Thessaloniki does not need ghost stories.
The actual history of the city is strange enough, layered enough, and sufficiently haunted by the real weight of what happened here that the invented legends that gather around its most atmospheric buildings are unnecessary additions to stories that are already extraordinary on their own terms. The villa that housed a deposed Ottoman sultan under house arrest while the Young Turks consolidated the revolution that had overthrown him. The red-painted mansion whose builder’s empire burned and whose inheritance disputes left it empty for four decades until a football club owner bought it. The Salem Mansion, a 130-year-old eclectic building that appeared without explanation on the international promotional poster of an American horror television series set in New Orleans.
These are not stories that require embellishment.
Thessaloniki is the second city of Greece and the city with the most layered history of any major Greek urban center: three thousand years of continuous habitation, the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the city from which the Young Turk revolution was launched, the site of the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world before the Second World War, the city that Constantine turned into a second seat of empire and that Galerius made into a palatial complex, the city that Byzantine emperors and Ottoman administrators and the competing claims of the Balkan wars have all left material traces in. Its visible monuments, the Rotunda, the Arch of Galerius, the White Tower, the chain of UNESCO-listed Byzantine churches, are the monuments that the standard account focuses on. But the buildings that carry the more oblique and more specifically human stories of what Thessaloniki has been to specific people are the buildings that the standard account overlooks.
Villa Allatini | The Deposed Sultan’s House Arrest
The Villa Allatini stands in the Depo district east of the city center, a three-storey baroque structure in red brick with a garden, built in 1898 by the Italian architect Vitaliano Poselli for the Allatini family, the prominent Jewish dynasty whose flour mills and industrial enterprises had made them one of the wealthiest families in Thessaloniki during the late Ottoman period.
The Allatini family’s history in Thessaloniki is the history of the city’s Sephardic Jewish community in compressed form: the family had been in Thessaloniki since the late fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II invited the Jews expelled from Spain following the 1492 Alhambra Decree to settle in the Ottoman Empire, and by the late nineteenth century they were among the most prosperous merchant families in a city where the Jewish community had constituted the majority of the population for four centuries. The villa that Guido Allatini built was the largest and most elaborate in the district where the city’s wealthy families had built their country houses at a comfortable distance from the commercial center.
In 1909, eleven years after the villa was built, Sultan Abdülhamid II, after he was unseated by the Young Turks, lived at Villa Allatini under house arrest. The specific circumstances of his arrival were these: the revolution that the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turks, had organized against the sultan’s rule came to a head in April 1909 when the Action Army marched on Istanbul. Abdülhamid was deposed on April 27, 1909, and placed on a train to Thessaloniki that same night. Since Thessaloniki was the headquarters of the Third Army and a CUP stronghold, the revolutionary leadership opted to keep the former sultan under close watch.
The deposed sultan spent the next 3.5 years at Villa Allatini. As the Greek troops closed in on Thessaloniki in 1912, the former sultan was whisked away to Istanbul where he died a few years later at Beylerbeyi Palace.
The specific quality of this history is the quality of a city that was simultaneously the last Ottoman city and the first Greek one: Abdülhamid arrived in Thessaloniki when it was still an Ottoman provincial capital, and he was removed from it as the Greek army advanced in the First Balkan War. The villa that housed him under guard was in a city that would change sovereignty before he left it, and the house arrest of the deposed sultan in the Allatini family’s luxury villa is the compressed image of the entire Ottoman-to-Greek transition of Thessaloniki in a single building.
After the emergence of the Young Turks movement, the villa housed the Philosophical School for one year in 1926, the unique department of the newly founded University of Thessaloniki, while during the Greco-Italian War in 1940 to 1941 it was used as a hospital. Today, the villa houses the Administration of the Region of Central Macedonia, which means it is an active administrative building rather than a museum, and access to the interior is limited to official purposes. The garden is visible from the street, and the building’s exterior, with its elaborate red brick facade and the specific quality of the Poselli architectural style that characterized the Depo district’s late Ottoman-era prosperity, is the accessible dimension of the landmark.
Koç Holding, Turkey’s largest conglomerate, is reportedly planning to purchase the historic Allatini Villa in Thessaloniki with the intention of transforming it into an institute focused on Turkish-Greek relations. Whether or not this proceeds, the interest itself is evidence that the building’s historical significance registers across borders in the specific way that Thessaloniki’s multilayered history consistently produces: a building that is simultaneously a piece of Greek regional architecture, a monument to the Sephardic Jewish prosperity of late Ottoman Thessaloniki, and the site of an Ottoman sultan’s captivity has an inherent claim on multiple national memories simultaneously.
The Salem Mansion | The Building That Appeared on an American Horror Poster
The Salem Mansion on Queen Olga Avenue is the building that most people walk past without knowing what they are looking at, which is the precondition for its specific story.
The building was constructed in 1894, before the Villa Allatini and before much of the surrounding district that now gives the avenue its character. It was built for a Jewish merchant named Jeborga and subsequently sold to Emmanuel Salem, a prominent Jewish lawyer in the city, whose name it has carried since. In 1924, the building was purchased by the Italian state and became the Italian Consulate, the specific diplomatic use that the interwar period’s alignment of interests made appropriate for Italian interests in a Greek city with a substantial Italian architectural presence. The building served as the Italian Consulate until the 1978 earthquake, the catastrophic seismic event that damaged much of Thessaloniki’s older building stock and that rendered the Salem Mansion structurally unsafe. Since then, it has been closed.
The building in its current state, the ivy-covered facade, the shuttered windows, the specific quality of an early twentieth century eclectic mansion in the condition that several decades of abandonment produces, has the visual character of a specific kind of building that the horror and gothic aesthetic traditions have found consistently useful. It looks, in the specific sense that the art direction of a certain kind of atmospheric visual media looks, like the building where something is happening that should not be happening.
In 2013, the production company responsible for the third season of the American Horror Story television series, which was set in New Orleans and whose narrative concerned contemporary witchcraft and the legacy of the Salem witch trials, used a photograph of the Salem Mansion as the primary image on the season’s international promotional poster. The season was subtitled Coven, it starred Jessica Lange, and its promotional materials reached the standard international distribution of a major American cable television production. The Thessaloniki building appeared on billboards, magazine pages, and digital advertising globally, with no credit, no caption, and no indication of where the building was located.
The story of how the Salem Mansion ended up on the American Horror Story poster has not been definitively documented: the production company has not publicly explained the choice, and the most probable explanation, that the art department was searching for a specific visual quality in a photograph library and found the Salem Mansion image without knowing or particularly caring where it was located, is the least dramatically satisfying but the most logistically plausible. The result, whatever its explanation, is that a 130-year-old building on a residential avenue in Thessaloniki became briefly and unexpectedly an international visual reference for supernatural horror, without any knowledge of its own history or its own name being relevant to the use.
The building is closed and there is no public access. Its exterior is visible from Queen Olga Avenue, and the building’s specific visual character, which the American Horror Story poster made internationally recognizable to the specific demographic that follows that series, is unchanged. The ivy has continued to grow. The shutters remain closed. The building continues to stand in the condition that 1978 left it in, waiting for the structural assessment and the resources for restoration that its listed status should eventually produce.
The Longos Mansion | The Red House and Its History
The building that Thessalonians call simply the Red House stands on the corner of Agia Sophia and Ermou Streets, and the red is the first thing visible from a distance: not the faded or earthy red of aged brick but a specific deep crimson that the building’s neo-classical facade carries with an intensity that the surrounding buildings do not approach.
The Longos Mansion was commissioned by Giannis Longos, a wealthy textile manufacturer from Naousa in northern Greece, and constructed between 1926 and 1928 by the Italian architect Leonardo Gennari, who was working in Thessaloniki during the period of the city’s post-Ottoman reconstruction when Italian architects were among the most active practitioners in the city’s building boom. The specific choice of the deep red color was Gennari’s aesthetic decision, and it was unusual enough in the Thessaloniki streetscape of the 1920s that the building was noticed immediately and named by its color rather than by its owner.
The subsequent history of the Longos Mansion is the history of a building that accumulated misfortune in the specific form that the twentieth century’s political and economic disruptions produced for the property holdings of prosperous northern Greek families: the Longos textile factory, which had been the source of the wealth that the mansion represented, was destroyed by fire. The inheritance of the mansion itself became the subject of legal disputes that the Greek civil war’s disruption of normal property law complicated and extended. The building stood empty for decades as the dispute continued, the red facade fading and the fabric deteriorating in the way that unoccupied buildings in an urban Mediterranean climate deteriorate, and the stories that accumulated around empty buildings in the city’s imagination accumulated around the Red House in proportion to its visibility and its history.
The building’s acquisition in 2014 by Ivan Savvidis, the businessman and owner of PAOK Thessaloniki football club, was the event that brought the Longos Mansion back into active use: three cafes now occupy the ground floor, the facade has been cleaned and the color restored, and the building functions as a commercial and social space in the heart of the city. The upper floors remain in a restoration process whose completion has been subject to the standard delays of Greek architectural conservation.
The Red House is the most immediately visible of the three buildings discussed in this article, and the most accessible: the ground-floor cafes are open to the public in the standard commercial sense, and the building’s facade, cleaned to the specific deep crimson that Gennari chose in the 1920s, is the most photogenic element of the Agia Sophia and Ermou corner in any weather.
The Roman Agora | What the Center of the City Was
The Roman Forum in the center of Thessaloniki, the archaeological site that occupies the block bounded by Philippou, Olymbiados, Makedonikis Amaxis, and Antigonidon Streets, is the most important archaeological site in the city that the standard tourist itinerary consistently underweights relative to the Byzantine monuments that receive more attention.
The site was the civic center of the Roman and early Byzantine city: the administrative, commercial, and judicial core of Thessaloniki during the period of its maximum Roman importance, when the emperor Galerius chose the city as the eastern capital of the Tetrarchy and built the palace complex, the arch, the rotunda, and the hippodrome that transformed the existing Hellenistic city into an imperial residence of the first order. The forum that served this imperial Thessaloniki was a structure of corresponding scale: colonnaded halls, administrative buildings, a cryptoporticus, and the odeon, the small roofed theater whose excavated remains are the most visually dramatic element of the current site.
The odeon’s specific acoustic character, which the excavation has revealed and which the site’s open-air concert programming has confirmed in practical terms, is the acoustic character of a small theater designed for musical and rhetorical performance: the curved limestone seating and the enclosed back wall produce the specific reflecting geometry that concentrates sound toward the audience in the way that the ancient theater designers had empirically understood. The sound behavior at the Roman Agora’s odeon in the early evening, when the ambient noise of the surrounding city is at its lowest and the stone has retained the day’s warmth, is the closest available approximation of what the ancient performance space felt like in use.
The cryptoporticus, the underground vaulted passage that the Roman forum’s construction used as a foundation and service corridor, is the element of the site that most directly produces the specific atmospheric quality of being physically beneath the city’s surface in a space that the Roman builders constructed and that the subsequent centuries did not substantially alter. The vaulting is Roman concrete, the light is artificial, and the experience of moving through the passage is the experience of moving through a space whose dimensions and materials have not changed since the second century CE.
The site is open to visitors and admission is included in the combined ticket for the Byzantine Museum and the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. The best time to visit is in the late afternoon, when the western light falls into the open excavation from the direction of the Thessaloniki waterfront and produces the specific quality of illumination on the limestone and the marble fragments that the overhead noon light does not achieve.
The Bit Bazaar Quarter | The Layered Commercial Heart
The Bit Bazaar area, the network of small streets and courtyards immediately south of the Modiano Market and the Kapani Market in the center of Thessaloniki, is the quarter whose current character, the mix of antique dealers, second-hand bookshops, small bars, and the specific atmosphere of a commercial district that has been continuously active in various forms since the Ottoman period, most directly preserves the texture of the pre-Second World War Thessaloniki that the Jewish community’s destruction in the deportations of 1943 removed from the city’s social fabric.
The Bit Bazaar takes its name from the Ottoman bit pazarı, the flea market, and the commercial character it encodes is the commercial character of the Ottoman-era bazaar district that occupied this part of the city before the 1917 fire that destroyed much of the city center and the subsequent rebuilding that the French urban planner Ernest Hébrard designed. The antique and second-hand trade that the Bit Bazaar currently houses is the direct descendant of the commercial activity that the Ottoman bazaar tradition organized in this space, and the specific mix of objects available in the Bit Bazaar’s dealers, the surviving material culture of the city’s multiple communities, is the material record of the city’s demographic and cultural history in the form of objects that outlasted the communities that produced them.
The small cafes and bars that now occupy the Bit Bazaar’s courtyards and basement spaces were established in the 1980s and 1990s when the district began the gentrification process that has made it one of the most socially active quarters in the city. The evening atmosphere of the Bit Bazaar, the combination of the antique dealers closing their shops and the bars opening their doors in the same small streets, with the Modiano Market’s fish and meat smell still present in the air from the day’s commerce, is the atmosphere of a city that has been simultaneously a commercial and a social space in the same location across multiple centuries of different governance.
At Olympus Estate, Wanderlust Greece guides you across the sacred and storied terrain of the Hellenic world. Thessaloniki’s real history is stranger than its legends. The deposed sultan arrived by night train. The building appeared on an American poster without explanation. The red house stood empty for forty years. These are the stories the city carries in its buildings, available to anyone who looks at the buildings with the attention they deserve.
