Thessaloniki (Θεσσαλονίκη) Thessalonica or Salonica is the second-largest city in Greece and the capital of the region of Macedonia. It is Greece's second major economic, industrial, commercial and political centre, and a major transportation hub for the rest of southeastern Europe; its commercial port is also of great importance for Greece and its southeast European hinterland. The city hosts an annual International Trade Fair, the International Thessaloniki Film Festival, and the largest bi-annual meeting of the Greek diaspora.
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| Part of the city walls |
The city is well-known for its great number of students, estimated not far from 200,000. Aristotle University (70,000), Macedonia University (around 35,000) are the two public universities located in the city; a TEI (Technological Educational institute) is located in Sindos, the industrial zone of the city. Public and private vocational institutes (in Greek IEK) provide professional training to young students. Private colleges offer American and UK academic curriculum, via cooperation with foreign universities. In addition to Greek students, the city hence attracts many foreign students either via the Erasmus programme in the public universities, or for an entire degree in public universities and private colleges.
Thessaloniki is home to numerous notable Byzantine monuments, including the Paleochristian and Byzantine monuments of Thessalonika, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as several Ottoman and Sephardic Jewish structures.
The city was founded around 315 BC by the King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and twenty-six other local villages. He named it after his wife Thessalonike, a half-sister of Alexander the Great. She gained her name ("victory of Thessalians": Gk nikē "victory") from her father, Philip II, to commemorate her birth on the day of his gaining a victory over the Phocians, who were defeated with the help of Thessalian horsemen, the best in Greece at that time. Thessaloniki developed rapidly and as early as the 2nd century BC the first walls were built, forming a large square. It was an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Macedon, with its own parliament where the King was represented and could interfere in the city's domestic affairs.
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| Inscription on bases of statues of the family of Alexander the Great mentioning the name of Cassander's wife |
Thessaloniki remained an important administrative and trade centre during the Roman period. It was given the privilege of a free city and became the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia.
The city had a Jewish colony, established during the 1st century, and was to be an early centre of Christianity. On his second missionary journey, the apostle Paul preached in the city's synagogue, the chief synagogue of the Jews in that part of Thessaloniki, and laid the foundations of a church. Paul wrote two of his epistles to the Christian community at Thessalonica, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians and the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians.
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| St. Demetrius basilica |
The patron saint of the city, a Christian martyr of the 4th c., is St. Demetrius. The basilica dedicated to him (near the ancient forum/agora of the city) is one of the most important early Christian monuments of the city.
By the time Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century, Thessaloniki's importance was second only to Constantinople itself in the Eastern Roman Empire. Shortly before the Empire was Christianized, in 306 AD, Thessaloniki acquired a patron saint, St. Demetrius. He was the Roman proconsul of Greece under the anti-Christian emperor Maximian and was martyred. His relics are still housed and venerated in Thessaloniki at the St. Demetrius Church.
Emperor Theodosius I was the one who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 381 AD. He also, in 390 AD, massacred 7,000 to 15,000 of the citizens in the city's hippodrome in revenge for a revolt. The act earned Theodosius a temporary excommunication.
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| White Tower |
After the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, repeated barbarian invasions left Macedonia depopulated. In the 7th century, the Slavs failed to capture Thessaloniki but a sizeable Slavic community nonetheless established itself there. This led to St. Cyril and his brother St. Methodius, who were born in Thessaloníki and spoke Slavonic, being encouraged by the Byzantine Emperor Michael III to visit the northern Slavic regions as missionaries. Their adopted South Slavonic speech became the basis for the Old Church Slavonic language.
Thessaloniki was occupied by the Saracens in 904 and by the Norman rulers of Sicily in 1185, with considerable destruction and loss of life on both occasions. It finally passed out of Byzantine hands for good in 1204, when Constantinople was captured by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Thessaloníki and its surrounding territory — the Kingdom of Thessalonica — became the largest fief of the Latin Empire, covering most of north and central Greece. The city was recovered by the Byzantine Empire in 1246, but, unable to hold it against the encroachments of the Ottoman Empire, the Byzantine Despot Andronikos Palaeologus was forced to sell it to Venice, who held it until it was captured by the Ottoman ruler Murad II in 1430.
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| The Arch of Galerius in the Ottoman period |
Thessaloniki, renamed Selânik, remained in Ottoman hands until 1912 and became one of the most important cities in the Empire, with a large port being built in 1901. The founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, was born in Thessaloniki in 1881. The city was extremely multicultural: of its 130,000 inhabitants at the start of the century, around 60,000 were Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors had fled Spain and Portugal after 1492; the city's language of daily life was Ladino, a Jewish language derived from Spanish; and the city's day off was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians and Albanians made up the remainder of the population.
Thessaloniki was the main prize of the First Balkan War of 1912, during which it was successfully captured by Greece (October 1912). King George I of Greece was assassinated in Thessaloniki in March 1913. In 1915, during World War I, a large Allied expeditionary force landed at Thessaloniki to use the city as the base for an offensive against pro-German Bulgaria. A pro-Allied temporary government headed by Eleftherios Venizelos was established there, against the will of the pro-neutral German King of Greece.
Much of Thessaloniki was devastated by a fire in 1917 of unknown origin, probably an accident. Venizelos forbade the reconstruction of the town center until a full modern city plan was prepared. This was accomplished a few years later by the French architect and archeologist Ernest Hebrard. The Hebrard plan swept away the Oriental features of Thessaloniki and transformed it to a European-style city.
One consequence of the fire was that half the city's Jewish population left for places like Palestine, Paris, or America. But their numbers were quickly replaced by refugees after huge numbers of ethnic Greeks were expelled from Turkey in 1922 following the Greco-Turkish War. The city expanded enormously as a result. It was nicknamed "The Refugee Capital" (I Protévoussa ton Prosfígon) and "Mother of the Poor" (Ftohomána), and even today the city's inhabitants and culture are distinctively Anatolian in character.
Thessaloniki fell to the forces of Nazi Germany in 1941 and remained under German occupation until 1944. The city suffered considerable damage from Allied bombing, and almost the entire Jewish population was exterminated by the Nazis. Barely a thousand Jews survived. However, Thessaloniki was rebuilt fairly quickly after the war.
