The history of an extremely exotic city, rarely mentioned: five hundred years of clashing cultures and peoples, from the glory of Suleiman the Magnificent to its fall under Nazi occupation.

Thessaloniki is the point where the wonders and terrors of the East and Europe meet through the centuries.

Written with a Pepysian sense of the texture of everyday life in the city across the ages, and with astonishingly detailed historical research, Thessaloniki evokes the images, smells, manners, songs, and reactions of a unique city and its inhabitants. The history of Thessaloniki is a story of forgotten alternatives and mistaken decisions, identities assumed and discarded. For centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims succeeded each other in dominance, each people seeking to erase the presence of their predecessors, and the result is a city with extraordinarily rich cultural traditions and memories of extreme violence and genocide, a city located at the overlapping borders of Europe and the East.

Mark Mazower has written a work of remarkable depth and originality about this remarkable city. Majestically researched and beautifully written, it is more than a book about a place; it examines in detail how three great faiths and peoples have inhabited the same area, and how smooth transitions and adaptations have woven with violent ends and new beginnings.