THESSALONIKI OF THE PERSECUTED

After the Balkan War of 1912 Thessaloniki became part of Greece, and this resulted in a massive change in its demographics. The Muslims and Bulgarians left and were replaced by desperate and impoverished Greek settlers from the rest of the Balkans, as well as Asia Minor. Jews now had to compete with Greek refugees in a limited labour market.

Fed by an increasingly aggressive nationalism, the tension between the two groups started to rise, culminating in 1931, when the extremist newspaper Macedonia published an article that "revealed" that the leaders of the Zionist sports organisation Makavei had "met with Bulgarian insurgents in Sofia" with a view to "the overthrow of Greek authority in Thessaloniki." On 29 June a mob of Greek settlers stormed the temporary settlement of some 200 Jewish families who had been left homeless after the Great Fire. The settlement was burned down and that was the first pogrom in the history of Greece.

In 1941 Nazi Germany occupied the city and this made things much worse. In 1943 the entire Jewish population of Thessaloniki – 58,000 souls – was shipped to the extermination camps. Only 2 percent of them survived the Holocaust.

In the interwar period Thessaloniki provided a refuge for the originators of Rembetiko, a style of music born at the beginning of the 20th Century in illegal joints where hashish was smoked. This music was a mix of melodies from continental Greece, Constantinople and Asia Minor. The lyrics reflected the drug-abusing proclivities of the songwriters and thus fell foul of censorship under the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936-1941).

Possession of genre-specific musical instruments such as the baglama was made an offence, and the police closed down every place where hashish was smoked, as well as rounding up anyone who dared to sing Rembetiko. Dedicated musicians had but one option: to flee to Thessaloniki. The city's then chief of police was an avid fan of this music and looked the other way, provided it was not performed in public. Today Rembetiko is considered one of the most "Greek" types of music, and you can hear it in every more or less authentic Greek tavern.

An excellent book on the subject: Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (HarperCollins, 2004) by the British historian Mark Mazower