ABSTRACT
Back in 1979, the Birmingham Spring Symposium had the theme of Byzantium and the Classical Tradition under which title its papers were later published by Margaret Mullett and Roger Scott. On the contrary, Thessaloniki flourished in the Middle Ages and positively converted itself into a vibrant Christian city, while retaining fragments of its Hellenistic and Roman past. The modern construction of the ‘Greek’ image of Thessaloniki was further refined as the result of an accidental catastrophe – the massive fire of August 1917 which destroyed the centre of the city. Thessaloniki by the end of Antiquity had all the features and amenities of a typical Roman town. The most important church for the social history of Thessaloniki is the pilgrimage church of St Demetrios. The paradox of Thessaloniki is that at the end of the Byzantine Empire, while it supposedly declined economically and politically, there was an upsurge of church building and decoration.
