Why go
Read the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki alongside the history of the old cemetery and the city's markets. These places and absences help explain both the depth of Sephardic life here and the scale of what was lost during the Holocaust.
The full story
Jewish life in Thessaloniki reaches back to antiquity. From the late fifteenth century, Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia settled in the Ottoman city in large numbers. Ladino was heard widely, and Jewish residents played a major part in its commercial and cultural life. Under German occupation from 1941 to 1944, the community was subjected to persecution and dispossession. The occupiers seized and destroyed the old Jewish cemetery; part of its site later became university grounds. From 1943, they deported most of Thessaloniki's Jews to Auschwitz, where most were murdered. The loss was both human and urban: families, institutions, businesses, religious sites and a language community were torn from the city. The Jewish Museum offers a place to approach this history directly. It is also worth recognising what cannot be seen on a normal walk: the scale of the former cemetery and the everyday life that once connected the port, markets and neighbourhoods. Treat the museum and those absences as part of Thessaloniki's history, not as a brief detour from it.