Salonica, city of ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950
Year: 2006
Type: book-review
Abstract: Salonica was one of the greatest Ottoman cities.It was a confessional mosaic where the Greeks, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians and others were created a micro-cosmos of the Ottoman Empire, similar to Ýstanbul, Jerusalem, Skopje, Ýzmir, Beirut and Plovdiv.However, one cannot easily recognize this history in the city today.Contemporary Salonica was a modern Greek metropolis constituted by thousands of apartment blocks, few Greco-Roman monuments, restored Byzantine churches and statues of Greek national heroes.Very little is left, reminding us the Ottoman, Muslim, Jewish and Bulgarian heritage of half a millennium.In fact, modern Salonica was an ambitious project of the Greek nation-building.Similar to others, the Greek nationalism was selective and forgetful of (sometimes destructive to) history.After the First World War, the Greek nationalists invented a "Greco-Byzantine Past" for Salonica and put the "Judeo-Ottoman Past" out of the official collective-memory.Obviously, this is not a unique experience in this part of the world.Most of the multicultural and cosmopolitan metropolises of the Ottoman Empire were monotonously
Source: Choice Reviews Online
Author: Yaycıoğlu, Ali
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1597002830