From the shimmering Aegean coast of Thessaloniki to the bustle of Skopje and finally to the calm of Ljubljana — my Balkan journey has been as much a journey through time as through geography. But Thessaloniki remains the heaviest-toned note in that itinerary: a city whose memory persists in layers, where past and present merge into an almost ghostly palimpsest.
My repeated returns to Thessaloniki have never just been about tourism. They felt — and still feel — like pilgrimages. Every time I arrive I see my worn copy of “Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950” by Mark Mazower in front of me. That book is more than history: it is the key to decoding the soul of the city. Through Mazower’s pages I met the Thessaloniki of five centuries — where Ottoman minarets cast shadows over Byzantine ruins, where Egyptian merchants, Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition, Orthodox Greeks, Sufi dervishes, Albanian brigands and many others lived side by side. Mazower traces with meticulous care how this vibrant, cosmopolitan mosaic unraveled over the 20th century — through war, fire, forced migrations, nationalism, and genocide. His book is not a nostalgic myth: it shows a city of real people, social tensions, tragedies — and an extraordinary cultural richness that eventually was erased from the streets, but which still lingers in archives, in memory, in subtle vibrations.
Visiting Thessaloniki again now, I feel that same “haunting” presence. The streets are modern — but ghosts live in the stones. I walk and I listen: sometimes to the traffic, sometimes to distant music; sometimes I close my eyes and try to imagine the voices of those who once shared the city’s cafés, bazaars, synagogues, mosques, churches. The city has changed, but memory remains — fragmentary, spectral, elusive.
And for me, those memories find voice again whenever I come to Thessaloniki for rebetiko.
My return to Thessaloniki — not coincidentally each time at the end of November — feels like a return to those margins, to those smoky taverns, to the echo of bouzouki strings combining with salt-edged sea breeze. It is a way to re-connect with the city’s buried ghosts through music.
This time, again, I came to listen to Pliri Dakxi. Though on that evening only three out of four members performed (the fourth, usually present — Katerina — was missing), the concert resonated with an intensity that felt both fragile and vital: fragile because the absent voice was missed, vital because the remaining voices filled the space with determination and longing.
Pliri Dakxi (in Greek, “Πλήρη ντάξει”) is a rebetiko-rooted ensemble — a contemporary continuation of the city’s musical soul. Their repertoire resonates with the spirit of the old cafés and clubs — songs of love, exile, longing, survival. Their voices — each unique in timbre and expression — combine in a way that is both harmonious and charged: sometimes sorrowful, sometimes defiant, always authentic. Even with one missing voice, the remaining three managed to evoke a strong presence — a reminder, that although people come and go, the music, and with it memory, endures. Listening to them, I sensed once more that history repeats — not in tragedies, but in returns: return to the same streets, return to the same rhythms, return to the same communal longing. In that sense, Thessaloniki is still the “city of ghosts” — not empty, but full of remembered lives, refracted through strings and voices, through rebetiko nights.
Returning to Thessaloniki, once again for rebetiko, I understand that some cities are not measured by their monuments, but by their silences, their missing voices, their fractures and their echoes. And in that sense, Thessaloniki lives best in music: in the trembling string of a bouzouki, in the fragile power of a human voice, in the communal memory of those who listen. Through Mazower’s history, through the ruins and through the music of Pliri Dakxi — Thessaloniki remains for me not only a stop on a map, but a living, breathing myth. And every end of November, that myth calls me back.
A short film to complement the words written here and to return to what has been healing the soul in recent days.
