Each time I visit Salonika, the city captivates me. Salonika is the cauldron of Byzantium, mixing together its Hellenic and Slav elements to create a pastry appreciably different from that of Athens. The city more fully expresses the reality and diversity of the Balkans and post-Byzantium than Athens, chosen for its Classical Greek associations to be Greece’s capital in 1834, when it was a small town. In contrast, for over 2000 years Salonika has been a major port city with open horizons, and more accurately reflects the Hellenism of pre-1900, with Greek communities stretching from Marseilles to Tblisi, cosmopolitan, commercial, and intellectual. If any city in the Balkans represents the region’s center of gravity, it is Salonika. As a Diaspora Greek, moreover, I feel more at home in Salonika, with its hidden diversities, than in deliberately statist Athens.

One million Greeks inhabit the city and its environs, and the city’s once thriving Jewish community was near totally destroyed by the Nazis in World War II. The Orthodox Slavs and Vlachs of the city have generally assimilated into the Hellenic Orthodox mass, though Salonika has small, distinctive Serb, Bulgarian, and Russian expatriate communities, bolstered by thousands of recent immigrants. The city’s Muslim community left to Turkey with the 1920s population exchange, brokered by the Salonika-born “Father of Modern Turkey,” Kemal Attaturk. Their place was taken by hundreds of thousands of Greeks from Asia Minor, Pontus, Bulgaria, and Russia. This process has continued since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as ethnic Greeks from Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia repatriated. Though Athens is also a primary destination, somehow the more Balkan, Byzantine, and Anatolian Salonika seems more familiar to these wide-horizoned “New Greeks.”

The first time my wife visited Salonika, she remarked on its similarity to Belgrade. These things are so subtle, but there is much truth to the familiarity between the two cities. Salonika, with its northerly winds from the Vardar River, clearly does possess some kinship with Belgrade. Belgrade I describe as a city both at the center and on the periphery, and much the same can be said for Salonika. The Aegean port constitutes the fulcrum of the Balkans, the center of gravity for the cultural world of ex-Byzantium, an hour’s flight from Athens, Belgrade, Bucharest, Istanbul or Sofia. Salonika’s deliberately named Macedonia International Airport flight scheduler tells an interesting story. Destinations such as Bucharest, Belgrade, Skopje, Odessa, Tblisi, Kiev, Moscow and other “Byzantine Commonwealth” venues outnumber West European destinations. The Headquarters for the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank also boasts a Salonika address, as does the Center for Diaspora Hellenism, the Institute for Balkan Studies, and other centers of Balkan cooperation. Athens may have a political and economic hold on the Greek state, but Salonika holds its soul. Further, like Byzantium, Salonika resonates well beyond the borders of Greece, while Athens speaks only for Greece.

And yet, Salonika somehow seems on the periphery and suffers from a mild complex as the perpetual second city. Eclipsed by Athens in the modern era and Constantinople in the Byzantine times, Salonika lies outside the fast lane of its particular civilization. Indeed, its proximity to Slav Orthodoxy often fosters tongue-and-cheek taunts from Athenians, who call them “Bulgarians.” It was, however, Salonika’s proximity to the Slav world which fostered and perhaps created the basis for Byzantium’s crowning achievement—the conversion of the Slavs to Orthodoxy. Geography is destiny, and Salonika’s position as a Byzantine island in what was, during the early eighth century, a Slav-inhabited sea, clearly positioned Salonika to play a vital role in the Slavs’ Christianization and absorption into the Byzantine cultural, though not political, realm.

On one trip to Salonika, I took a cab up to the old city and the fortresses. Locals call the fortress area “ta kastra”—using the plural form. As a visitor, I called the area “to kastro,” revealing my outsider status. I climbed upon the walls of the fortress, not far from modest but smart, gentrifying homes, and I thought of what these walls have witnessed—sieges, conquests, successful resistance—but always the walls were permeable, like a cell membrane, defending against diseases, sometimes succumbing, and sometimes expanding outside their circumstances. Cities always played this role of mediator and processor, and in Salonika’s case the urban Hellenic Christian culture successfully fended off Perun-worshiping Slavs, and then undertook a soft, osmotic conquest of the Slavs’ souls.

Two Salonika boys, Cyril and Methodius, brought the word of God to the Slavs in their own language, with their own alphabet, and carried the institutional and cultural infrastructure of Byzantium wherever they went. As I sat on the walls, as certainly, the brothers had done over one thousand years before, I could not help thinking that this proximity and intimacy with the Slavs outside—and probably inside—the wall lent itself to a great understanding between Slavs and Byzantines. I have always suspected that Hellene and Slav are culturally complementary—certainly in my own family! But this closeness and understanding of both peoples for one another—characteristics no doubt shared by the brothers—contributed to the wholehearted and utter assimilation of Byzantine Orthodoxy by the South Slavs, and later the Russians. The religious and cultural accoutrements of Orthodoxy fit Slavs and Greeks like a glove, though each hand retains its separate—though mirror—identity.

They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but it also brings both understanding and humanity. There is no doubt that Byzantine citizens such as Cyril and Methodius, whether or not—as Bulgarians and Slav Macedonians claim—they had Slavic blood, might have looked down on the Slavic hordes they set out to convert. Their condescension, however, was of a milder version than that of Western Europeans who converted north Slavs and Balts—often by the sword. Further, Byzantines would never assume that Greek alone was fit for the liturgy and gospel and they provided the liturgy and the means for the Slavs to express themselves in their own language. They fully assimilated the religion, liturgy, and the trappings of state, on their own terms, voluntarily, and speaking their own language.

The Greek Army liberated Salonika on St. Demetrios Day, 1912, about 18 hours ahead of their Bulgarian allies. Salonika thus suffered longer the weight of Ottoman rule than southern Greece, and in its aura one feels greater coloring of Turkish culture than in Athens, a situation exaggerated by the presence of so many descendents of Asia Minor Greeks. In other ways, however, the city feels more Western, or at least Central European, than Athens. Salonika’s broad avenues and cafes have a hint of Vienna, like a crème shlag on your coffee. Salonika had been a major outlet of Central European goods to the Mediterranean and like its northerly “sister,” Belgrade, Salonika was not immune to the cultural trends from the Hapsburg realm.

Perhaps, though, Salonika’s more European, Western feel comes from its Byzantine civic pride and continuity. Salonika from its founding in the Classical Era has been a major commercial, administrative, and cultural center. When Athens was a minor town, Salonika was the second city of the Byzantine Empire, and during the Ottoman era, Salonika continued to be a major city with a diverse population and economy. Again, Athens, Sofia, and Belgrade were far smaller towns until the end of the nineteenth century and none had the civic grandeur of Salonika. What I may be revealing as an author is my own biased preconception that civic and orderly is somehow “Western.” Salonika’s civic depth, its Byzantine legacy together with its former ethnic diversity, in my opinion, makes the northern capital a far deeper experience than its southern colleague.