THESSALONICA

THESSALONICA. Founded in 311 B.C., it was the site in the late A.D. 40s of Paul’s missionary activity, an important city throughout the Byzantine era, and second only to Constantinople (qq.v.) in the Empire’s waning centuries. Thessalonica continued to be important through the period of the Ottoman Empire (q.v.), its population a mixture of Turks, Slavs, and Greeks. Occupation by the Greek state in 1912 brought the city into the political orbit in which it remains today. Ecclesiastically, it ranks second to Athens in the Greek Church, its metropolitan acting as the representative of the Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) for the dioceses of the “New Territories,” i.e., the lands gained from the Turks at the beginning of the 20th c.