Patrick Comerford
I was recalling earlier this week how I have came across a collection of photographs of modern sculptures in the streets and parks of Thessaloniki and how realised that I had written little about these sculptures over the years.
Rather than leave the photographs and memories in forgotten files on my laptop or in the cloud, I have started an occasional series of blog postings on some of those modern sculptures I have rediscovered in Thessaloniki. Over the next few weeks, I am inviting you to join me in a minor odyssey of recovery and discovery as my mind wanders through Thessaloniki, looking at these sculptures again.
The sculptures I have looked at this week include the monumental statues of Aristotle, Alexander the Great and Eleftherios Venizelos.
Thessaloniki has a number of sculptures and works of public art that reflect the city’s Jewish history, including the Holocaust Memorial, ‘Menorah in Flames 2’, by the Serbian Jewish sculptor Nandor Glid in Eleftherias Square, and the ‘Stolpersteine’ or ‘stumbling stones’, 10x10 cm brass-topped cobblestones by the German artist Gunter Demnig to honour local Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
The Jewish Monument of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki honours the city’s Jewish community and is a reminder of the Jewish cemetery on the site that was destroyed by the Nazis. The monument on the campus also recognises the destruction of the old Jewish cemetery during the Nazi occupation of Greece.
The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Αριστοτέλειο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλονίκης (ΑΠΘ, AUTh), often known as the University of Thessaloniki, is the largest university in Greece. It was founded in 1925 and was the first Greek university founded outside of Athens.
The university established a chair in Jewish Studies in 1929, but it was abolished in 1936 under the Metaxas regime. The Jewish cemetery in Thessaloniki was destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Greece, the university campus was built partly on the remains of the cemetery and uprooted gravestones were used as building materials in the university.
Thessaloniki was once known as the ‘Mother of Israel’ and the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans.’ For over three centuries, it was the largest Sephardic Jewish city in the world and the only major European city where Jews formed the majority. But, in the space of five months in 1943, the Nazis erased all that almost completely.
There have been Jews in Thessaloniki since the time of Alexander the Great. But the story of the city’s modern Jewish community begins in 1492, with catastrophe transformed into refuge. When Spain’s Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand expelled all Jews from Spain, between 15,000 and 20,000 Sephardic Jews fled across the Mediterranean. Many settled in Thessaloniki, then a bustling port city in the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. He realised that Spain’s loss could be his empire’s gain. The Jewish refugees brought skills in medicine, printing, textiles, metalwork and international trade, they spoke multiple languages and they had commercial networks spanning continents. ‘The Spanish king is a fool,’ Bayezid reportedly said, ‘impoverishing his own country to enrich mine.’
The Sephardic Jews transformed Thessaloniki. They established the city’s first printing press, making Thessaloniki a centre of Jewish scholarship and publishing. They built synagogues – eventually 42 of them – each named after the Spanish or Portuguese city their founders had fled: Catalán Yashan (Old Catalan), Aragon, Lisboa, Evora, Castile.
They created networks that made Thessaloniki one of the most important trading hubs in the Ottoman Empire. Jewish merchants shipped wool, silk and ceramics across the Mediterranean, Jewish craftsmen became the exclusive tailors for the Ottoman Janissaries, and Jewish bankers facilitated trade between east and west.
By 1519, just 27 years after the expulsion, Jews made up 56 per cent of Thessaloniki’s population. By 1613, Jews were 68 per cent of Thessaloniki's population – a percentage unmatched anywhere else in Europe, before or since. This was a living reality into the 20th century: Sabbath observance shut down commerce, rabbinical courts wielded authority, Ladino echoed through marketplaces and Jewish printing presses produced books shipped across the Mediterranean.
For over 300 years, from the 16th to the early 20th century, Jewish life defined the rhythm of life in Thessaloniki. The city effectively shut down from Friday evening until Saturday night, honouring the Jewish Sabbath alongside the Friday prayers of Muslims and the Sunday observance of Christians.
The Ottoman millet system granted religious minorities autonomy. Jewish courts handled civil disputes, rabbinical authorities oversaw education, marriage and religious life, and the community paid collective taxes but otherwise was self-governing.
Jewish entrepreneurs led Thessaloniki’s industrialisation in the mid-19th century. The Allatini brothers established the first modern flour-milling plant in 1854, followed by textile, brickmaking and tobacco factories. By the early 20th century, Jews owned 38 of the city’s 54 largest trading houses, and there was a vibrant Jewish working class too. Jewish stevedores controlled the docks, Jewish weavers supplied textiles throughout the Balkans, and Jewish printers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and merchants filled every sector of urban life.
Thessaloniki became a Jewish intellectual powerhouse. The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened educational institutions that taught French alongside traditional Jewish subjects; a whole generation became conversant with both Jewish tradition and European modernity; and newspapers in Ladino connected the community with Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman world.
Politically, Thessaloniki’s Jews were active in Ottoman reform movements. Many supported the Young Turks revolution of 1908, which sought to modernise the empire with constitutional government. Zionist leaders who visited the city saw it as a model. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky all visited Thessaloniki in the early 20th century, seeing in its Jewish majority a preview of how a Jewish state might work.
The port city closed every Saturday. Most workers – including the dockworkers – were Jewish and observed Shabbat. Street signs were in Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews. There were synagogues in almost every neighbourhood, newspapers in four languages served the cosmopolitan population, but Ladino and Greek were the main languages and the dominant voice in the synagogues was Spanish-inflected Hebrew prayers.
But forces were gathering that would unravel its world. Four years before my grandfather’s arrival there, Greece took Thessaloniki in 1912 during the Balkan Wars and incorporated the city in the modern Greek state. The Jewish community – 70,000 strong at the time and the city’s largest ethnic group – faced an uncertain future.
At first, the Greek government recognised the community’s rights and traditions. But tensions simmered, Greek merchants resented Jewish commercial sway, and some people saw the Jewish presence as a remnant of Ottoman rule.
On 18 August 1917, a small kitchen fire in central Thessaloniki exploded into an inferno. For 32 hours, flames consumed over one-third of the city. The fire destroyed 9,500 buildings, and left 70,000 people homeless, 52,000 of them Jews, and 16 of the 33 synagogues were burned. Jewish schools, libraries, charitable institutions, and the grand rabbinate's archives, with the records of centuries of births, marriages and deaths, rabbinical decisions and community history, vanished in smoke.
The entire documented history of one of the world’s great Jewish communities went up in flames, and the fire devastated Jewish Thessaloniki. Over 20,000 Jews, unable to find shelter, left the city for Athens, France, the US and Palestine.
The community rebuilt itself on the outskirts of the city but never recovered its former glory. The balance in the population shifted dramatically in 1923 when Greece and Turkey negotiated a population exchange. About 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece from Turkey, with roughly 100,000 settling in Thessaloniki. For the first time in four centuries, Jews had become a minority in the city they had once defined.
By 1940, Thessaloniki had a Jewish population of about 56,000 in a city that had grown to about 250,000 residents. The community had survived fires, political upheaval, and demographic transformation, they kept open their synagogues, schools and cultural institutions, and they remained a vital part of the city’s fabric. But nothing prepared them for what came next.
On 9 April 1941, German forces occupied Thessaloniki. Within a week, Nazi authorities arrested Jewish community leaders, confiscated Jewish homes and hospitals, and began the systematic looting of Jewish cultural property. Tens of thousands of books, religious artefacts and works of art were shipped to Germany.
On 11 July 1942 – a date remembered to this day as ‘Black Saturday’ – the Nazis forcibly rounded up 9,000 Jewish men aged between 18 and 45 in Plateia Eleftherias (Πλατεία Ελευθερίας, Liberty Square). For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before the crowds of onlookers. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour. The rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the demanded sum.
In December 1942, the Nazis began destroying the Jewish cemetery with 300,000 Jewish graves. The Jewish cemetery, with 20 generations and over 500 years of burials, stretching from Egnatia street to Saranta Ekklisies, was destroyed. The tombstones were purloined as building materials for footpaths, university stairs, and barrack latrines. Aristotle University Thessaloniki was rebuilt where the Jewish dead had been buried.
In February 1943, Eichmann sent Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to Thessaloniki, specialists in Jewish deportation, to implemented the Nuremberg Laws. They forced people to wear yellow stars, restricted movement and confiscated property, and within days Jews were forced into three ghettos. The largest, the Baron Hirsch transit camp, was beside the railway station.
The first train left Thessaloniki on 15 March 1943. Between March and August 1943, 19 trains took as many as 46,000 Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each train held 1,000 to 4,000 people crammed into cattle cars.
When they arrived at Auschwitz, most people were sent directly to gas chambers. Of the 46,000 deported, about 1,950 or 4 per cent survived; 96 per cent of the city’s Jewish population was exterminated in 1943. In five months, the Nazis accomplished what four centuries of disasters – plagues, fires, wars and economic transformations – had failed to do: they destroyed the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’, the ‘Mother of Israel’.
The survivors who returned from the camps found a ghost community. Fewer than 2,000 Jews remained in Thessaloniki, their synagogues were destroyed or vandalised, their homes had become the homes of strangers, their cemetery was razed, their archives were burned, their commercial networks were shattered. Many survivors could not bear to stay and emigrated to Palestine, the US or other diaspora communities. Others rebuilt what they could, establishing small institutions to preserve their memories.
Today, about 1,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki, where they are less than 0.2 per cent of the city’s population of over 800,000. Three synagogues remain of the original 42. The Monastir Synagogue survived only because Nazis had used it as a Red Cross warehouse. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year, documents the community’s history.
The Jewish Monument of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, designed by the architect Konstantinos Lentaris, honours the city’s Jewish community and is a reminder of the Jewish cemetery on the site that was destroyed by the Nazis.
The monument, unveiled in November 2014, includes a sarcophagus, a bronze menorah or seven-light lamp, scattered marble plaques with Jewish symbols, and a bronze Star of David. Five marble plaques in five languages, recalling, perhaps, the five books of the Torah or the Pentateuch, tell the story of the former cemetery and of the monument.
The university’s department of Jewish Studies, forced to close in 1936, reopened in 2015 in partnership with the local Jewish community, and now offers courses on Greek-Jewish history, the Holocaust, and Ladino language and culture. Sadly, the monument has been vandalised many times by far-right antisemites.
One of Thessaloniki’s last Holocaust survivors, Heinz Kounio, died earlier this year (16 April 2026) at 98. The Holocaust Museum of Greece (Μουσείο Ολοκαυτώματος Ελλάδος) in Thessaloniki, due to open in coming months, is the first museum dedicated specifically to telling the story of Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust.
May their memories be a blessing, זצ״ל
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
In this series:
1, Introduction (21 September 2026)
2, Aristotle by Giorgos Georgiadis, Aristotelous Square (22 September 2026)
3, Alexander the Great by Evangelos Moustakas, Alexander’s Garden (23 September 2026)
4, Eleftherios Venizelos by Giannis Pappas, Plateia Dikastirion (24 September 2026)
5, The Jewish Monument by Konstantinos Lentaris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (25 September 2026)
6,Admiral Nikolaos Votsis by Georgios Dimitriadis, at the White Tower
