{"id":1530,"date":"2017-08-15T15:49:51","date_gmt":"2017-08-15T15:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1530"},"modified":"2017-08-15T15:49:51","modified_gmt":"2017-08-15T15:49:51","slug":"shape-shifting-in-thessaloniki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1530","title":{"rendered":"Shape-Shifting in Thessaloniki"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portrait of a Jewish Woman from Thessaloniki<\/p><\/div>\n

The Thessaloniki experience has to include both ghosts and crowds.\u00a0 Walking through the old souks on a mid-August holiday, its corridors are full of shadows, smells but no people, plastic bags flapping on the skeletal rafters.\u00a0 This is a good image for a polyglot city that has shifted, lost and gained identities countless times through its 24-century history.<\/p>\n

On the same holiday, there are families and students having coffee and cake, strolling along an arching seaside esplanade that could be a twin of Nice or Tel Aviv.\u00a0 Hipsters get cooler in the creative urban planning of giant city fans, make use of the endless possibilities for renovated spaces which have become coffee houses, clubs and bars.\u00a0 Thessaloniki is Greece\u2019s second city after Athens, yet known as a kinder, more dynamic place.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to beat Athens\u2019 history but Thessaloniki is dosed with fascinating past. \u00a0 In 15-17th centuries, the Roman agora that centers the city was part of a large Jewish city – large population of Jews settled after leaving Inquisition Spain, eventually becoming the majority.\u00a0 The Ottoman Empire allowed them to coexist, coopting their skills.\u00a0 As mosques, the ruling Muslims were using the city\u2019s early Christian churches, which themselves borrowed imagery of peacocks and gardens from classical sources.<\/p>\n

100 years ago this month, a massive fire wiped out most of the Jewish Ottoman city. \u00a0 Many residents of this Jerusalem of the East became refugees and fled, after manipulative urban planning, to other countries.\u00a0 In one of the 20th century\u2019s crueler ironies, most of \u00a0the remaining Sepharads who had survived fires of the Inquisition and an uncontrolled bread oven were exterminated by the invading Nazis.<\/p>\n

Thessaloniki stories continue – when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and Greeks took the city back in the early 20th century, a massive exchange of population took place: huge population of Muslims moved to Turkish lands and Greeks moved from Turkey back in.\u00a0 Minarets were all torn down, disappeared.\u00a0 It\u2019s a little known \u201cethnic reorganization.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this is in a place that some describe as a \u201cteenager\u201d city.\u00a0 Pegged by some to be the next Barcelona. \u00a0Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Thessaloniki experience has to include both ghosts and crowds.\u00a0 Walking through the old souks on a mid-August holiday, its corridors are full of shadows, smells but no people, plastic bags flapping on the skeletal rafters.\u00a0 This is a good … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[605,613,15],"class_list":["post-1530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-greece","tag-thessaloniki","tag-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-oG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1531,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1530\/revisions\/1531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}