Overview
Salonica’s historic Jewish cemetery expanded across centuries as the city became a major Sephardic center. Its tombstones preserved names, family origins, occupations, rabbinic titles, poetry, and communal memory in Hebrew and other languages. Ottoman urban reforms and later Greek state projects repeatedly threatened the burial ground. During the German occupation, the cemetery was destroyed and its stones were dispersed through construction sites. The site’s history therefore joins funerary culture with property conflict, nationalism, archaeology, and wartime plunder. Surviving inscriptions and photographs remain crucial archives for reconstructing the destroyed community.
