Greece - Korina Miller [215]
In 168 BC, the Romans conquered Macedon, incorporating it into an imperial province. The provincial capital’s ideal location on the Thermaic Gulf and the east–west Via Egnatia, plus its proximity to the Axios/Vardar River valley corridor leading north into the Balkans, enhanced its commercial and strategic importance. Under Emperor Galerius, Thessaloniki became the eastern imperial capital; with the empire’s division in AD 395, it became Byzantium’s second city, a flourishing Constantinople in miniature.
However, Thessaloniki’s attractiveness also meant frequent attacks by Goths, Slavs, Saracens and Latin Crusaders. Nevertheless, the city remained a centre of life and learning; among others, it was home to the 9th-century monks Cyril and Methodius (creators of Glagolitic, precursor to the Cyrillic alphabet), who expanded Orthodox Byzantine literary culture among the Balkan and central European Slavs, and the great 14th-century theologian, St Gregory Palamas.
In 1430, the Turks captured Thessaloniki, though it still remained a major city. After 1492, the shrewd Ottomans resettled Sephardic Jewish exiles fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, making Thessaloniki one of Europe’s most important centres of Jewish life, education and commerce.
The 1821 War of Independence failed to dislodge the Ottomans from Thessaloniki and Macedonia in general. Throughout the 19th century, Thessaloniki thus became a lurid hub for diplomatic intrigue, secret societies and mutually antagonistic rebel groups and reform movements. Along with Greek liberation entities, these included the pro-Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), which achieved notoriety for a terrorist bombing of the city’s Ottoman Bank in 1895, and the Young Turks, who sought to introduce Western-style reforms to save the dwindling empire, and who successfully infiltrated the Ottoman military with their secret ideology. One notable Young Turk and Thessaloniki native, Mustafa Kemal, would become the founder of modern Turkey, and be deemed Atatürk (Father of the Turks).
The world wars were darkly decisive for Thessaloniki. The August 1917 fire burned most of it, and ethnic diversity shrank with the great population exchange of 1923 with Turkey and a smaller one with Bulgaria in 1926. And, in WWII, the occupying Nazis deported Thessaloniki’s Jews to the concentration camps. The ensuing Greek Civil War led to the forced removal of other non-Greeks. Thessaloniki’s character and complexity changed dramatically, the result today being a Hellenicised city built according to a French architect’s 1920 avenue scheme.
Thessaloniki’s next major innovation, the long-promised metro, is currently being built along Egnatia (and causing much traffic congestion). Peering into the trenches beside the sidewalk here reveals much older layers of Thessaloniki just beneath the surface. Archaeological items discovered in the metro dig will be displayed in a special museum to be housed in an old Ottoman structure nearby.
Orientation
Central Thessaloniki is bounded on the south by the sea and on the north by a sloping hill, site of the old Ano Poli, itself hemmed in by the Byzantine Walls. The cafe-lined waterfront avenue, Leoforos Nikis, runs west from the port to the White Tower (Lefkos Pyrgos) in the east; the new Office of Tourism Directorate is near this tower. Going from the water and Leoforos Nikis north (uphill), other principal streets also run parallel to the sea: first Mitropoleos, Tsimiski and, above them, the main thoroughfare Egnatia; north of this, other major east–west streets are Filippou and Agiou Dimitriou.
Thessaloniki’s main squares include Plateia Eleftherias, near the port, and the grand Plateia Aristotelous, a popular meeting point that runs between Egnatia and Leoforos Nikis. Squares further east include Plateia Agias Sofias and Plateia