ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the modern researcher par excellence on the transplantation of the Enlightenment into southeast Europe, Thessaloniki is a paradox. It examines the archaeology of the Greek Macedonian movement, which emerged after the appearance of its rival Bulgarian movement in the 1860s. The book describes Thessaloniki’s place in Bulgarian nationalist thought before 1912. It presents a charming history of Ottoman archaeology from its first disorganized steps to the improvement and systemization of its efforts and finally to the official calendars published by the Thessaloniki provincial administration, in which one section is devoted to the antiquities. The book explains the installation of refugees after the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922, which radically changed the city’s ethnic composition, residential patterns, economy, and political behavior. Major infrastructure works, an opening of the local economy to global trade, and rapid economic progress followed, prior to liberation.