Up until the 1920s Thessaloniki was not a Greek city. After Istanbul it was the second most important city of the Ottoman Empire and birthplace of Mustafa Kemal, later Ataturk. The Jews were the largest population group - before the Turks, Greeks, Slavs, Albanians, Armenians and Levantines. Ladino, their medieval Spanish language, was the lingua franca of the city and on the Sabbath day the city stood still.
When David Ben Gurion, later prime minister of Israel, visited Salonica just before the First World War, he was convinced that a Jewish state was feasible. The Jews of Thessaloniki were living proof that they were not merely merchants and bankers dealing in financial business, but that they were quite capable of running a community. Of a population of 150,000 in 1910, 110,000 were Jews; workers from the docks and factories, skilled artisans, physicians, rabbis businessmen – in short, all social classes and professions were represented. That was unique in the history of the world.
The decline of the Jewish population began after the defeat of the Turks and the loss of Thessaloniki, which now became Greek. In the course of the Hellenisation of the city, many Greeks settled here (the so-called Pontic Greeks). They had entered the country as refugees from the Ottoman Coast, from Istanbul or from the Black Sea Region in exchange for the Turks who were living in the city at that time.
This whole colourful Jewish world disappeared sixty years ago. Within two months a 500-year-old civilisation was extinguished: 56,000 people were deported and destroyed in Auschwitz between April and June 1943.
If you stroll through Thessaloniki, it feels no different to any other ordinary nervous Greek town. However, if you know anything of its past you start to see the city through different eyes. You can feel that something is missing.
I was disenchanted: there was no trace of the former «Jerusalem of the Balkans». Of the 32 synagogues only one remained, of the grandiose Jewish cemetery only the stones were left, and these now served as a road surface.
I was appalled to find that nothing could be seen or felt of this splendid history. A pathetic monument that had finally been constructed in 1997 at the insistence of the European Union was the only reminder of the Jews of Salonica. This is where I decided that I would like to make a film.
Initially I imagined that it would be a historically comprehensive film exclusively about the Jewish history and based on archive material. I also imagined portraying Jews originally from Salonica, but now spread all over the world in Argentina, France, Israel and USA.
But then I lived in the city, got involved in the city. I discovered a nervous, agitated city, whose inhabitants went out of their way to emphasise their Greek-ness or Macedonian-ness. As if something had not yet been resolved with regard to the Greek national identity and as if everything were still very fragile and new.
And this identity continued to be defined by the fact that a considerable number of inhabitants were descended from the Greek refugees, who had swarmed into the country in their hundreds of thousands after the defeat of Greece in Asia Minor.
Slowly but surely my original plan was modified. I decided that the film would play exclusively in the city and only in the present and that it had to confront the modern reality of Thessaloniki.
Paolo Poloni, January 2008