Salonika in the First World War

Salonika, the great port of Greek Macedonia, was the Entente’s main base in the Balkans for the last three years of the war. From October 1915 French and British divisions came ashore here, followed by Serbian, Russian and Italian ones, and the Salonika front grew out of the camps around the city. In 1916–1917 Salonika was the capital of Eleftherios Venizelos’s revolutionary government, in August 1917 most of the old town burned down, and in September 1918 Bulgaria signed an armistice here.

A city of many nations

Until the autumn of 1912 Salonika belonged to Turkey. On 8 November, in the First Balkan War, the Greeks marched in, and after nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule the city became Greek. The Greeks were not, however, a majority there. The largest group were Sephardic Jews, and alongside them lived Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians and the Dönmeh, Muslims of Jewish descent. Mustafa Kemal was born here.

The British correspondent G. Ward Price listed the languages heard in the streets: old Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Italian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian and French. For the war, though, what mattered more were the port and the only railway line, which ran from here up the Vardar valley northwards to Serbia. This was the only way the Entente could come to the Serbs’ aid.

The Entente’s base

On 2 October 1915 Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos asked France and Britain to send their troops to Salonika. On 5 October the first French and British troops from the Dardanelles came ashore in the port, and on 12 October General Maurice Sarrail, commander of the French Army of the Orient, arrived. The help came too late. After the fighting at Krivolak and Kosturino the Allies withdrew in December onto Greek soil.

The British then wanted to evacuate Salonika, but the French, Russians, Italians and Serbs objected and the troops stayed. On the ridges a dozen or so kilometres north of the city, soldiers and local labourers built an entrenched camp, which its dense barbed wire earned the name “the Birdcage”. Ward Price wrote that a town open on the landward side had been turned into one of the principal fortresses of the world.

Salonika’s neutrality melted away step by step. On 30 December 1915, after a raid by Central Powers aircraft, Sarrail had the consuls of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey arrested. In May 1916 ships in the port shot down the German airship LZ 85, and on 3 June Sarrail declared a state of siege and the Allied military took over the city.

One army after another came through the port. In the spring of 1916 the Serbian army rebuilt on Corfu arrived, and in the summer the Russians and the Italians. Up to 200,000 soldiers gathered in and around the city.

Malaria from the marshes around the city was a severe trial for the troops. According to Ward Price, in 1916 soldiers at Salonika were admitted to hospital for sickness nearly two and a half times as often as in France.

The Venizelists’ capital

On 30 August 1916 Venizelos’s supporters staged a coup in Salonika and renounced their allegiance to the government in Athens. On 9 October Venizelos himself arrived in the city and took the lead of the government of National Defence, which on 23 November declared war on Germany and Bulgaria. From then on Greece had two capitals: the royal one in Athens and the wartime one in Salonika. The split ended only in June 1917, when the Entente forced the king to leave, Venizelos took power in Athens and the whole of Greece went to war.

The great fire

On the afternoon of 18 August 1917 a fire broke out in the Turkish quarter. A strong wind from the Vardar drove the flames on, water was scarce, and the city fire brigade’s two old engines were useless. The fire leapt across Egnatia Street, which divided the old town from the new, and finally reached the waterfront. Sailors played water on the buildings from lighters, and British lorries carried thousands of refugees away. Only after two days, when the wind dropped and houses in the path of the fire were dynamited, was it brought under control.

According to the British official history, more than 9,000 buildings burned, among them the fifth-century church of St Demetrius. Eighty thousand people were left homeless, two-thirds of them Jews. Ward Price wrote that the fire destroyed two-thirds of the town within the walls. Almost all military establishments lay outside the old town and survived, but the Allies had to feed the victims and give them a roof over their heads.

The offensive, the armistice and what remained

On 18 June 1918 command of the Allied armies was taken over in Salonika by General Louis Franchet d’Espérey. In September his troops broke through the Bulgarian front, and on 29 September, at his headquarters in Salonika, Bulgarian delegates signed an armistice. Bulgaria was the first of the Central Powers to leave the war.

The war changed the city for ever. The burnt-out centre was not rebuilt in its old form: the government commissioned a new plan from the French architect Ernest Hébrard. Many Jews who had lost their livelihoods in the fire left, according to some accounts as many as half. At Zeitenlik, where the main military hospital of the Serbian army had stood since 1916, a Serbian war cemetery was laid out.