The history of the city of Thessaloniki is a long one, dating back to the Ancient Greeks. Today with the opening of borders in Southeastern Europe, since the collapse of Communism in the early 1990s, it is currently experiencing a strong revival, serving as the prime port for the northern Greek regions of Macedonia and Thrace, as well as for the whole of Southeastern Europe.
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The city was founded around 315 BC by King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and twenty-six other local villages. King Cassander of Macedon named the new city 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, it had its first walls built, which enclosed and protected the city. The city also came to be an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Macedon, with its own parliament were a King was represented that could interfere in the city's domestic affairs.
After the fall of the Kingdom of Macedon in 168 BC, Thessalonica as it came to be called in Latin, became a city of the Roman Republic. It grew to be an important trade-hub located on the Via Egnatia, the Roman road connecting Byzantium (later Constantinople) with Dyrrhachium (now Durrës in Albania), which facilitated trade between Europe and Asia. The city became the capital of one of the four Roman districts of Macedonia while it kept its privileges but was ruled by a praetor and had a Roman garrison. Also for a short time in the 1st century BC, Thessalonica even became capital for all the Greek provinces. Due to the city's key commercial importance, a spacious harbour was built by the Romans, the famous Burrowed Harbour (Σκαπτός Λιμήν) that accommodated the city's trade, up to the 18th century. Later, with the help of silt deposits from the Axios river, land was reclaimed and the port was expanded. Remnants of the old harbour's docks can be found in present day under Frangon Street, near the city's Catholic Church.
Thessaloniki's acropolis, located in the northern hills, was built in 55 BC for security reasons, following Thracian raids in the city's outskirts at the time.
During the 1st century a Jewish colony was established in the city, and came to become an early centre for Christianity. On his second missionary journey, Paul the Apostle of Tarsus, born a Hellenized Israelite, preached in the city's synagogue, the chief synagogue of the Jews in Thessaloniki and laid the foundations of a new church to be built there. Paul wrote two of his epistles, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians and the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians to the Christian community at Thessalonica. He was driven out from the city and fled to Veroia by Jews who opposed him.
In 306, Thessaloníki acquired a patron saint, St. Demetrius. He is credited with a number of miracles that saved the city and was the Roman Proconsul of Greece, under the anti-Christian emperor Maximian. The saint martyred at a Roman prison, where the Church of St. Demetrius lies today. The church was first built by the Roman sub-prefect of Illyricum Leontios in 463. Other important remains from this period include the Arch and Tomb of Galerius, located in the city centre of the modern Thessaloniki.
When the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum was divided between the East and West Roman Empires in 379, Thessaloniki became the capital of the new Prefecture of Illyricum (reduced in size). Its importance was second only to Constantinople itself, while in 390 it was the location of a revolt against the emperor Theodosius I and his Gothic mercenaries. Botheric, their general, together with several of his high officials, were killed in an uprising triggered by the imprisoning of a favorite local charioteer for pederasty with one of Botheric's slave boys.[1] 7,000 - 15,000 of the citizens were massacred in the city's hippodrome in revenge – an act which earned Theodosius a temporary excommunication.
A quiet interlude followed until repeated barbarian invasions after the fall of the Roman Empire, while a catastrophic earthquake severely damaged the city in 620, resulting in the destruction of the Roman Forum and several other public buildings. Thessaloniki itself came under attack from Slavs in the 7th century; however, they failed to capture the city. Byzantine brothers Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius were born in Thessaloniki and it was Byzantine Emperor Michael III who encouraged them to visit the northern regions as missionaries were they adopted the South Slavonic speech as the basis for the Old Church Slavonic language. In the 9th century, the Byzantines decided to move the market for Bulgarian goods from Constantinople to Thessaloniki. Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria subsequently invaded Thrace, defeated a Byzantine army and forced the empire to move the market back to Constantinople. In 904, Saracens, led by Leo of Tripoli, managed to seize the city and after a ten day depredation, left, with a large loot and 22,000 slaves, mostly young people.[2]
Following these events, the city recovered and the gradual restoration of Byzantine power during the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries brought peace to the area. As the population of the city expanded, according to Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish community of some 500-strong was also established in the 12th century. During that time the city came to host the fair of Saint Demetrius every October, which was held just outside the city walls and lasted six days.
The economic expansion of the city continued throughout the 12th century as the rule of the Komnenoi emperors expanded Byzantine control into Serbia and Hungary, to the north. The city is known to have housed an imperial mint at this time. However, after the death of the emperor Manuel I Komnenos in 1180, the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire began to decline and in 1185, Norman rulers of Sicily, under the leadership of Count Baldwin and Riccardo d'Acerra, attacked and occupied the city, resulting in considerable destruction. Nonetheless, their rule lasted less than a year and they were defeated by the Byzantine army in two battles months later, forcing them to evacuate the city.
Thessaloniki passed out of Byzantine hands in 1204, when Constantinople was captured by the Fourth Crusade. Thessaloniki 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 given by emperor Baldwin I to his rival Boniface of Montferrat, but seized it back once more in 1224 by Theodore Komnenos Doukas, the Greek ruler of Epirus. In 1235, Tsar Ivan Asen II of Bulgaria subjugated the Despotate of Epirus and made the rulers of Thessaloniki his vassal's. The city was recovered by the Byzantine Empire in 1246.
At this time, despite intermittent invasion, Thessaloniki sustained a large population and flourishing commerce, resulting in intellectual and artistic endeavour that can be traced in the numerous churches and frescoes of the era and by the evidence of its scholars teaching there.[3] Examples of Byzantine art survive in the city, particularly the mosaics in some of its historic churches, including in the basilica of Hagia Sophia and the church of St George.
In the 14th century , however, the city faced upheaval in the form of the Zealot social movement (1342–1349), springing from a religious conflict between bishop Gregorios Palamas, who supported conservative principles, and the monk Barlaam, who introduced progressive social concepts. Quickly, it turned into a political commotion, leading to the preeminence of the Zealots, who ruled the city for a time and applied progressive social ideas.
The Byzantine Empire, unable to hold the city against the Ottoman Empire's advance, sold it in 1423 to the Republic of Venice. Venice held the city until it was captured after a three-day-long siege by the Ottoman Sultan Murad II, on the 29 of March 1430.[4] The Ottomans had previously captured Thessaloniki in 1387, but lost it in the aftermath of their defeat in the Battle of Ankara against Tamerlane in 1402, when the weakened Ottomans were forced to hand back a number of territories to the Byzantines. During the Ottoman period, the city's Muslim and Jewish population grew. By 1478, Thessaloniki had a population of 4,320 Muslims between 6,094 Greek Orthodox inhabitants. By ca. 1500, the numbers of Muslims grew to 8,575 Muslims, with Greeks numbering at 7,986, making them a minority. Around the same time, Jews began arriving from Spain, fleeing persecution. In ca. 1500, there were only 3,770 Jews, but by 1519, 15,715 Jews came to form 54% of the city's population. The invitation of the Sephardic Jew's expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, was an Ottoman demographic strategy aiming to prevent the Greek population from dominating the city, as it had in previous years.[5] Sephardic Jews, Muslims and Greek Orthodox remained the principal groups in the city for the next 400 years.[5] The city came to become the largest Jewish city in the world and remained as such for at least 200 years, often called "Mother of Israel". Of its 130,000 inhabitants at the start of the 20th century, around 60,000 were Sephardic Jews.[6] Some Romaniote Jews were also present.[7] Thessaloníki, called Selânik in Turkish, became one of the most important cities in the Empire, viable as the foremost trade and commercial center in the Balkans. The railway reached the city in 1888 and new modern port facilities were built in 1896-1904. The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was born there in 1881, and the Young Turk movement was headquartered in the city in the early 20th century.
Selânik was a sanjak center in the Rumeli eyalet from 1393 to 1402 and again from 1430 to 1864, when it became a vilayet (province). The Ottoman vilayet of Salonika included the sanjaks of Selânik (Thessaloniki), Drama, and Serres (Siroz or Serez). Architectural remains from the Ottoman period can be found mainly in the city's Ano Poli (Upper Town) district, in which traditional wooden houses and fountains survive the city's great fire in the following years. In the city center, a number of the stone mosques survived, notably the "Hamza-Bey Camii" on Egnatia (under restoration), the "Alatza Imaret Camii" on Kassandrou Street, "Bezesteni" on Venizelou Street, and "Yahoudi Hamam" on Frangon Street. Most of the more than 40 minarets were demolished after 1912, or collapsed due to the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917; the only surviving one is at the Rotonda (Arch and Tomb of Galerius). There are also a few remaining Ottoman hammams (bathhouses), particularly the "Hamam Bey" on Egnatia Avenue.
From 1870, driven by economic growth, the city's population exploded by 70%, reaching 135,000 in 1917. During 19th century, Thessaloníki became one of the cultural and political centres of the Bulgarian revival movement in Macedonia. According to Bulgarian ethnographer Vasil Kanchov around the beginning of the 20th century there were approximately 10,000 Bulgarians, forming a substantial minority in the city.[8] In 1880 a Bulgarian Men's High School was founded, followed later by other educational institutions of the Bulgarian Exarchate. In 1893 a part of the Bulgarian intelligentsia created a revolutionary organization, which spread its influence among Bulgarians throughout Ottoman Balkans and became the strongest Bulgarian paramilitary movement, best known under its latest name, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). In 1903 a group of Bulgarian leftists and anarchists, tied to IMRO, organized series of Thessaloniki bombings of 1903. After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, Thessaloniki became a centre of Bulgarian political activity in the Ottoman Empire and seat of the two largest legal Bulgarian parties, the rightist Union of the Bulgarian Constitutional Clubs, and the leftist People's Federative Party (Bulgarian Section).[9]
During the First Balkan War, the Ottoman garrison surrendered Salonika to the Greek Army, on 9 November [O.S. 27 October] 1912. This was a day after the feast of the city's patron saint, Saint Demetrios, which has become the date customarily celebrated as the anniversary of the city's liberation. The next day, a Bulgarian division arrived, and Bulgarian troops were allowed to enter the city in limited numbers. Although officially governed by the Greeks, the final fate of the city hung in the balance. The Austrian government proposed to make Salonika into a neutral, internationalized city similar to what Danzig was to later become; it would have had a territory of 400–460 km² and a population of 260,000. It would be "neither Greek, Bulgarian nor Turkish, but Jewish".[10]
The Greeks' emotional commitment to the city was increased when King George I of Greece, who had settled there to emphasize Greece's possession of it, was assassinated on 18 March 1913 by Alexandros Schinas. After the Greek and Serbian victory in the Second Balkan War, which broke out among the former allies over the final territorial dispositions,[11] the city's status was finally settled by the Treaty of Bucharest on August 10, 1913, sealing the city as an integral part of Greece. In 1915, during World War I, a large Allied expeditionary force landed at Thessaloniki to use the city as the base for a massive offensive against pro-German Bulgaria. This precipitated the political conflict between the pro-Allied Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos and the pro-neutral King Constantine. In 1916, pro-Venizelist army officers, with the support of the Allies, launched the Movement of National Defence, which resulted in the establishment of a pro-Allied temporary government, headed by Venizelos, that controlled northern Greece and the Aegean, against the official government of the King in Athens. Ever since, Thessaloniki has been dubbed as symprotévousa ("co-capital").
On 18 August [O.S. 5 August] 1917, the city faced one of it most destructive events, were most of the city was destroyed by a single fire accidentally sparked by French soldiers in encampments at the city. The fire left some 72,000 homeless, many of them Turkish, of a population of approximately 271,157 at the time. Venizelos forbade the reconstruction of the town center until a full modern city plan was prepared. This was accomplished a few years later by French architect and archeologist Ernest Hebrard. The Hebrard plan, although never fully completed, swept away the oriental features of Thessaloníki and transformed it into the modern European metropolis that it is today. One effect of the great fire, came to be dubbed the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917, was that nearly half of the city's Jewish homes and livelihoods were destroyed, leading to massive Jewish emigration. Many went to Palestine, others to Paris, while others found their way to the United States. Their populations, however, were quickly replaced by considerable numbers of Greek refugees from Asia Minor as a result of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, following the defeat of the Greek forces in Anatolia during the Greco-Turkish War. With the arrival of these new refugees, the city expanded enormously and haphazardly. These events made the city to be nicknamed "The Refugee Capital" (I Protévousa ton Prosfýgon) and "Mother of the Poor" (Ftokhomána).
Thessaloniki fell to the forces of Nazi Germany on April 22, 1941 and remained under German occupation until 30 October 1944. The city suffered considerable damage from Allied bombing and almost of its entire Jewish population that remained following the fire, was exterminated by the Nazis. Barely a thousand Jews survived. Thessaloniki was rebuilt and recovered fairly quickly after the war, with this resurgence taking in both a rapid growth in its population and a large-scale development of new infrastructure and industry throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Most of the urban development of that period was however without an all-embracing plan, contributing to the traffic and zoning problems remaining to this day.
On 20 June 1978, the city was hit by a powerful earthquake, registering a moment magnitude of 6.5. The tremor caused considerable damage to several buildings and even to some of the city's Byzantine monuments; forty people were crushed to death when an entire apartment block collapsed in the central Hippodromio district. Nonetheless, the large city recovered with considerable speed from the effects of the disaster. Early Christian and Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1988 and Thessaloniki later became European City of Culture in 1997.
Thessaloniki today has come to become one of the most important trade and business hubs in the Balkans with its port, the Port of Thessaloniki being one of the largest in the Aegean, and fascilitating trade throughout the Balkan hinterland. The city also forms one of the largest student centres in Southeastern Europe and is host to the largest student population in Greece. The city sustains two state universities — the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the largest university in Greece (founded in 1926), and the University of Macedonia, alongside the Technological Education Institute of Thessaloniki. It also sponsors a range of private international institutions, either affiliated with universities in other nations, or accredited abroad.
In June 2003, the city was host to the Summit meeting of European leaders, at the end of the Greek Presidency of the EU, with the summit taking place at the Porto Carras resort in Chalkidiki, to aid security precautions. In 2004 the city hosted a number of the football events forming part of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games and experienced a massive modernisation program. Thessaloniki unsuccessfully bid for the 2008 World EXPO, this time won by Zaragoza in Spain, but another planned bid for 2017 was announced in September 2006 and is now in full development.
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