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Mazower is convincing in his portrayal of Ottoman society as neither an unrelenting hell for non-Muslims nor a happy, American-style melting pot. Had it ended with the Greek conquest of Salonica in 1912, it would rank as a solid contribution to the field. As Mazower reports in his brief account, the Nazis (who had conquered Greece in 1941) succeeded in murdering over 90 percent of the 50,000 Jews living in Salonica on the eve of World War II.Ĭity of Ghosts is a clearly written and engaging book, even picturesque at points. Most of those who remained met their end in 1943, with deportation to Auschwitz. Increasingly marginalized, many Jews emigrated. With the Muslims gone, the Jews remained the only substantial non-Greek element in a city whose identity and appearance had changed drastically in just over a decade.

The minarets once vilified by a Greek journalist as “the symbols of a barbarous religion” were demolished, stripping Salonica of the most visible aspect of its Ottoman heritage. In 1923, the city’s Muslims were forced to move to Turkey as part of a population exchange. These had arrived in large numbers after World War I and the failed Greek attempt to resurrect the Byzantine Empire by conquering western Turkey. New housing estates were filled with Greek Christian refugees. Mazower’s new work again shows him to be an accomplished practitioner of historical narrative-and an unreliable judge of historical culpability.Įngineering of a different sort was applied to Salonica’s population. He recently served on a Columbia committee that investigated, and largely exonerated, faculty who were accused of intimidating Jewish students. In City of Ghosts, Mark Mazower offers up a particularly exotic slice of Ottoman life, a detailed panorama of the city of Salonica, once the empire’s chief European port, now a largely ignored corner of northern Greece.Ī professor of history at Columbia and director of the university’s Center for International History, Mazower first gained attention with Inside Hitler’s Greece (1993), an elegant if overly romantic account of Greek resistance to German occupation during World War II. This is true partly for reasons of the empire’s obvious geopolitical interest-its successor states include present-day Turkey, Iraq, Israel, and Libya-but perhaps in greater part because of the richness and rococo intricacy of the societies over which Constantinople long ruled.

Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950