Lost Solun: A History in Pictures

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  • Vinum
    Junior Member
    • Apr 2011
    • 2

    #16
    Hi there,

    Got to this forum while trying to google early 1910s Solun photos. The thing is, there's a vintage photo of perfect quality featuring seaside city falsely referred as Pula. In fact, it's a clear mistake — some four mosques in picture appear to be absoulte nonsence for the small Croatian town in Istria. So the questions is — what's the town depicted on photo? Could it be Solun port in the beginning of 20th century?

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    • George S.
      Senior Member
      • Aug 2009
      • 10116

      #17
      Amazing pictures,there is a saying a picture is a thousand words.Does anyone know if pictures like these are preserved like in books etc for the future so that at least people will know how it really was.Niko & others thanks that's really very intersting.
      Welcome to Vinum I hope you are enjoying yourself.In respect of solun it was such a big city,amazing.
      "Ido not want an uprising of people that would leave me at the first failure, I want revolution with citizens able to bear all the temptations to a prolonged struggle, what, because of the fierce political conditions, will be our guide or cattle to the slaughterhouse"
      GOTSE DELCEV

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      • ennea
        Banned
        • Apr 2011
        • 46

        #18
        Vinum,
        Given the formation of the port and the existance of an opposite shore, this is NOT Thessaloniki.

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        • Onur
          Senior Member
          • Apr 2010
          • 2389

          #19
          Originally posted by ennea View Post
          Given the formation of the port and the existance of an opposite shore, this is NOT Thessaloniki.
          I didn't see Salonika myself but wasn't there a gulf in Salonika? So, there should be an opponent shore in there?

          Btw, this place cant be Croatia with these minarets since there was no Ottoman regime in there. I guess this is either Salonika or Izmir. I am not sure but i gotta check old Ottoman era pictures of Izmir cuz you know, after the great fire in 1922, most of the coast line of the city has been burned and it`s completely different right now but the building right at the port, on the left side of the picture looks similar to me. There is an old customs office at the port in Izmir, built by Gustave Eiffel. It`s survived the great fire and i think it`s that building. So, this is probably Izmir in 1910s.



          Edit:
          Yes, this should be Izmir before the great fire of 1922. This is the Eiffel`s building. It`s restored today but as exactly as it was built;





          The roof of the building and it`s surroundings are same.
          Last edited by Onur; 04-21-2011, 11:29 AM.

          Comment

          • Vinum
            Junior Member
            • Apr 2011
            • 2

            #20
            Whoa, I'm impressed! Onur, thank you so much for your great response!

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            • The LION will ROAR
              Senior Member
              • Jan 2009
              • 3231

              #21

              Another photo of George entering the city of Solun, 29/10/1912
              The Macedonians originates it, the Bulgarians imitate it and the Greeks exploit it!

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              • The LION will ROAR
                Senior Member
                • Jan 2009
                • 3231

                #22

                1901, some rarely seen details in this picture


                White Tower at 1890




                1915


                view from White Tower (1915)
                Last edited by The LION will ROAR; 04-23-2011, 08:57 AM.
                The Macedonians originates it, the Bulgarians imitate it and the Greeks exploit it!

                Comment

                • The LION will ROAR
                  Senior Member
                  • Jan 2009
                  • 3231

                  #23

                  The quays at Solun on June 8, 1917: taken from the height of 13,000 feet. by the Germant air force


                  a polyglot army L. to R. Annamite, Frenchman, Senegalese, Englishman, Russian, Italian, Serbian(partly hidden), British Indian, in frond a Cretan gendarme (military policeman) of the Venizelos provisional government. Year 1917
                  The Macedonians originates it, the Bulgarians imitate it and the Greeks exploit it!

                  Comment

                  • The LION will ROAR
                    Senior Member
                    • Jan 2009
                    • 3231

                    #24

                    chained prisoners put to work


                    Solun, Two women by city walls, around 1916
                    The Macedonians originates it, the Bulgarians imitate it and the Greeks exploit it!

                    Comment

                    • George S.
                      Senior Member
                      • Aug 2009
                      • 10116

                      #25
                      There was a photograph of macedonian prisoners jumping off the tower of solun.If someone has got it they can post it.
                      "Ido not want an uprising of people that would leave me at the first failure, I want revolution with citizens able to bear all the temptations to a prolonged struggle, what, because of the fierce political conditions, will be our guide or cattle to the slaughterhouse"
                      GOTSE DELCEV

                      Comment

                      • TRAVOLTA
                        Member
                        • Nov 2009
                        • 504

                        #26

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                        • TRAVOLTA
                          Member
                          • Nov 2009
                          • 504

                          #27


                          People and soldiers at the seafront during WWI.

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                          • TRAVOLTA
                            Member
                            • Nov 2009
                            • 504

                            #28

                            1920

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                            • TRAVOLTA
                              Member
                              • Nov 2009
                              • 504

                              #29

                              Roman Arch of Galerious over Egnatia street at 1930.

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                              • Onur
                                Senior Member
                                • Apr 2010
                                • 2389

                                #30
                                Give Greece a chance

                                Thessaloniki, Greece's second city, has spent centuries being burnt, bombed and built again. Our writer brings the colourful and cultural metropolis up to date

                                I want to tell you a story. You don't have to believe it. I didn't at first, and it happened to me. It was years ago in Istanbul, at the end of a long evening down by the water at Besiktas, when we had all become as dreamy as the waters of the Bosphorus at that hour. I was aching for my bed, but the tide of the night was running towards an iskembe joint, and I could already taste the garlicky vinegar of the tripe soup on the air. I pleaded mercy – a godawful early start for Salonica – when a young guy at the edge of the group touched my arm. "If you are going to Salonica, you must eat the borek," he said, and began to write down directions to the best bougatsatsidiko in the city.

                                He had never been to Thessaloniki himself, but his grandfather had been born there. Even his grandmother, who came from Hania, with all the Cretan pride that entails, had to admit that Salonicans made the best borek/bougatsa on the planet – the lightest, flakiest filo, just greasy enough to cut the goaty kick of the young mizithra cheese flecked with oregano and mint.

                                He handed me a napkin with a line drawn across it to show the sea, a fortress on a hill, a hamam with three domes, and between them the Turkish names of some streets.

                                But hadn't Thessaloniki been Greek since December 1912? Hadn't it been burned to the ground, bombed, rebuilt, knocked down and rebuilt again since then? Hadn't it endured two world wars, various occupations, a civil war, a dictatorship and the worst that precast concrete can inflict? Hadn't its Turks been sent back to the eternal exile of "home" and its Jews, the soul of the city, who made up the majority of its remarkable mix of peoples, been all but exterminated at Auschwitz?

                                None of this seemed to phase him. It should be there. "People still have to eat borek."

                                Two days later, using his scribbled directions, I found a bougatsa shop just where he said I would, next to a patsas place that was still serving the Greek variant of that hangover tripe soup I had missed in Istanbul to the last of the night's stragglers.

                                The owner was a refugee, too. But his family had come from Smyrna, now Izmir in Turkey. His Borekci grandfather had taken over from a man who had been given the key by a blond-haired Turk the day he and his family were deported in 1924 with the last of the city's Muslims. And yes, the bougatsa was fit for a bishop.

                                I took a photograph of the owner with two customers – one an Armenian Greek, the other a Cappadocian, though neither had set foot in the places they claimed to be from – and sent it to my friend in Istanbul. A few weeks later I received a reply.

                                He'd shown the photo to his grandfather, then well into his 90s. I'd got the wrong borek shop. The place never got sun like that in the morning.

                                I am telling you this story because to me it says a lot about the people who live in Salonica or have lived there, and people who have only inhabited the city in their dreams or in the stories of their parents or grandparents, but for whom it is still in some ways home.

                                The guide books will tell you that Thessaloniki is Greece's second city, a port of a million people that doesn't make the best of its spectacular setting and architectural heritage, its Byzantine churches lost in a permanent chaos of traffic and concrete.

                                I can't say they are wrong. But then there is Salonica, Selanik, Solun and Salonika, the New Jerusalem, the city that was once a candidate to be the capital of a Jewish Promised Land, the second city of the Byzantine empire and later of the vast Ottoman emirate when it was up there with the Ming as the most dominant, dynamic dynasty on earth. This is the city that is the real capital of the Balkans, its missing heart, the lodestar of a whole swathe of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Adriatic to Alexandria. But all that post-Byzantine bustle was an embarrassment to the city and to Greece generally.

                                Arriving in Thessaloniki any time in the past 50 years, you would have found a city that had gone into exile from itself. This flight began the day the Greek army marched into Salonica in 1912 just ahead of the Bulgarians to "liberate" a city that wasn't that Greek, and became practically pathological after the last transports left for Auschwitz carrying its Spanish-speaking Jews 32 years later.

                                The people who moved into their shops and apartments had themselves arrived, traumatised barely two decades earlier from Istanbul, Asia Minor, the Black Sea, Cappadocia or the Caucasus, or in endless refugee columns that had snaked from the Crimea, Bulgaria or Eastern Thrace. These new "old Greeks" of Magna Graecia were joined in the 1980s by Greeks from Russia, Tashkent, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia, who now muddle along with the latest arrivals from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and more recently Libya, stuck in the island in the moat of Fortress Europe that is Greece today, unable to get into Europe proper, and too ashamed or broke to go home. Thessaloniki is such a place in exile that its biggest football team, PAOK, has been playing away from home for more than 80 years. Its real home turf is Istanbul – Costantinopoli – its colours shared with Besiktas.

                                Nothing is quite what it seems. To really see Thessaloniki for what it is, you have to see not just the living but the dead. You have to look out towards Olympus and the mists that roll in off the Thermaic Gulf and see Pierre Loti rowing Aziyadé away from her husband; or see the last true sultan, Abdulhamid II, step ashore into house arrest from the imperial caique with his harem and carpentry tools in tow (as well as being a paranoid, bloodthirsty tyrant, he was a very nifty cabinet maker).

                                You have to imagine, too, those same women herded off a few years later into the saddest of travelling circuses ever to cross Europe. It is not for nothing that Mark Mazower subtitled his magisterial history of the place City of Ghosts.

                                This is a city of conspiratorial corners, where you cannot help turn detective as you climb up from Paralia through the Modiano market to Ano Poli and the city walls of the upper town, the Turkish quarter that looks so Greek. You don't have to look too hard to see churches that have been mosques and mosques that are now churches, old women lighting candles at shrines to holy men that were both saints and dervishes, or find the Moorish mosque-cum-Andalusian synagogue that served the city's Muslim Jews. Yes, you read right, Muslim Jews – the Ma'aminim or Donme, followers of Sabbatai Sevi. Thessaloniki did unlikely syntheses with the same ummatched elan as it do bougatsa. My God, they've tried, but no amount of wrecking balls or chauvinistic brainwashing has been able to destroy entirely the glorious diversity of its DNA. In any case, its unmentionable origins are laid out for all to see three times a day in its fantastic food, and in the songs that are sung in its skyladiko (literally "doghouse") clubs and rembetiko tavernas every night.

                                There is no getting away, however, from the fact that Thessaloniki is still the most conservative, nationalistic city in Greece – where the Orthodox church could bring thousands on to the streets to threaten war with the fledging republic of Macedonia for trying to "steal the name of Macedonia" and the heritage of Alexander the Great. And there are plenty of Orthodox Taliban on the nearby monastic republic of Mount Athos, which has its embassy in the city, ready to pounce on any slackening of national-religious fervour. Which makes it all the more remarkable that earlier this year the radical winemaker and ecologist Yiannis Boutaris swept into office as mayor on a platform of getting Thessaloniki to come out about itself, to embrace the cosmopolitan city that in living memory had shop signs in six alphabets.

                                He first promised to build a new mosque and a monument to Salonica's most famous son, Ataturk, and the Young Turks, whose revolution began there. And the doors should be thrown open to all the Jews, Turks and others who trace their roots to the city. The bishop of the city threatened to kill himself rather than swear Boutaris in and vowed to do everything in his power to stop this "Bulgarian traitor", a reference to the mayor's roots in the Latin-speaking Vlach minority. Boutaris branded him a "mujahideen" and took his own "cosmic vows".

                                He's going to need every bit of karmic help he can get. Thessaloniki has been run into the ground by a cabal of churchmen and extreme rightwing demagogues these past 20 years. The corruption and incompetence is on such a phantasmagoric scale that the city ran out of petrol to keep the handful of working dustcarts on the road. There is the small mattter, too that Greece is bankrupt. There is no better reason to bail out Greece again than to give Yiannis Boutaris a chance.

                                29 May 2011

                                Thessaloniki, Greece's second city, has spent centuries being burnt, bombed and built again. Fiachra Gibbons brings the colourful and cultural metropolis up to date

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