Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 940
EAN num: 9780007120239
ISBN number: 0007120230
Label: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Page Count: 528
Printing Date: September 20, 2004
Publishing house: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Sale Popularity Level: 2679051
Studio: HarperCollins Publishing houses Ltd
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The history of a rarely written about, bewilderingly exotic city: five hundred years of clashing cultures and peoples, from the glories of Suleiman the Magnificent to its nadir under Nazi occupation. Salonica is the point where the wonders and horrors of the Orient and Europe have met over the centuries. Written with a Pepysian sense of the texture of daily life in the city through the ages, and with breathtakingly detailed historical research, Salonica will evoke the sights, smells, habits, songs and responses of a unique city and its inhabitants. The history of Salonica is one of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded. For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have succeeded each other in ascendancy, each people intent on erasing the presence of their predecessors, and the result is a city of extraordinarily rich cultural traditions and memories of extreme violence and genocide, one that sits on the overlapping hinterlands of both Europe and the East. Mark Mazower has written a work of astonishing depth and originality about this remarkable city; magnificently researched and beautifully written, it is more than a book about a place; it studies in detail the way in which three great faiths and peoples have inhabited the same territory, and how smooth transitions and adaptations have been interwoven with violent endings and new beginnings.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Instead of trying to fit everything into the imaginary frame of nation-state based historical accounts, it is much better to focus on a place and observe the interaction of civilizations through time.
This book very successfully undermines any simplistic understanding of Balkans and the relationship between faith, state and society.
Essential book for anyone who is seriously interested in history
Rated by buyers -
Today I got Mark Mazower's very first book in Hebrew, a translation of this book I have in English.
Two Quotations from the Paperback copy.
p 12 "By 1950, when this book concludes, Salonica's Muslims had been resettled in Turkey, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans and most of them killed."
On the same page "Similar transformations occurred in cities across a wide swathe of the globe - Lviv Wroslaw Vilna Tiflis, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Lahore..."
(I know live with Arabs in Jaffa. S.C.)
p 460 "The Aftermath" : "For returning Jews the experience was a haunting one, Jacques Stroumsa was a young engineer who helped construct the Hirsch camp, and had survived Auschwitz, where his parents and his pregnant wife had been killed. After the war, unwilling to return home , he had left for good. When he eventually he came back for a brief visit, he spent hours sitting on his hotel balcony and looking out over the sea: 'I was smoking cigarette after cigarette for fear the tears would come. A Greek Orthodox friend found me alone around midnight and said: "I understand you, Jacques, you don't really know any more where to go in Salonica, the city where you once knew every stone." And that's how it was."
S.C.: Jacques was my fathers friend at school and Sorbonne in Paris. My father survived WW2 and saved most of the family by leaving Salonica for Athens and hiding there as Christians.
But the book is the History of Salonica from 1430-1950, not only WW2.
WW1 and the Fire in Salonica in 1916.
Very Good reading!
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