Free Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower Page B

them for the time and attention they generously gave me. Nikos Stavroulakis gave me precious guidance on the complexities of Marrano and Ma’min identities, not to mention food. My parents, Bill and Miriam Mazower, and my grandmother, Ruth Shaffer, read the early chapters closely for style and were both critical and supportive. And I am hugely indebted, not for the first time, to Peter Mandler, for ploughing through the entire manuscript and giving me the benefit of his encouragement, thoughtfulness and invaluable critical eye. Above all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Marwa Elshakry, who, despite living with the subject for much longer than anyone would consider reasonable, never betrayed impatience at hearing yet another story about Salonica, being shown another document or driven down another side-street. Her challenging suggestions and queries opened up exciting new perspectives for me. What is more, she went rigorously through the text line by line, and made innumerable scholarly and stylistic improvements. In this as in everything else, I owe her more than I can put into words. This book is dedicated to her with the author’s love.

Introduction
Beware of saying to them that sometimes cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.
I TALO C ALVINO , Invisible Cities 1
    T HE FIRST TIME I visited Salonica, one summer more than twenty years ago, I stepped off the Athens train, shouldered my rucksack, and left the station in search of the town. Down a petrol-choked road, I passed a string of seedy hotels, and arrived at a busy crossroads: beyond lay the city centre. The unremitting heat and the din of the traffic reminded me of what I had left several hours away in Athens but despite this I knew I had been transported into another world. A mere hour or so to the north lay Tito’s Yugoslavia and the checkpoints at Gevgeli or Florina; to the east were the Rhodope forests barring the way to Bulgaria, the forgotten Muslim towns and villages of Thrace and the border with Turkey. From the moment I crossed the hectic confusion of Vardar Square—“Piccadilly Circus” for British soldiers in the First World War—ignoring the signposts that urged me out of the city in the direction of the Iron Curtain, I sensed the presence of a different Greece, less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures.
    The crowded alleys of the market offered shade as I pushed past carts piled high with figs, nuts, bootleg Fifth Avenue shirts and pirated cassettes. Tsitsanis’s bouzouki strained the vendors’ tinny speakers, but it was no competition for the clarino and drum with which gypsy boys were deafening diners in the packed ouzeris of the Modiano food market.Round the tables of Myrovolos Smyrni (Sweet-Smelling Smyrna), its very name an evocation of the glories and disasters of Hellenism’s Anatolian past, tsipouro and mezedes were smoothing the passage from work to siesta. There were fewer back-packers in evidence here than in the tourist dives around the Acropolis, more housewives, porters and farmers on their weekly trip into town. Did I really see a dancing bear performing for onlookers in the meat market? I certainly did not miss the flower-stalls clustered around the Louloudadika hamam (known also according to the guidebooks as the Market Baths, the Women’s Baths, or the Yahudi Hamam , the Bath of the Jews), the decrepit spice warehouses on Odos Egyptou (Egypt Street), the dealers still installed in the old fifteenth-century multi-domed bezesten. This vigorous commercialism put even Athens to shame: here was a city