germans withdrew in 1944, leaving the city deserted and devastated, over 46,000 Jews from Thessaloniki - 95 per cent of the community - had died in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Among the few survivors, most emigrated to Israel. The Jewish Museum, housed in the former office of the newspaper L'Independent, one of the rare Jewish structures to survive the Great Fire in 1917, is a silent witness to a proud and cultured community that should not be forgotten as part of the Balkan mix that has helped to forge the identity of our new Europe. Only a handful of elderly Jews and one lone synagogue survive in the "Mother of Israel" today.