Customer Reviews

Farewell to Salonica: City at the Crossroads

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I discovered this book by reading Mazower's book. This was a pure delight to read. The author brought me back to a Thessaloniki I had learned about in Mazower, but added the warm, personal details of family life and interaction among the groups which made up Salonica in the early 20th century. I didn't want the book to end. I was surprised to learn that it had been published quite a while ago and that the author's child added an epilogue. I wish I had read it before and wandered the streets to find some of the landmarks.

Farewell To Salonica: City At The Crossroads is the autobiography of Leon Sciaky and tells of his having grown up in Salonica (now called Thessaloniki), in Greece. A remarkable view of a place where Sephardic Jews, Greeks, Turks, Macedonians, Albanians, and Bulgarians all met, traded, and went about their daily lives. A superbly written memoir, Farewell to Salonica is a heartfelt, highly recommended testimony to a memorable city and a cultural mecca.

This is a fascinating book about one of the world's most interesting cities. It wouldn't appear obvious today because Thessaloniki (as it's called in Greek today as in ancient times) gives the impression of being a wholly-Greek and modern big city, but it was anything but that for the 500 years prior to World War I: it was a multinational, multicultural Balkan port city of the Ottoman Empire, whose largest single ethnic group was Sephardic Jews from Spain, Portugal and Italy and whose lingua franca was Judeo-Spanish ("Ladino"), a language very close to modern Spanish (and different from it primarily in that the former has sounds and syntax that were current in Castilian speech 500 years ago but have since changed or disappeared as the Spanish language developed over time). The book is written from the point of view of a Sephardic Jewish Salonican who senses (rightly) that the golden age of the city as a Jewish metropolis (or a multicultural one, for that matter) are coming to an end and conveys that general sense about as well as could possibly be done. (Although, needless to say, he could not possibly have anticipated the wholesale slaughter of nearly the entire Jewish community which occurred barely 30 years later.)
This book actually inspired me to go to Salonica (Thessaloniki) and see for myself. Judeo-Spanish is still spoken, but only by the elderly Sephardic Jews (everyone else speaks Greek), and at the one synagogue at which outsiders are able to attend services there is rigorous scrutiny of all people other than regular congregants -- such are the times, and such is the city's historic memory. Apart from the physical setting (on a horseshoe-shaped bay with Mt. Olympos on the horizon), the only real physical reminders of the Salonica the author knew are the White Tower by the waterfront and the historically-Turkish Ano Poli district with the house where modern Turkey's Mustafa Kemal ("Ataturk") was born and lived the first 31 years of his life. (Because the Ottoman Empire lost Salonica in 1912 while he was away serving in its army, he literally couldn't go home again.) Otherwise, fervent Hellenization prevails everywhere in the city and its surroundings. Indeed, even the name "Thessaloniki" is commonly abbreviated as "Thess'niki" --- a locution which wipes out the very syllables ("sa-lon") by which the Jews, the Turks and the Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs who lived there a century ago would have known and referred to the city in their various languages.

This gives another lens on Thessaloniki's history before it became Greek - with a personal touch, reminiscent a bit of Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul". Highly recommended for anyone interested in Greece, the Ottoman Empire, Sephardic Jews...or simply a pleasant memoir.