Two Brothers, the Uncreated Light, and a Sephardi City

Constantine, who took the name Cyril, and his brother Methodius grew up in Thessalonica speaking Greek and knowing the Slavic of the surrounding countryside. Sent to Moravia in 863, they devised an alphabet for that language, translated the scriptures and the liturgy into it, and then had to defend the principle in Venice and Rome against the claim that only Hebrew, Greek and Latin were fit for worship. They won papal approval. The script now called Cyrillic was developed by their pupils, and Slavonic Christianity has been literate in its own tongue ever since because of two men from this city.

Five centuries later Gregory Palamas was its archbishop. He defended the monks of Athos who claimed that disciplined prayer could bring a vision of the light seen at the Transfiguration, arguing that God is unknowable in his essence but genuinely encountered in his energies. Councils held in the 1340s and 1350s upheld him, and that distinction became Orthodox doctrine. He is buried in the city.

After 1492 the Ottoman sultan invited the Jews expelled from Spain, and Salonica became a city with a Jewish majority, organised in congregations named for the towns they had left, with its own rabbinical courts, printing presses and a port that closed on Saturdays. It produced the Donme, followers of the seventeenth century messianic claimant Shabbetai Tzvi who converted outwardly to Islam and kept their own observance. The community was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 and almost none returned.