Greece's pleasant second city and the administrative centre for the two northern regions,
THESSALONÍKI - or Salonica, as the city was known in western Europe until well into the twentieth century - has a very different feel to Athens: more Balkan-European and modern, less Middle Eastern and villagey. Situated at the head of an eponymous gulf, a horseshoe-shaped inner recess of the Thermaďkos bight, it also seems more open.
The "modern" quality of Thessaloníki is due largely to a disastrous 1917 fire which levelled most of the old plaster houses along a labyrinth of Ottoman lanes, including the entire Jewish quarter with its 32 synagogues, rendering 70,000 - nearly half the population - homeless. The city was rebuilt over the following eight years on a grid plan prepared under the supervision of French architect and archeologist Ernest Hébrard, with long central avenues running parallel to the seafront, and cross-streets densely planted with shade trees. Hébrard's prohibition of high-rises was blithely disregarded within two decades, but Thessaloníki is still a more liveable, though arguably less interesting, city than Athens. It has a wider ethnic mix and more wealth, stimulated by its major university, international trade fair and famously avant-garde live music and entertainment scene. The food is generally superior, too: there are some very sophisticated restaurants, but also flavoursome traditional fare on offer in ouzerís and undeniably Turkish-influenced tavernas. The city's opulence is epitomized by the locals' sartorial elegance, but the recent upsurge in prosperity, owing to a stable economy and, undoubtedly in part, EU subsidies, has resulted in a new class of "yuppies", in contrast to a permanent floating underclass living in shantytowns near the port: Pontic (Black Sea) Greeks flog substandard goods at the street markets, while unemployed Albanians and eastern European refugees eke out a meagre living by selling contraband cigarettes or cleaning car windscreens.
Athenians have always delighted in disparaging their rival city as "Bulgaria", especially at football matches, but it might be more accurately nicknamed "Anatolia", for Thessaloníki is the 1923 refugees' metropolis par excellence , their presence most obvious in the preponderance of Turkish surnames (such as Dereli, Mumtzi and Aslanoglu) and the spicy Anatolian food seen nowhere else in Greece.
Before 1923, the population was as varied as any in the Balkans, with Greek Orthodox Christians in a distinct minority. Besides Ottoman Muslims, who had called the city "Selanik" since their arrival in 1430, a generation before the conquest of Constantinople, there were Slavs (who knew it as "Solun"), Albanians, Armenians and, after the Iberian expulsions at the end of the fifteenth century, the largest European Jewish community of the age: 80,000, or nearly half of the inhabitants, for whom "Salonik or Salonicco" ranked as a "Mother of Israel" - until, that is, the first waves of emigration to Palestine, western Europe and the United States began after World War I. Numbers had dropped to fewer than 60,000 at the onset of World War II, when all but a tiny fraction were deported from Platía Eleftherías to the concentration camps and immediate gassing, in one of the worst atrocities ever committed in the Balkans. The vast Jewish cemeteries east of the city centre, among the world's largest, were desecrated in 1942; to add insult to injury, the area was later covered over by the new university and expanded trade-fair grounds in 1948. At last, however, the role of the Jewish community in making the city what it is has received some recognition in the form of a new museum , inaugurated in 2001, and a memorial to the victims of the 1943 deportations.
You can catch glimpses of "Old Salonica" today in the walled Kástra quarter, often known as the Áno Pólis , on the hillside beyond the modern grid of streets. Even amidst the post-1917 flatlands below, there are pockets of Ottoman buildings which miraculously survived the fire. The same goes for Greek Art Deco piles dating from the city's heyday and put up in time for the first International Trade Fair in 1926. In addition, the city's many churches constitute a showcase of Orthodox architecture through the ages. A smaller number of Islamic monuments - virtually all of them from the fifteenth century - attests to Thessaloníki's status as the premier Ottoman Balkan city, when Athens was still a backwater. For most visitors, however, the sight that stands out is Thessaloníki's excellent Archeological Museum , albeit depleted since the transfer of most Philip II-related exhibits back to Veryína.
The downside, for visitors as well as residents, is a complex of problems all too reminiscent of those experienced in Athens. Industries and residences alike discharge their waste, untreated, into the gulf (with slight improvements of late), and traffic on the main avenues, despite a comprehensive one-way system and a ring-road, is often at a standstill. After years of planning and sporadic discussion, bids for a contract to dig a metro system were finally tendered.
