A glimpse of Paradise on the most isolated and remote island in Greece

Kastellórizo lies only a few minutes south of the Turkish coast (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

In Paradise I have marked out an island
akin to you and a house by the sea.

– Odysseus Elytis, The Monogram

Is everything in Greece up for sale? At the height of the tourist season this summer, the Greek Culture and Tourism Minister, Pavlos Garoulas, insisted in Istanbul: “No Greek islands are for sale, unless they are already private property.”

There are over 6,000 Greek islands, but only 227 are inhabited, and only 78 of those have more than 100 residents year-round. The largest and one of the most-visited is Crete, while one of the smallest and one of the most remote is Kastellórizo. This year, I visited Kastellórizo for the first time, but only after two or three failed efforts to travel from Turkey to the Dodecanese islands.

The Dodecanese literally means “twelve islands.” But this is a group of 12 larger Aegean islands, including Rhodes, and another 150 islands, of which only 26 are inhabited. Kastellórizo is known officially in Greece as Megísti and in neighbouring Turkey as Meis. It is the smallest inhabited Dodecanese island and the most remote Greek island.

Unlike the other Dodecanese islands, however, Kastellórizo is not in the Aegean – it is not even close to the rest of Greece. It is the most easterly and the most isolated part of Greece, a rocky outpost in the south-east Mediterranean, 570 km south-east of Athens, but only a mile or two off the south coast of Turkey. The nearest Turkish town, Kaş, is a mere 20 or 30 minutes away in a small caique, while the nearest Greek island, Rhodes, is 130 km to the west and three or four hours away by ferry.

A plucky piece of bravado

The former castle of the Knights of Rhodes dominates the approach to the harbour of Kastellórizo (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The official name Megísti means “biggest” or “greatest.” But this name is more a plucky piece of bravado than a statement of fact, for this tiny island is only 6 km long and 3 km wide. The population is now 430, and most people live in the town of Megísti, with handfuls on two tiny offshore islets, Rho (15) and Strongilí (9). Many islanders have emigrated to Australia, especially Perth and Sydney, where they are known as “Kazzies.”

The name Kastellórizo or Kastellórizon, dates only from Byzantine times, and has never been properly explained. Kastello is derived from the Latin castello (castle). But does the second part of the name refer to the reddish colour of the rocks, the colour of the castle at sunset, or the red on the coat-of-arms of the Knights of Rhodes? Does it refer to the neighbouring islet of Rho, or the tree roots on the foothill below the castle? Who knows?

The island is mountainous, with a high, steep coastline and many sea caves, including the Blue Grotto, which is larger than its namesake in Capri. The limestone soil yields only small crops of olives, grapes and beans, and there are no natural sources of drinking water.

Knights, Dorians and Lycians

The Faros Bar, once the Italian governor’s office, and the former mosque, now a museum, are the first buildings on the harbour front to greet new arrivals (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Arriving from Kaş, the first sight is the ruined 14th century Castle of the Knights of Rhodes. Under the Byzantine Empire, Kastellórizo was part of the “Eparchy of the Islands,” with its capital in Rhodes. The Knights of Rhodes and their Grand Master, Foulques de Villaret, captured the island in 1309, and established a safe harbour for pilgrims and crusaders on the route from Rhodes to Cyprus and the Holy Land. The castle was built almost three generations later by Grand Master Juan Fernandez de Heredia in 1379-1383.

All that remains of the castle is the curtain wall, part of a square tower and the remains of two cylindrical towers. A Doric inscription from the 4th century BC is evidence of an earlier fortress in antiquity and refers to Megiste, the ancient name of Kastellórizo, and its dependence on Rhodes. During the Hellenistic period, the island was ruled from Rhodes.

In 1440, the island was captured by an Egyptian fleet and the castle was wrecked and the islanders were sold into slavery. Then, in quick succession, the island passed to Aragon, Catalans, Naples, Spain and Venice. The castle was rebuilt, but fear of the Turks saw the islanders abandon their homes in successive waves. Finally, Kastellórizo fell in 1635 to the Ottoman Turks, who held it for almost 300 years apart from a brief period in 1659, when it was recaptured by Venice.

Bright Mediterranean colours on doors lining the harbour (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

As the boat comes closer to the harbour, the view is dominated by the knights’ castle and the dome of the island’s former mosque, a poignant reminder of the Ottoman occupation of the island that lasted until 1913.

The mosque, built in 1753 by Osman Agha, has been restored and is now a museum. Nearby, on the harbour front, the Faros Bar is the surviving single storey of the former office of the island’s Italian governors, built in 1926 by Florestano Di Fausto, the Italian architect who also designed some of the most important buildings of the Italian period in Rhodes.

Ottoman balconies

The harbour water is clear with plenty of marine life, including turtles (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

After docking at the horseshoe-shaped harbour, it is a short walk past Italian colonial market, the Néa Agorá, along the quay to the central square at the heart of the waterfront. The water is crystal clear, rich with fish and turtles. The houses here and in the side streets and alleyways are tall and slender, with Ottoman wooden balconies and Anatolian-style windows.

Along the east side of the harbour are the Megisti Hotel, built in 1970 to attract tourists, and the Blue House made popular by the movie Mediterraneo (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The best-know of the harbour-front houses is the so-called “blue house” or Mediterraneo House, famous for its role in the 1991 Academy Award winning Italian movie, Mediterraneo. The movie, directed by Gabriele Salvatores, tells the story of Italian soldiers hiding from World War II on a remote Greek island, and over the past 20 years it has boosted the island’s popularity with tourists looking for an isolated place in the Dodecanese. But in the back streets and alleys, many of the houses are abandoned and in ruins.

The Church of Saint George of the Well, with its high Byzantine-style dome, stands on Australia Square (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The most visible church in the town, the Church of Saint George of the Well (1906), with its high Byzantine-style dome, stands on Australia Square, a small square recalling the island’s emigrants. Hidden in a side street is Saint Merkourios, an example of late 18th century architecture restored to its former glory three years ago.

The Cathedral of Saint Constantine and Saint Helena dominates the skyline above the town (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Cathedral of Saint Constantine and Saint Helena (1835) has three naves divided by 12 giant granite columns taken from the Temple of Apollo Lykios in the classical city of Patara on mainland Anatolia. Tradition says that the Emperor Constantine and his mother, Saint Helena, on their way to find the True Cross, were delayed here by bad weather and laid the foundations of this church. Most of the island’s baptisms, weddings and funerals take place here.

The island is dotted with dozens of churches (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Above the harbour and the town, two monasteries look down benignly on Kastellórizo, the Prophet Elías and the Holy Trinity, the former now an army base. Smaller churches dot and decorate the hillside, including the twin churches of Saint Nicholas and Saint Dimirtios, Panaghía, Saint Spyridon, the imposing Saint George of the Fields, half a dozen other churches named after Saint George, and Saint Paraskeví and Saint Savvas at the small bay of Mandráki, the island’s second harbour. They are testimony to the piety and generosity of exiles and their descendants.

Ottoman balconies and Anatolian windows ... a reminder of centuries of Turkish rule (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Ottoman occupation was interrupted briefly in 1659, during the war for Crete, when the island was captured by Venice. In the 18th century, Kastellórizo was a stopping point between Constantinople or Rhodes and Beirut for those on the Grand Tour. Richard Pococke (1705-1765) reported in 1739 that the island was a lair of Maltese pirates, drawn by the good waters. He described the castle and said the island was rich in vines. Richard Pockocke was then Vicar-General of Lismore, and he went on to become Precentor of Waterford (1745), Archdeacon of Dublin (1746), Bishop of Ossory (1756) and Bishop of Meath (1765).

Struggles in war and peace

Bright and inviting ... but does anyone live inside? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Although many islanders joined the Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), the island’s only Turkish inhabitants were the aga or governor, the tax collector and the policeman. The population and the economy reached a height at the end of the 19th century when 10,000-14,000 people lived here. Kastellórizo was the only safe harbour between Makri (Fethiye) and Beirut, and its 165 sailing ships and schooners plied between Anatolia and Alexandria, Rhodes and Cyprus, making fortunes through trading in timber, sponges and charcoal.

In 1912, during the Libyan war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, the islanders asked General Ameglio, head of the Italian forces in Rhodes, to annex Kastellórizo. The request was refused, and in 1913 the islanders proclaimed a provisional government and imprisoned the Turkish governor and his Ottoman garrison, but their request to be incorporated in the modern Greek state was short-lived.

In 1915, a French naval force occupied the island and Kastellórizo became the only Dodecanese island to come under French rule as the French blocked another attempted landing by Greek soldiers. France went on to use Kastellórizo as a staging post for its Middle East colonies in Syria and Lebanon.

Many of the older houses are abandoned and exposed to the weather (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Six years of French rule ended in 1921 when the island was assigned to Italy under the Treaty of Sevres, and Kastellórizo – under the Italian name Castelrosso – was integrated into the Italian province of the Aegean Islands. But the decline in the island’s economy and population was hastened by the sale of much of the fleet to the British for the Dardanelles campaign, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the forced deportation of Greeks from Anatolia in 1923. Thousands of islanders moved to Rhodes and Athens or emigrated to Australia, Egypt and the US. By the late 1920s, the population had fallen to 3,000, leaving many of the houses empty or in ruins.

In 1932, a convention between Italy and Turkey delineating the sea border gave all the islets of the small archipelago around Kastellórizo – except Rho and Strongili – to Turkey.

The Néa Agorá or New Market was designed in Italian colonial style (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

During World War II, British and Greek commandoes landed briefly. When Italy started to fall in 1943, the island was taken by an allied fleet, including a Greek destroyer. Disaster struck in 1944, when the island’s fuel dump caught fire. The fire spread to a nearby ammunition dump, half the island’s 2,000 houses were destroyed, and the islanders continue blame the disaster on British incompetence. Kastellórizo was still under British rule in May 1945, but it effectively passed to Greece in 1947 under the post-war treaties, and, along with the other Dodecanese islands, the island was formally incorporated into the modern Greek State in 1948.

During my visit, Kastellórizo seemed a world away from modern Greece, with its daily protests and its economic woes, and this was a taste of Paradise not for sale before summer came to an end.

A quiet square offers shade from the summer sun and the heat of economic woes (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This essay was first published in November 2011 in the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough) and the Diocesan Magazine (Cashel and Ossory).

Finding poetic inspiration on a street corner in Thessaloniki

A grieving mother weeps over the slain body of Tasos Tousis, on the corner of Egnatia Street and Venizelou Street 75 years ago ... the photograph from Thessaloniki moved Yannis Ritsos to write his poem ‘Epitaphios’

Patrick Comerford

Thessaloniki is a city of sculptures, from the proud statue of Alexander the Great near the White Tower at the east end of the city to the moving monument on Elephtheria Square near the western end of Nikis Avenue, recalling the deportation of Thessaloniki’s Jews to the death camps in 1943.

On my final day in Thessaloniki, I visited some more Byzantine churches and monasteries, visited the Rotunda (the Church of Aghios Georgios), which had been built as the mausoleum of Gelarius, peered into the archaeological dig and walked around the remains of the Palace of Galerius on Navarinou Square, and climbed the White Tower at the eastern end of the promenade, now the symbol of Thessaloniki and the Museum of the History of Thessaloniki.

Protesting strikers marching through Mitropoleos Street in central Thessaloniki on Friday (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

As I walked back up trough Aristotelous Square, hundreds of striking workers were marching with banners along Mitropoleos Street, chanting slogans and blowing whistles. These protests are part of daily life in Greece today, as the government spending cuts bite deep and more and more public service workers lose their jobs.

But Thessaloniki has always been a city of protests, and there was one last monument I wanted to see before catching a flight later yesterday [Friday]. At the corner of Egnatia Street and Venizelou Street, a busy junction just a few blocks from my hotel, by the Thessaloniki Workers’ Centre erected a monument in 1997 to remember the murder of Tasos Tousis in 1936.

That murder, and the mother’s grief it caused, instantly became the inspiration for one of the most moving poems in modern Greek literature – Epitaphios by Yiannis Ritsos.

The corner of Egnatia Street and Venizelou Street is a busy junction ... even the Hamza Bey Mosque has been sealed off by corrugated hoarding as work on the new Metro line continues (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Sadly, I failed to find this monument yesterday [Friday, 14 October 2011]. Most of the junction has been dug up and fenced off as tunnelling and construction work continues for a new Metro line. Even the Hamza Bey Mosque on this corner – also known as Alkazar and dating from 1468 – has been surrounded by corrugated hoarding and blocked off from the public.

Hopefully, when the Metro line is finished and the new station at this junction is opened, this monument will be returned to remember that fatal incident three quarters of a century ago.

On 9 May 1936, thousands of workers, students, shopkeepers and tobacco farmers took to the streets of Thessaloniki. In the clashes with police that followed, 10 to 20 people lay dead on the streets and a further 300 were wounded.

The protests were sparked after the Greek general election that year resulted in a deadlock between the conservatives led by Panagis Tsaldaris, and the liberals led by Themistoklis Sofoulis. The Communist Party, with 15 seats and the support of the Agrarian Party, supported Sofoulis. But King George II, distrusting both liberals and communists, appointed Kostantinos Demertzis as the caretaker prime minister. But when Demertz died unexpectedly, instead of turning to Sofoulis the king appointed the Minister of War, General Ioannis Metaxas, who moved immediately against the trade union movement.

On 29 April, the Panhellenic Tobacco Workers’ Federation called a general strike, demanding the lowest daily wages be raised to 120 drachmas. Thessaloniki had a long history of trade union activism, and 12,000 tobacco workers took to the streets that day. Soon the protests spread to Volos, Serres, Drama and Kavala, and on 2 May, workers in many other Greek cities joined the strike.

The General Directorate of Northern Greece – now the Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace – was the target of the protesters march in May 1936 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The strikes and protests reached a peak on 5 May, when paper mill workers, weavers, rubber workers, and cobblers in Thessaloniki joined the strike. On 8 May, 7,000 tobacco workers began marching on the General Directorate of Northern Greece (now the Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace) on the hill at the top of Venizelou Street.

Mounted police and foot patrols began beating and shooting at the marchers. As news of the clashes spread through the city, many more people rushed to the support of strikers, who entrenched themselves behind hasty barricades. The authorities panicked and called in the army. After 3½ hours of clashes, the strikers and their supporters were forced to retreat. But that same night a host of other unions joined the cause.

By Saturday 9 May, the strike had become a general strike. Students, the owners of small businesses and shopkeepers joined the factory workers, so that about 25,000 people were on the streets. From dawn, the city was turned into a war zone with hand-to-hand skirmishes.

That morning, Tasos Tousis, who worked as a driver, was shot dead at the junction of Egnatia Street and Venizelou Street. He was the first death in the protests. In the chilling moments that followed, a photographer captured the moment when the young man’s mother came across her son’s dead body on the street and fell to her knees.

An angry crowd gathered and placed his body on a makeshift bier made from a door. They began marching on up to the General Directorate. By now, the officials and civil servants had vacated the building, but it was defended by a large, well-armed police force. Church bells rang out as more and more people joined the crowd. Some of the police began shooting at random into the crowd, with more casualties. But the crowd refused to not scatter. Even a declaration of martial law had little effect.

Later that afternoon, the demonstrators regrouped at 5 p.m. at the street corner where Tousis was murdered, and trade unionists held the streets throughout the night.

The Army Corps C mustered all available resources near the city the next morning and swamped Thessaloniki, arresting anyone they thought looked remotely suspicious. But, despite martial law, the funerals of the victims went ahead. After the burials, there were more processions from the cemetery, near the present campus of the Aristotelian University campus, to the Vardaris district, a march of several kilometres.

Metaxas used the disturbances in Thessaloniki to stir fears of a communist revolt, and he abolished parliament on 4 August 1936. As Greece entered World War II, it was still ruled by the military dictatorship. The dragon’s teeth he had sown continued to grow in the bitter civil war that followed World War II and, in the 1960s and 1970s, under the colonels’ junta.

The corner of Egnatia Street and Venizelou Street ... a busy junction today (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Meanwhile, the left-wing daily newspaper Ritzospastis published a front-page photograph of the grieving mother dressed in black and weeping as she knelt over the body of her slain son, Tasos Tousis, on the corner of Egnatia Street and Venizelou Street. Moved by this Pieta-like image, Yannis Ritsos, then aged 27, locked himself in his attic room and set to work immediately. In two days and two nights of intense creativity, he produced his greatest poem, Epitaphios.

“Epitaphios” is the name for the cloth that dresses the funeral bier of Christ in the Good Friday processions in Greek Orthodox churches.

In writing his poem, Ritsos was deeply influenced by the Good Friday liturgy, as well as the funeral speeches of Thucydides and Lysias. The Epitaphios Trinos is the lament chanted in Greek Orthodox churches on the evening of Good Friday. But Ritsos’s poem moves at the end from Crucifixion to Resurrection, and culminates in an abiding hope that grave injustices can be conquered.

At first, the bereft mother, like Mary with her crucified Son, grieves inconsolably. She extols her son’s virtues and recalls his gifts. She cannot understand why he died; nor can she understand his political convictions. But she gradually changes and begins to apply his local struggle to the universal struggle for social justice.

Her grief is sustained as she recalls how her son pointed to the beauties of nature and creation. She challenges the values of a society that claims to be Christian while killing those struggling for justice.

But darkness turns to light as the realisation unfolds that her son lives on in the lives of his comrades as they continue his struggle. At the end, her vision is of a future in which all shall be united in love. And in a stirring finale, she vows to take up her son’s struggle and to join his comrades in arms.

The Epitaphios in a church in central Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The first edition of this poem was published on 12 May 1936, with a dedication to the workers of Thessaloniki. A second edition, with a print-run of 10,000, outsold the works of Kostis Palamas, the father-figure of modern Greek patriotic poetry. Later, Ritsos was to become one of the most prolific poets of his time in Greece, with over 100 volumes of poems, dramatic works, essays, fiction and translations to his name, and he was nominated on 10 occasions for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Metaxas dictatorship moved quickly to ban Epitaphios and publicly burned the last 250 copies available in Athens in front of the Temple of the Olympian Zeus. Epitaphios was not seen in print again until the 1950s, and in the years that followed Ritsos was held for four years in concentration camps and forced into internal exile.

The final definitive text of Epitaphios was published in 1956, and runs to 324 verses, divided into 20 parts or cantos, each with 16 verses in eight couplets, except for the last two, which run to 18 verses in nine couplets.

Robert Frost once said a true poem memorises itself, and so it could be said a true lyric sings itself and harks after a melody. Epitaphios is lyrical and Ritsos achieved that lyricism by grafting his earlier elegiac mode and his political fervour onto the rootstock of Greek folksong, the demotikó traghoúdi. He employed 15-syllable lines and rhymed couplets, reaching back into the popular and mythical past of a people continually invaded, cheated and plundered.

In 1958, he sent Epitaphios to the composer Mikis Theodorakis, who was then living in exile in Paris. Theodorakis, best known to many for his score for Zorba the Greek, set parts of the epic poem to music, employing the quintessential instrument of poor, urban Greeks, the bouzouki of rembetika, using rhythms drawn from the folk songs and folk music of different parts of Greece. At the time, the bouzouki was out of fashion among middle class Greeks, who associated it with brothels and hashish dens.

Ritsos was apprehensive when he heard that Epitaphios – with its sacred allegories drawing on the deeply religious emotions surrounding the Greek Orthodox ceremonies of Good Friday, including ta Aghia ton Aghion (“The Holy of Holies”) – was going to enter the music halls and the nightclubs of Greece. “I thought it would be sacrilege,” he said. “I was wrong.”

The setting by Theodorakis was soon recorded by other great performing artists of the day, and the poem quickly acquired a political career of its own, becoming the anthem of the Greek left.

Aristotelous Square in Thessaloniki ... in 1963, central Thessaloniki again became the focus of events that brought new life to the epic poem (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

In 1963 – once again in May and once again in Thessaloniki – the young left-wing deputy Grigorios Lambrakis lay dying in hospital after a murderous assault that provided the dramatic story for the Costas Garvas movie, Z. Hundreds kept vigil in the streets and they were joined by Ritsos and Theodorakis as they sang Epitaphios in their martyr’s honour, vowing to ensure his struggle would live on.

After his funeral in Athens, the dirge was sung and sung again by the crowds in the streets, and graffiti began appearing on the walls: “Lambrakis Lives.” The events surrounding the assassination of Lambrakis and the subsequent efforts at a cover-up inspired the author Vassilis Vassilikos to write his thriller Z – pronounced in Greek the letter “Z” means: “He lives.”

When the colonels seized power in Greece in 1967, Ritsos was arrested yet again and sent into internal exile on the island of Samos. The poetry of Ritsos and the music of Theodorakis were banned, but Epitaphios was soon being presented at readings and concerts throughout Europe as a rallying poem and anthem of opposition to the junta. The political force of Epitaphios had acquired a new dimension directly from its lyricism and the new setting by Theodorakis.

The director Costas Garvas turned the book by Vassilos Vassilikos into a movie – although filming in Greece was impossible under the colonels and he had to make the movie in French in Algeria. Nut the colonels’ junta began to collapse with the student occupation of the Athens Polytechnic on 17 November 1973, and democracy was restored in Greece the following year.

Epitaphios still moves me every time I hear it. It is still a stirring musical and poetical reminder that death does not conquer all, that those who struggle against injustices and those who become the victims of violence and oppression do not necessarily die in vain, that death does not have the last word.

The story of the murdered young tobacco worker in Thessaloniki, and the story of the events recalled in Z are reminders that the demand for justice does not die when its advocates are beaten, silenced, murdered or die. Before I left Thessaloniki, I headed back up into the hills above the city yesterday, into the Old Town (Ano Poli), past the monasteries of Ossios David, Vlatadon and Aghios Pavlos, which appears to cling to the rocks as it hangs over a precipice, with pine forests behind.

And at Aghios Pavlos, I thought of the Epistle reading for tomorrow in the Revised Common Lectionary (I Thessalonians 1: 1-10), and how the Apostle Paul, in his opening greeting to the Church in Thessaloniki, tells the people of this city about the centrality of the Resurrection in Christian faith.

The strikes and protests in Greece continue to disrupt daily life. A flash protest by air traffic controllers in Athens delayed my connecting flight in Budapest by hours, so that I only got home in the early hours of this morning. But when the work on the new Metro line is completed, and when I am next in Thessaloniki, I hope to lay flowers at the reinstated monument to the memory of Tasos Tousis, on the corner of Egnatia Street and Venizelou Street, and to remember those who struggle for workers’ rights, human dignity and democracy in Greece.

The heart-breaking stories of the Jews of Thessaloniki

The Jewish Holocaust Memorial on Platia Eleftherias near the port in Thessaloniki ... in July 1942, all the men in the Jewish community aged from 18 to 45 were rounded up in this square for deportation (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

I am staying in Thessaloniki in the Egnatia Hotel, a block away from the city’s last surviving synagogue and a short walk from the city’s sensitively-presented Jewish Museum. Nearby too is the sprawling and bustling Modiáno central market, named after a wealthy Jewish family who had the foresight and vision to build it.

Until 1942, Thessaloniki had no Jewish ghetto. This is no ordinary city when it comes to Jewish history, for the story of the Jews of Thessaloniki dates back more than 2,000 years, and the city was home to a major Jewish community, mostly of Sephardic origin, until the middle of World War II.

Thessaloniki is the only major city of this size to have had a Jewish majority for centuries. For at least two centuries, this city was the largest Jewish city in the world, and was known as the “Mother of Israel.” Many non-Jewish people in Thessaloniki also spoke Ladino, the Romance language of the Sephardic community, and the city virtually ground to a stop on Saturdays. The city even had its own unique sect of Jews, the Dönmeh or Sabbateans, followers of Sabbatai Zvi, who converted to Islam and built their mosques in the style of synagogues.

The 2,000 years or more history of this community dates back to at least the year 140 BC, when the first Jews are recorded in the city. In early Christian times, the Apostle Paul, in his first letter to the church in Thessaloniki (I Thessalonians), mentions Hellenised Jews in the city about 52 CE.

By the early mediaeval period, Benjamin of Tudela reported that there were 500 Jews in Thessaloniki in 1170. A small Jewish population continued to live here during the Byzantine period, but it has left no records, and the Jewish population was still small when the Ottoman Turks captured Thessaloniki.

When the Ottoman Turks captured Thessaloniki in 1430, they turned the city’s churches into mosques, and drove the city into sharp decline. But the city’s Muslim and Jewish population grew. In 1478, there were 4,000 Muslims, 6,000 Greek Orthodox, a handful of Catholics, and a tiny, ancient Greek-speaking or Romaniote Jewish community. But in the decades that followed, the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 were warmly welcomes, and this new community influenced the Sephardic world culturally and economically so that the city became known as the “Mother of Israel.”

The Ottoman Empire protected the Jews as dhimmis, but the invitation to the expelled Jews may have been a strategy to prevent ethnic Greeks from dominating the city. The first Sephardim who arrived from Majorca in 1492 were “repentant” returnees to Judaism after their earlier forced conversion to Catholicism. They were soon joined by Castilians and Sicilians, and then by Jews from Aragon, Valencia, Calabria, Venice, Apulia, Naples and Provence.

Monastiriotin Synagogue on Syngrou Street is the only synagogue in Thessaloniki to have survived after World War II (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

In mid-16th century, Jews from Portugal also sought refuge in Thessaloniki. Soon, they were joined by small numbers of Ashkenazim from Austria, Transylvania and Hungary. The Jewish community grew rapidly, and by 1519 numbered over 15,500 or almost 55% of the city population; by 1613, they were 68%. Throughout the 16th century, they enjoyed a “Golden Age.” Each new group brought its own rites and rituals and founded its own synagogue: the Katallan Yashan (Old Catalan) was founded in 1492; the Katallan Hadash (New Catalonia) started at the end of the 16th century.

In 1651, a young and brilliant rabbi, Sabbatai Zevi, arrived from Smyrna in Thessaloniki, proclaiming himself the messiah, but with a reputation too as a scholar and a Kabbalist. He found a great number of followers among the Shalom Synagogue, many of them former marranos.

Stars of David on the top of a column in the portico of the Monastirioton Synagogue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Sabbatai Zevi caused a scandal when, during a solemn banquet in the courtyard of the Shalom Synagogue, he defied Jewish piety by pronouncing the Tetragrammaton, and claimed he was the Messiah, the Son of David. The rabbinical courts drove him out, but his presence so divided Thessaloniki’s Jewish community that he was called before the sultan and jailed. Unable to prove his supernatural powers, he relented and converted to Islam.

Many of his followers, the Dönmeh or Sabbateans, converted to Islam. Although some returned to Judaism, about 300 of the richest Jewish families in the city decided to embrace Islam in 1686. They later divided into three groups – Izmirlis, Kuniosos and Yacoubi – forming forming a new religious community in Thessaloniki. However, they never assimilated with the Turkish Muslims, and instead married within their own community, lived in separate quarters, built their own mosques that retained many elements found in synagogues, and developed a liturgy in their own language.

A colourful street front in Ladidaka, once a Jewish district in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Jews of Thessaloniki enjoyed a revival in the mid-19th century with the arrival of French and Italian Jews who were influential in education. They brought contemporary ideas from Europe that changed the Jewish culture of the city. With this rapid economic growth from 1870, members of the Jewish community built elegant Renaissance-style and neo-classical villas and mansions that line Vassilis Olga Avenue.

When Thessaloniki was incorporated into the modern Greek state in 1912, the city’s Jews acquired full citizenship. At first, the change of sovereignty was not well-received by them, and some Jews sought the internationalisation of the city under the protection of the European powers. But the Greek government took firm measures to promote their integration, including allowing them to work on Sundays and to observe Shabbat.

The great fire of 1917 destroyed the historic centre and a large part of the city’s architectural heritage and it was a disaster for the Jewish community. It destroyed the seat of the Grand Rabbinate, its archives, and half of the city’s 33 synagogues. Many Jews left for other parts of Europe, Turkey, the US and Alexandria in Egypt, where there were large Jewish and Greek-speaking communities.

The sprawling and bustling Modiáno central market takes its name from the wealthy Jewish family who built it (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The influx of tens of thousands of Greek refugees from Anatolia, and the departure of Muslims, including the descendants of the Sabbateans, in the 1920s significantly changed the ethnic and religious diversity of the city. No longer were the Jews an absolute majority and by the eve of World War II they had been reduced to 40% of the city.

Those Jews who remained in the city saw themselves as both Greek and Jewish, and in 1926 the Greek Government re-emphasised that all citizens of Greece enjoyed equal rights. The historian Misha Glenny says these Greek Jews had not encountered “anti-Semitism in its North European form … The 20th century had witnessed the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment among Greeks ... but it attracted an insignificant minority.”

The story of the Jews of Thessaloniki is told in the Jewish Museum in Aghiou Mina street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Jewish population fell to 53,000 on the eve of World War II, and the emigrants to northern Europe included a future grandparent of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.

When the city was captured by German Nazis on 22 April 1941, the threat of deportation was repeatedly met with disbelief. The Grand Rabbi of Thessaloniki, Zvi Koretz, was arrested by the Gestapo on 17 May 1941 and sent to a concentration camp near Vienna, although he returned in late January 1942 to resume his post.

In July 1942, all the men of the Jewish community between the ages of 18 and 45 were rounded up in Plateia Eleftherias and forced to do humiliating physical exercises at gunpoint. About 4,000 of them were ordered to build a road for the Germans from Thessaloniki to Kateríni and Larissa, a region infected with malaria.

In less than ten weeks, 12% of these Jewish men died of exhaustion and disease. In the meantime, the community in Thessaloniki, with help from Athens, collected 2 billion drachmas towards the 3.5 billion drachmas demanded by the Germans to ransom the forced labourers. In the meantime, the Germans forced the closure of the Jewish cemetery, with 300,000 to 500,000 graves. The Jewish tombs were destroyed, and the cemetery was turned into a vast quarry. The site is now the campus of the Aristotelian University.

About 3,000 to 5,000 Jews escaped Thessaloniki, finding refuge in the Italian zone, 800 more fled to the Macedonian mountainsides, joining the Greek Communist Resistance, ELAS. The remaining 54,000 Sephardim were shipped to the concentration camps.

Fragments of Jewish gravestones scattered by the Rotunda (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Towards the end of February 1943, the Jews of the city were rounded up in three districts – Kalamaria, Syngrou and Vardar or Aghia Paraskevi – and sent to a transit camp where the death trains were waiting. Each train carried 1,000 to 4,000 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz, with one convoy to Treblinka. Chief Rabbi Tzvi Koretz and others were sent to Bergen-Belsen, along with 367 Jews protected by their Spanish nationality.

The Jewish population of Thessaloniki was so large that the deportation took several months until the deportation was complete. But even in the concentration camps, the Greek Jews never ceased to affirm their sense of belonging to the Hellenic nation. Primo Levi, in If this is a man, described the strong patriotic sense among the Greek Jews in the camps: “They are amongst the cohesive of the national groups, and from this point of view the most advanced.”

In Birkenau, about 37,000 Jews from Thessaloniki were gassed immediately, including women, children and the elderly. Nearly a quarter of all 400 experiments perpetrated on the Jews were on Greek Jews, especially those from Thessaloniki. By the end of World War II, almost 98% of the Jewish population of Thessaloniki had died. Only the Jews of Poland experienced a greater level of destruction. By contrast, a large proportion of Jews in Athens managed to escape death.

The exhibits in the Jewish Museum tell the story of the Jews of Thessaloniki over almost 2,200 years

Among the few survivors of the camps, some chose to return to Greece and others emigrated to Western Europe, America or Palestine. Those who returned to Thessaloniki were often the sole survivors in their families and found their homes occupied. But in the late 1940s, the government of George Papandreou, grandfather of the present Prime Minister, was the first European government to return Jewish properties that had been confiscated during World War II.

Yad Vashem has identified 265 Greeks among “The Righteous among the Nations,” the same proportion as among the French population. The 1951 census listed 1,783 survivors. Today, although this is the second largest Jewish community in Greece after Athens, only 1,200 Jews live in Thessaloniki.The only synagogue to have survived the Holocaust is the Monastirioton Synagogue in Synogrou, around the hotel where I have staying this week. However, services are normally held in the smaller Yad Lazikaron. The rich story of this community is movingly told in the nearby.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy in the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral.

Additional reading for this essay:

Photini Constantopolou, Thanos Veremis (eds), Documents on the History of the Greek Jews (Athens: Kastaniotis Editions for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece, University of Athens Department of Political Science and Public Administration, 1998).

Mark Mazower, Salonica: City of Ghosts, Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (London: HarperCollins, 2004).

Exploring Biblical and Byzantine Christian roots in Thessaloniki

The Monastery of Vlatádon ... a working monastery with strong links with academic theological life in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

This week’s visit to Thessaloniki is providing me with a unique opportunity to look back on centuries of architecture and to see some of the city’s wonderful ecclesiastical heritage as I visit its ancient churches.

Christianity first came to this city with Saint Paul, who wrote two of his epistles (I Thessalonians and II Thessalonians) to the early Christians here.We start reading I Thessalonian as the New Testament Lectionary readings in the Revised Common Lectionary cycle next Sunday (16 October). So this is a city with a rich Biblical and Byzantine heritage, and in 1988 Unesco declared many of the churches as World Heritage Monuments.

The Church of Aghios Dimitrios, the largest church in Greece, recalls the martyred patron of Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The most famous church in Thessaloniki is the Church of Aghios Dimitrios, named after the martyred Roman soldier who is the city’s patron saint and whose feast day is celebrated later this month on 26 October. The church was first built as a small oratory shortly after the year 313 on the ruins of a Roman bath and on the site of the saint’s martyrdom ten years earlier on the orders of the Emperor Galerius.

A new church was built on the same site in the fifth century. This was a large, three-aisled basilica, but was burnt down in 634. Soon after, the present five-aisled basilica was built on the site, and it remains the largest church in Greece.

The church became a mosque in 1493, but was restored to Christian worship in 1912. It was destroyed by fire again in 1917, but restoration work began immediately after the catastrophe of 1917. Very few fragments of sculptures, mosaics or frescoes survived the fire of 1917, but those that have survived are representative of the successive phases of the church’s history.

Today, the church serves as the de facto cathedral of Thessaloniki.

The interior of the Church of Aghios Dimitrios ... the largest church in Greece (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The crypt under the sanctuary and the transept was closed by a two-day strike when I went to visit it yesterday. But this is said to be the place where the saint was martyred, and has been an archaeological site since it was discovered in 1918. The remains of the saint were returned from Italy in 1980 and are part of the exhibition open to the public, with items that survived the 1917 fire and others that came to light during recent excavations:

● The fountain of the holy water and holy oil associated with the cult of Saint Dimitrios.
● Architectural sculptures, including columns and parapets, from the first architectural phase of the church in the fifth century.
● Corinthian-style capitals from the first architectural phase of the church.
● Two small fifth century pillars from the sanctuary.
● The restored ambo (pulpit) of the church; it dates from the sixth century, and in the seventh century was placed in the wall where it is now exhibited.
● Fragments of middle Byzantine sarcophagi.
● Fragments of icons of the Virgin Mary from the 11th and 12th century relief decoration of the church.
● Fragments of a 13th century ciborium.
● Decorative fragments from a 14th century burial monument.
● A mosaic votive inscription from the decoration of the church destroyed by the 1917 fire.

The Church of Aghia Sophia in Thessaloniki ... modelled on the great basilica of the same name in Constantinople (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Church of Aghia Sophia in the centre of Thessaloniki, stands on Plateia Aghia Sophia, between Egnatía and Navarínou, and is said to have been first built as a replica of the great Aghia Sophia in Constantinople.

The church was built in the seventh century on the ruins of a large, five-aisled basilica dating from the fifth century. It was the metropolitan church of Thessaloniki, dedicated to the Wisdom (Sophia) of God, and it soon became the nucleus of a large building complex, with administrative and religious functions. It was here that Saint Gregory Palamas, as Archbishop of Thessaloniki, preached his sermons on the uncreated energies of God.

The present church is different in many ways from the original seventh century church. Several parts of the interior decoration are preserved, including mosaics on the dome and the sanctuary, dating from the eighth to the 12th centuries, with a striking mosaic of the Ascension of Christ in the dome, which is 10 metres in diameter, and wall paintings from the 11th century in the narthex.

The interior of the Church of Aghia Sophia in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

In 1524, the church was converted into a mosque by the Ottoman Turks. The church was burnt down in 1890 and was repaired between 1907 and 1909. After the liberation of the city in 1912, the church was restored to Christian worship. The building was restored again in 1941. In 1961, the Turkish plaster was removed and the wall paintings in the narthex were uncovered and cleaned. The liturgy is no longer served in the church, but it remains open to the public.

The shrine of Saint Basil, Archbishop of Thessaloniki, in the Church of Aghia Sophia (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

An even older Byzantine church is the mid-fifth century Church of the Panaghia Achiropiitos. The church was built in on the site of a Roman bath, and was dedicated to the Virgin “not made by human hands” (Achiropiitos), a reference to an icon rather than an inference of any miraculous role in its building.

Inside the church, a few fragments of mosaics from the fifth century have survived in the soffits of the arches of the colonnades. Several parts of the wall paintings date from the 13th century, are also preserved in the south aisle.

The Church of the Panaghia Achiropiitos was built in on the site of a Roman bath (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

This is a three-aisled basilica with a narthex on the west side and a second entrance with a monumental propylon in the middle of the south wall. To the east of the propylon a building is attached, probably a baptistery or a diakonikon. A small parekklesion (chapel) is formed at the east end of the north aisle.

This was the first church in Thessaloniki to be converted into a mosque after the conquest of the city by the Turks in 1430. The Turks hammered down practically all the figurative decorations in the church, including the mosaics and frescoes. In 1930 the building was turned back into a church.

The Church of Panaghía Halkéon was once a mosque, serving the guild of coppersmiths (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Church of Panaghía Halkéon (the Virgin of the Coppersmiths) was built in 1028 by a Christophoros, a Byzantine official named in an inscription on the marble lintel at the main west entrance. After the Ottoman Turks took Thessaloniki in 1430, the church was turned into a mosque, serving the guild of coppersmiths in the city. When it became a church once again in 1912, the Turkish plaster was removed and the earlier wall paintings were cleaned.

The church was damaged by the earthquake in 1932 and was subsequently restored; and parts of it were rebuilt. Similar work was also carried out after the earthquake of 1978. There are fragmentary frescoes in the cupola and some icons.

The Church of Aghios Nikólaos (Saint Nicholas) Orphanós, close to the house where Ataturk was born, was the katholikon or main church of a monastery and dates from the early 14th century. The name refers either to the charitable works of Saint Nicholas on behalf of orphans, or to the probable founder of the monastery, a member of the Byzantine Orphanos family. Another story says the church was founded by a Serbian named Milutin. However, the church is a metochion (dependency) of Vlatádon Monastery near the Byzantine walls of Áno Pólis, the old city.

The marble iconostasis remains almost intact as well as many superb if age-damaged frescoes and wall paintings that have been dated to 1310-1320. Aghios Nikólaos continued to function as a church, even during the Ottoman Turkish period. To help preserve the frescoes, candles are only lit during the Liturgy on Sunday mornings.

The Church of Dódeka Apóstoloi (the Twelve Apostles), with five domes, once served as the katholikon of a monastery, probably dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was founded in 1310-1314, by Patriarch Niphon I, who is named in an inscription on the marble lintel over the entrance and the three monograms on three capitals on the west facade.

When the Ottoman Turks converted the church into a mosque in 1520-1530,many of the mosaics were hammered down and the rest of the paintings were whitewashed. After the city became part of the modern Greek state in 1912, this became a church once again. The church was restored in 1940-1941 and again after the earthquakes of 1978. At the same time, the wall paintings were cleaned and restored. The surviving 14th century mosaics are among the last executed in the Byzantine Empire.

The Metropolitan or Cathedral Church of Saint Gregory Palamas in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Today the metropolitan church or cathedral of Thessaloniki is the Church of Saint Gregory Palamas. The cathedral, which has a round red dome, is named after the saint who was the Archbishop of Thessaloniki from 1347 to 1359.

The shrine of Saint Gregory Palamas in the Metropolitan Cathedral Church in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Inside are the shrine and relics of the saintly archbishop, while the walls are covered with bright, modern frescoes depicting the life of Christ and the ministry of the Apostle Paul.

The Church of the Prophítis Ilías, dating from the 14th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Church of the Prophítis Ilías (the Prophet Elijah) has the features of a monastic building. It was the katholikon of a monastery and dates from the 14th century.

The church was converted into a mosque after 1430 and during the Ottoman Turkish period most of the frescoes were stripped away, and the building was reinforced with colossal buttresses. A few fragments of frescoes survive, especially in the narthex, and the church was restored as a church after 1912.

The Church of Óssios Davíd, first built to commemorate the baptism of Theodora (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The little fifth century Church of Óssios Davíd is said to have been built to commemorate the baptism of Theodora, a daughter of the anti-Christian Emperor Galerius, while he was away on business.

The church has well-preserved mosaics and rare 12th century frescoes depicting the Baptism of Christ. The four rivers of Paradise, replete with fish, flow from beneath Christ, lapping the feet of the prophets Ezekiel and Habakkuk.

The Church of Aghios Panteleimon, close to the Arch of Galerius (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Close to the Arch of Galerius, the Church of Aghios Panteleimon (Saint Panteleimon) was the katholikon of the Monastery of Theotokos Perivleptos, and was built at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries by Bishop James of Thessaloniki.

During the Turkish period, the church was converted into a mosque, probably around the years 1568-1571. Most of the frescoes were hammered down and the walls were whitewashed. After 1912, the church was restored as a church once again.

The Rotunda, built by the Emperor Galerius, was turned into the Church of Aghios Georgios (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Also close to the Arch of Galerius is the Rotunda, built by the Emperor Galerius as his future mausoleum. But he died in Serbia and was never buried here. Instead, the Emperor Constantine converted the Rotunda into the Church of Aghios Georgios (Saint George).

The church has and eight barrel-vaulted niches, and some frescoes survive. Later, the Ottomans transformed it into a mosque, and the minaret they erected has been restored.

The Monastery of Vlatádon is in a leafy, secluded location above the city (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

In the hills above the city, the Royal and Patriarchal Monastery of Vlatadon is in a leafy, secluded location. As you make your way up the hill, you keep seeing the over-hanging walls of the monastery, founded in the 14th century, perhaps by two monks from Crete.

In recent years, Vlatádon has been renovated and expanded, and has lost much of its old feeling. But the charming, inner, tree-shaded courtyard is a cool and refreshing place to rest and contemplate. This is one of my favourite places in Thessaloniki, and I once met the actress Irene Papas in this courtyard in the late 1990s.

From Vlatádon , the panorama looks out over the whole city and as far as the peaks of Mount Olympus. The resident peacocks are usually in good voice. They are here because peacocks are an early Christian symbol of faith in the resurrection, perhaps because it was believed that their flesh did not decay after death.

The Turks badly damaged the original frescoes in the church and they have not been restored. Today, the monastery of Vlatádon is the only active monastery among about 20 monasteries in Thessaloniki. Traditionally, the abbots and monks of Vlatádon have close links with the University of Thessaloniki and the Theological School in Chalki. The Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies was founded here in 1965, and it has a library and publishes the journal Klironomia.

By tradition, the little chapel of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Vlatadon stands on the very spot where the Apostle Paul preached when he visited Thessaloniki in the year 50. And so my visit to Thessaloniki this week’s is truly a Biblical and Byzantine experience.

Christ Pantocrator in the dome of a church in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

Why this city is part of my life and part of my story too

Looking down on the city of Thessaloniki and out to the Thermaic Gulf ... and recalling my grandfather’s days here during World War I (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

I am staying in the centre of Thessaloniki, just off Egantia, one of the main parallel, east-west thoroughfares running through the city.

All round, there are signs of the economic troubles that are besetting Greece at the moment, and the storm of protest and anger that is building up over the cuts in public spending that have become a necessary part of the Government’s response to its present fiscal dilemmas.

Rubbish is building up around the bins on many sidewalks, where there has been no collection for days. All public museums, including the Roman Agora, the Rotunda, the Archaeological Museum, the Byzantine Museum and their shops, are closed by a public service strike today and tomorrow. Many kiosks or peripteros, the uniquely Greek convenience stores, are closed too, along with the small shops selling bus tickets or providing tourism information.

Unemptied bins spilling over onto the streets of Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

But the temperature had risen to the low-to-mid 20s by mid-morning today. Greeks say they are beginning to feel the autumn bite, and some are even wearing their overcoats when they head out. But by any Irish standards – and especially after the weather we’ve had in Ireland for the last four or five months – this is still summer, and I was determined to make the most of the day.

I headed first to the Roman Agora on Egnatia and Platia Dastirion, north of Aristotelous. The site was closed off, and the only sign of life inside the perimeter was a lone and lame dog. This place was at the heart of commercial, financial and cultural life in Classical Macedonia, and the centre of public affairs, with public services, shops and a debating area, and with a small theatre on the eastern rim.

It was still possible to see most of the site, including the theatre, and even to catch a glimpse of the remnants of the mosaic floors this morning.

The sliver reliquary containing the relics of Saint Dimitirios (Photograph: Patrick Comerford,2011)

From there, I headed a little uphill to Aghios Dimitrios, the largest and the grandest of all churches in Greece. Despite being used as a mosque for almost five centuries under Ottoman Turkish rule, the church was restored in 1912, and some of the Byzantine mosaics that were recovered survived the great fire of 1917 and are on display.

The church was packed with pilgrims this morning, and a small group of them clustered together for a short service at the silver reliquary that holds the relics of Saint Dimitrios, which were returned from Italy to Greece in 1980.

A set of steps on the south-east side of the sanctuary area leads down to the crypt, where Thessaloniki’s patron saint was martyred in the year 303. However, even this crypt was closed by the two-day strike, and a paper notice pinned to the door told visitors and pilgrims alike to come back on Friday if we wanted to go down and see it.

From there, I worked my way up through the narrow streets, cobbled alleyways and steep steps that lead to the old city, or Ano Poli (Upper City) and the Kastra or Castle and the Byzantine Walls that mark out the top of the hills overlooking the city.

There is a look of picture-postcard Greece to the steep streets leading up to Ano Poli above Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

It’s a demanding climb for those who walk it rather than taking the easy option of a taxi. But it’s a climb that is worth it, for this is truly picture-postcard Greece, with hanging balconies, houses painted in bright primary colours, and tiny cafés.

As the city fell away beneath my gaze, and the view of the Thermaic Gulf spread out below, I thought of my grandfather, who had been brought here with his regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, in the aftermath of the disasters at Gallipoli and Suvla Bay in 1915. Was he housed in a makeshift camp on these slopes and hills I was climbing today?

He must have prayed so often that bitter winter for his wife, Bridget (Lynders), my grandmother, and his sons and daughters left at home in Ireland. Did he imagine he would ever see them again?

As he watched his comrades die from the wounds they had received in Balkan battles, from the bitter cold of winter and from frostbite, many of them young enough to be his sons, how could he imagine he would ever have another son?

Were his wife and children praying in Ranelagh for his safe homecoming?

His parents were long dead. But were my grandmother’s parents, Patrick and Margaret Lynders, praying in Portrane for their son-in-law’s safe homecoming?

On my way up, I was conscious of his presence here, and conscious of his prayers as I stopped at a church here or a monastery there.

The first of these was the 14th century Byzantine Church of the Prophet Ilias (the Prophet Elijah), but this too was closed by the two-day strike.

The next stop was the Church of Aghioi Taxiarches (the Holy Archangels), also built in the 14th century as part of an unknown monastery.

The Monastery of Vlatadon ... a quiet and undisturbed corner in the hills above Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

From there, there were more steep steps to climb before reaching the street called Akropoleos, for this is the acropolis of the classical city. We were at the ancient walls, and had reached my favourite part of the city, the Patriarchal and Stavropegic Monastery of Vlatadon, which dates back to the 14th century, and the Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, founded in 1963.

The church is said to stand on the point where the Apostle Paul preached to the people of Thessaloniki. There are beautiful views across the city, and there are dozens of friendly peacocks – bred by the monks because the peacock was traditionally seen as a sign of the resurrection.

Once again, I prayed in thanks that my grandfather had returned alive from this city, and then we had lunch in ‘Toicho Toicho,’ one of the many delightful cafés, restaurants and bars inside the Old City, enclosed by the Byzantine walls of the Seven Towers of Ano Poli. This was once the old Turkish quarter of Thessaloniki, but today it is a fashionable part of the city.

On the way back down, rather than retracing my pathway up, I took another set of steep steps and alleyways back down, stopping to look back up at the new buildings in Vlatadon, and then stopping at the Monastery of Ossios David, with its quiet courtyard and a church that has 12th century frescoes depicting the Baptism of Christ.

I finally ended up back at the Rotunda and the Arch of Galerius, still thinking of my grandfather’s time in Thessaloniki almost a century ago. Had he not survived his time here, my father would never have been born. I have a lot to be thankful for in this city. The malaria he contracted here eventually killed him. But it was because of this malaria that he was sent back to Dublin, and because of that I am alive today.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the commander of the Turkish forces at Gallipoli in 1915, was born in Thessaloniki in a house beneath the walls of the old city in 1881. In a tribute to the allied soldiers killed at Gallipoli, he wrote in 1934:

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side-by-side now here in this country of ours ... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”

I can hardly imagine the tears my grandmother, my uncles and my aunts shed as my grandfather was sent off to Gallipoli, or the fear they had when they heard he had been moved to Thessaloniki. Had he died here, and been buried in Greek soil, surely he too would have become a son of Greece, a son of Thessaloniki.

In a roundabout way, this city is part of my life and part of my story, and this is my Thessaloniki too.