Thessalonica

The first letter to the Thessalonians is generally taken to be the earliest surviving Christian writing, composed around 50 CE, which means the oldest document of the religion is a pastoral note to a congregation in this city. Its immediate problem is a practical one that only arises if you expect the world to end soon: members of the community have died, and those left behind want to know whether they have missed what was coming. Paul answers that the dead will not be at a disadvantage. Acts describes his brief and stormy visit, ending with his hosts dragged before the magistrates.

The city's own patron came later. Demetrius, remembered as a soldier or an official killed in the persecutions of the early fourth century, acquired a great basilica over a crypt, and by the middle ages his tomb was reported to give off a fragrant oil that pilgrims carried away in small flasks. He was credited with defending the city against sieges, and mosaics in the church show him with the officials who built it.

Thessalonica was the second city of the Byzantine empire, and its churches trace the whole history of eastern Christian architecture, from the rotunda that Galerius built as a monument and that was converted first to a church and later to a mosque, through the great basilicas, to the small painted churches of the fourteenth century.

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.