Salonica
Salonica names 2 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Salonica or SALONIKI (ancient Turkish
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
or SALONIKI (ancient Turkish, Selanik), a large Thessalonica; ; seaport, formerly belonging to Turkey, nd awarded to Greece by the treaty with Turkey, following the World War; on a gulf ulf of the Ægean Sea, 315 miles W. S. W. of Constantinople, rising from the sea in the form of an amphitheater, and forming a mixture of squalor and splendor. In Salonica may still be seen vestiges of Cyclopean and Hellenic walls, triumphal arches, and remains of Roman temples, Byzantine structures, and Venetian castles. Its harbor is excellent and its roadstead well sheltered. The principal exports are cotton, corn, tobacco, timber, and wool; imports, sugar, coffee, indigo, calicoes, etc. The manufactures include cotton, silk, leather, carpets, s, etc. Thessalonica was founded on the site of an older town in 315 B. c., and had a somewhat eventful history. St. Paul preached the Gospel here, and addressed two of his epistles to the Christian converts of the place. In the first Balkan War the Turks surrendered the city and an army of 29,000, to the Greeks on May 8, 1912. During the World War, Greece, having failed to fulfill the terms of her treaty with Serbia against Bulgaria, Salonica was occupied by the Allies. In August, 1917, a disastrous fire ruined two-thirds of the city and made 100,000 persons homeless. Salonica became the military base for the Allies in the Balkans for their operations against the Bulgars which culminated in the surrender of Bulgaria in 1918. See WORLD WAR. Pop. (1919) 250,000 civilians.
Salonica GULF OF (ancient Sinus Thermaicus)
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
GULF OF (ancient Sinus Thermaicus), the extreme N. W. arm of the Ægean Sea, between Thessaly on the W., Macedonia on the N. W., and Chalcidice on the E. It is formed of two distinct parts, one of which is very wide, and lies S. E. and N. W.; the other, which is narrow, lies S. W. and N. E., and is about 60 miles long.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 with the ink barely dry on the Treaty of Sèvres and the 1917 fire that "ruined two-thirds of the city"; that catastrophe was in fact the making of modern Thessaloniki, which was rebuilt to a new grid plan drawn up by the French architect Ernest Hébrard. Two things Collier's could not know followed fast: the 1923 Greek–Turkish population exchange poured some 100,000 refugees from Anatolia into the city, and in 1943 the German occupiers deported and murdered roughly 50,000 of its Jews, ending the great Sephardic community that had been the city's largest population group for four centuries. It is now Greece's second city, known in English as Thessaloniki rather than Salonica, with about a million people in its wider area, a university founded in 1925, and a metro railway opened in 2024. One small correction: the Ottoman garrison surrendered to the Greek army in November 1912, not May.
Written for this edition, 2026.