Who ruled Thessaloniki?

Thessaloniki curves around the head of the Thermaic Gulf in northern Greece, where the valleys of the Axios (Vardar) and Strymon rivers open routes into the Balkan interior. A sheltered harbour at the end of those routes made it the natural port for Macedonia and much of south-eastern Europe. For more than two thousand years it has been a major city without interruption, the second city of the Byzantine Empire, and for four centuries an Ottoman port where Sephardic Jews formed the largest community, a mix of peoples that the twentieth century largely destroyed.

King Cassander of Macedon founded the city around 315 BCE by merging older settlements, including Therma, and gave it the name of his wife Thessalonike, whose half-brother was Alexander the Great. After Rome defeated Macedon in 168 BCE, Thessalonica became the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia and a key station on the Via Egnatia, the road from the Adriatic to Byzantium. Paul the Apostle preached here around 50 CE, and his letters to the Thessalonians are among the oldest writings in the New Testament. The emperor Galerius made the city one of his residences around 300 CE, leaving a palace, a triumphal arch and the Rotunda. In 390 Theodosius I ordered a massacre of thousands of its citizens after a riot.

Under the Byzantine Empire Thessaloniki was the empire's second city, defended by massive walls and devoted to its patron, Saint Demetrius. It withstood Slavic and Avar sieges in the sixth and seventh centuries, but Arab raiders sacked it in 904 and the Normans in 1185. After the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople in 1204 it became the centre of a Latin kingdom, later passing to the Greek rulers of Epirus and then of Nicaea. In the 1340s a radical faction known as the Zealots ran the city for several years. Its churches, many of them now on the UNESCO World Heritage list, preserve Byzantine mosaics and frescoes from across this long period.

The Ottomans held the city briefly from 1387 to 1403. Unable to defend it, the Byzantines handed it to Venice in 1423, and on 29 March 1430 Sultan Murad II took it by storm. As Selanik it remained part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly five centuries, beginning earlier than the map's 1492 snapshot suggests. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 settled here in large numbers, and by the sixteenth century they formed the largest community; Thessaloniki was often called the Jerusalem of the Balkans. In the nineteenth century railways and a modern port made it the leading trading city of the Ottoman Balkans. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born here in 1881, and the Young Turk movement that forced constitutional rule on the sultan in 1908 was based in the city.

The Ottoman garrison surrendered Thessaloniki to the Greek army in the autumn of 1912 during the First Balkan War. A fire in August 1917 destroyed much of the centre and left over 70,000 people homeless, and the rebuilt city followed a new plan by the French architect Ernest Hébrard. After 1923 the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey sent the city's Muslims away and brought tens of thousands of Greek refugees from Anatolia. German forces occupied the city in April 1941, and in 1943 they deported about 45,000 of its Jews, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Today Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece, with about a million people in its metropolitan area, and a major port and university centre.