Salonica, City of Ghosts [Hardcover]

Mark Mazower (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2004

The history of a rarely written about, bewilderingly exotic city: five hundred years of clashing cultures and peoples, from the glories of Suleiman the Magnificent to its nadir under Nazi occupation. Salonica is the point where the wonders and horrors of the Orient and Europe have met over the centuries. Written with a Pepysian sense of the texture of daily life in the city through the ages, and with breathtakingly detailed historical research, Salonica will evoke the sights, smells, habits, songs and responses of a unique city and its inhabitants. The history of Salonica is one of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded. For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have succeeded each other in ascendancy, each people intent on erasing the presence of their predecessors, and the result is a city of extraordinarily rich cultural traditions and memories of extreme violence and genocide, one that sits on the overlapping hinterlands of both Europe and the East. Mark Mazower has written a work of astonishing depth and originality about this remarkable city; magnificently researched and beautifully written, it is more than a book about a place; it studies in detail the way in which three great faiths and peoples have inhabited the same territory, and how smooth transitions and adaptations have been interwoven with violent endings and new beginnings.

Editorial Reviews

Review

From Amazon readers' reviews of Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (Penguin, 1999) 'Original, insightful, provocative and easy to read. Easily the best one-volume history of Europe available: original, insightful, provacative and easy to read.' 'Mazower is masterly: A must read for anyone interested in politics or recent history. ' 'A superb introduction to a dying century Mazower's work is always clear and concise. He reveals the fragility of democracy inside Europe over the last century and he has challenging insights that prompt us to think of the coming decades in creaking nation states. A must for the Millennium'

About the Author

Mark Mazower is the author of Inside Hitler's Greece (Yale), Dark Continent (Penguin Press) and The Balkans (Weidenfeld), and is published in the US by Knopf. He is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Harper Collins; First Edition edition (September 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007120230
• ISBN-13: 978-0007120239
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,793,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)