A city's kaleidoscope of cultures

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

By Mark Mazower

Knopf, 490 pp., illustrated, $35

When the historian Mark Mazower first visited the Greek city of Salonica -- or Thessaloniki, as it is now known -- over 20 years ago, he found himself in a thoroughly up-to-date European city of tower blocks and wide avenues. But something about the mood of the place suggested lands to the east, beyond Europe. Watching noisy vendors hawking their goods close by the old hamam (bathhouse), and a procession of housewives and farmers on their way to market, Salonica slowly revealed itself to Mazower as a city ''which had remained much closer to the values of the bazaar and the souk."

For centuries, it was one of the major cities of the Ottoman Empire, a bustling port and center of commerce, where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived -- not always peaceably -- in a ''society of almost kaleidoscopic interaction." They jostled and traded, bickered and prayed, under the reign of largely tolerant Ottoman rulers. Synagogues and mosques dotted the urban core of Salonica; it was also a city of charismatic rabbis and Sufi dervishes, where the cries of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer echoed through the back streets and cafes. Strange sects once flourished here, not least the Jewish-Muslim fusion of the Ma'min, who were inspired by the 17th-century Jewish mystic Sabettai Zevi.

Yet today, one would be hard pressed to find concrete traces of this rich Muslim and Jewish past. As Mazower shows in this stunning, judicious new book, the story of Salonica has been one of perpetual erasures and obliterations, constant renewal and horrific destruction. Author of a trenchant study of Greece under the Nazi occupation; ''Dark Continent," an account of 20th-century Europe; and a fine short history of the Balkans, Mazower is a first-rate scholar and writer; ''Salonica" is his masterpiece. Few works of history published this year will display his total command of source material -- which ranges from census reports to memoirs, consuls' dispatches to troves of letters -- and his masterly synthesis of cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history, nor his pungent evocations of Salonica's ethnic and religious subcultures.

We learn not only how the city was governed, first by its Byzantine rulers, then the Ottomans and the Greeks, but what it was like to live and work there, how they did business, what gods they prayed to, what newspapers they read, what ideas fueled them, what their homes and places of worship looked like (among his many virtues, Mazower displays a great sensitivity to the city's architectural riches). His book is also a meditation on the rise of the modern nation-state, a phenomenon that had drastic consequences for all Salonicans and the entire Balkan region.

Named after Alexander the Great's half sister, the city's roots stretch far back into the past. In its first thousand years, it was variously Greek, Roman, and Byzantine. Situated at the crossroad between east and west, it was frequently sacked. But the most important conquest came in 1430, a crucial date in the city's history, when the forces of Sultan Murad II took Salonica.

If this made Christians shudder, the coming of the Ottomans brought stability to the city and region. The Ottomans governed through a combination of brutality and pragmatic genius. (Mazower rightly stresses that sultans ruled with a measure of finesse and insight not often attributed to them.) They were not religious fanatics; though they could treat Christians roughly, they did not abolish their right to worship. After Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottomans welcomed the Sephardim as fellow people of the book. But they also brought a dazzling array of skills and trades, which further propelled the city's rise as a colossus of commerce in woolens, tobacco, metalwares, and other commodities. In the two centuries after, it became one of the most important trading depots in the Mediterranean region, a buzzing metropolis that pulsed with frenzied deal making, ruthless entrepreneurship, and cutthroat scheming. (The chapters on the city's economic hurly-burly are especially good.)

But Salonica's emergence as a nexus of trade ultimately contributed to its undoing, for ''the same trade routes were also carrying dangerous new political ideas." The spread of romantic nationalism and newfangled ethnic-linguistic categories sent ripples through the Ottoman world. These new terms were decidedly crude: the reductive distinction ''Turk" characterized Salonica's Muslims, who, as one visitor noted, comprised ''the Black of Ethiopia . . . fair skinned Circassians, blue eyed Albanians, and Hungarian, Prussian and Polish coverts." In the 19th century, the nationalisms of the emerging Greek and Bulgarian states pressed Ottoman Christians -- like the empire's Muslims, a vastly diverse lot -- to choose sides.

''Salonica, City of Ghosts" is finally a book to bring one to tears. Its history in the 20th century is a chronicle of almost unrelieved sadness and loss. After the Greeks conquered Salonica in 1912, during the Balkan Wars, a relentless process of Hellenization was set into motion, one that would dramatically alter the city's complex mix of faiths and identities. A devastating fire destroyed much of the old city in 1917, yet Salonica's greatest modern calamities were entirely man-made. In 1923, Turkey and Greece exchanged their respective Greek (Orthodox Christian) and Turkish (Muslim) populations after Greece's disastrous invasion of Anatolia. In a stroke, the city's Muslim presence, nearly five centuries old, was eradicated. Some 20 years later, during the brutal Nazi occupation of Greece, nearly all Salonica's Jews were arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where they perished.

A short review cannot do justice to the importance of Mazower's labors. Today, the city is pressed by troubles common to many urban centers -- pollution, overcrowding, high rents -- which a younger generation is confronting. Mazower humbly concedes, ''With all these problems to cope with, what use to them is the history of a small city, with a complex polyglot population, which disappeared many decades before?" After all, ''forgetting the Ottomans was part of Greece's claim to modernity." But such forgetting is no longer tenable, he argues -- rightly. As tiny nation-states like Greece ''integrate themselves in a wider world," a new, less rigid view of the past is required. Mazower's invaluable history is a step in that direction.

Matthew Price is a regular contributor to the Globe.