Modern Classic

Peer behind the contemporary façades of Thessaloníki, in northern Greece, and you’ll find extraordinary cultural treasures hiding in plain sight. On a whirlwind summer trip, Claire Messud retraces her family’s links with the city—and finds a region ripe for discovery.

- Claire Messud

THE CITY OF THESSALONÍKI, a busy Aegean seaport in the northeast of Greece, might not be high on most travellers’ must-visit list, but I wanted very much to see it. Though the nation’s second-largest city has a rich and underrated cultural history, and the beaches of nearby Halkidiki are known to be spectacular, I was drawn by my family’s history.

My grandfather, a French naval officer, was posted in Salonica (the Judeo-Spanish name for the city) at the beginning of World War II, after spending several years in Beirut, Lebanon. In Messud family lore, Salonica was a haven from the gathering storm—a place where Western Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East overlapped in apparent harmony. There, for the first time, my grandparents lived in a pretty, comfortably furnished villa instead of a small apartment. Their children—my father and my aunt—had a leafy garden in which to play. They recalled it as a place of calm and prosperity.

In the spring of 1940, when Germany invaded France and it was clear that Italy would soon enter the conflict, the family fled in haste. My grandmother and the children went back to Algiers, and my grandfather to Beirut, both cities then governed by France. By the war’s end, the city that had so enchanted them had been forever transformed. My relatives never returned, but almost 80 years later, I wanted to see Thessaloníki for myself, and search for the traces of that lost cosmopolitan enclave.