In this enchanting and moving memoir, Leon Sciaky describes his childhood before the FirstWorld War in a prosperous, loving Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica (nowThessaloniki in Greece). Under the Ottoman Empire, the city's diverse communities - Jews,Muslim Turks, Orthodox Greeks and Bulgarians - met, traded and lived alongside each otherday-to-day in an atmosphere of tolerance.Farewell to Salonica offers a fascinating insight into a lost society in which an older tradition ofmutual respect was finally overcome by the pressures of nationalism and war, the after-effects ofwhich are felt in the region to this day.

At the crossroads of the Eastern and Western worlds, Salonica -- now Greece's third largest city Thessaloniki -- was an oasis in a desert of conflicting powers and interests. A Turkish territory until 1912, the city was an economic centre of the Ottoman empire and a cultural centre of Sephardic Judaism. In this memoir, Leon Sciaky, the son of a Sephardic merchant family who immigrated to Turkey during the Spanish Inquisition, tells of growing up in the vibrant community that flourished in Salonica at the turn of the century. He introduces the Turkish sheiks and dervishes, Sephardic rabbis, Hungarian revolutionaries, Bulgarian farmers, Greek priests, Kurdish grocers, Albanian woodcutters, and French headmasters who populated this little Balkan world. Although his early years were idyllic, Sciaky's well-respected merchant family could not escape the violence of Salonica's constant lesions and struggles. Situated amidst peoples of different languages, religions, cultures, and national allegiances, Salonica was like a vividly set stage in a drama where these very diverse peoples lived, in peace and strife, vying for power and prosperity.