SALONIKA.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 7, Issue 348, 1 December 1915, Page 3

SALONIKA.

DEPOT OF THE BALKANS.

"They came to Thessalonica, where was a synagogue of the Jews. And

Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three Sabbath days reasoned with, them out of the Scriptures." So the author of the Acts of the Apostles informs us, and adds that St. Paul’s stay at Thessalonica was troublous and untimely terminated. That the Apostle’s labours were nevertheless not unfruitful the spistle to the Tessalonians exit to testify. Such is the first appearance of Salbnika in the history of the world.

Even in St. Paul’s day it was already three centuries old and a place of importance. The Romans, who organised the Balkan Peninsula better than any of its owners before or since, drove a road across from west to east, uniting Durazzo on the Adriatic with Salonika on the Aegean.- From that time onward Salonika ha been the great depot of Balkan commerce. You need little acquaintance with the Balkans, to understand the causes of this pre-eminence. Between Constantinople and the Piraeus there is no harbour which could be a rival. Salonika stands close to one of the most fertile districts of the Balkans, the tobacco country about Drama and Serre. It possesses natural lines of communication up the radiating valleys of the Struma, the Vardar, and its tributaries to the heart of the peninsula. Once a focus of highways, it it now a focus of railways. One, having tapped the tobacco country and the valley of the Struma, runs*along the coast to Constantinople. Another, of supreme importance in this war. passes up the Vardar Valley to Nish and Belgrade, and thus forms the main artery of Serbia’s strength. A third penetrates hto Macedonia as far as Monastir. A BEAUTIFUL HARBOUR. But it is primarily upon its harbour that the importance of Salonika depends. Your steamer passing out of the Aegean enters a gulf some fifty miles wide. Slowly the land approaches on either bow, and you see to starboard a green, wooded, undulating country, with a host of windmills rising on the skyline, in evidence of its fertilty. This is the historic epn insula of Chafe, id ice. To port rise the mountains of Thessaly. first Pelion, then Ossa, and at the head of the gulf a great mass, snow-capped, piercing the clouds, lofOlyrapus itself, the home of the immortal gods. Salonika rises before you in a halfdrcle, a white city, studded with minaret and dome, gleaming in a sin gularly lucid air, its whiteness all the more refulgent for the dark groves of Cyprus set here and there among the houses. At the end of so deep an inlet anchorage is naturally good, but In the last years of the nineteenth century great harbour works were constructed. The modern port, is a parallelogram protected by a breakwater 600 yards long, and two piers of 200 yards each. There is a quay frontage of more than 400 yards, iwth 16ft of water alongside. More than 10,000,000 tons of shipping enter the

i harbour in a year with imports valuing £2,500,000, and exports £1,250,000. The quays are of great width, and, thanks to the enterprise of a British Consul-General, paved and drained with a perfection rare in the Levant. They arc lined with large modern buildings, and behind, the streets, wider than is usual in the East, climb, by natural ravines, to the old Citadel of the Seven Towers. The houses are, in great part, wooden and dilapidated, but among them you find magnificent relics of the past, here a massive Roman arch, there a solemn and stately Byzantine church, with round arches on marble columns, crowned by rich mosaic. Norman and Saracen, and Venetian, too, have left their mark on the streets of Thessalonica, and the modern quarter, with its banks and its warehouses and its electric trams, is oddly placed beside this medley of the past. A COSMOPOLITAN CROWD.

The population, too, seems to the stranger a tableau vivant of the confused, eventful history of the city. There is no place in Europe where you may see a great variety of race, a richer confusion of picturesque costume. As in St. Paul’s day, Salonika has many Jewish inhabitants—Bo,ooo perhaps, out of a total of 160,000 profess the Hebrew faith. But there arc Jews who wear the gaberdine or the robes of the 15th century, Jews who, in this Greek city, speak a dialect of Spanish. They are the descendants of a colony who fled from the tortures of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal to the gentler rule of the Turk. Among them you' find Albanians in their kilted costume, sturdy squat Bulgarians, Armenians, and, after the Jews, the most numerous, busy Greeks. Some 40,000 of the population are Greek in blood and feeling, a number vastly greater than that or any other Balkan element in the city. In the settlmentt. after the recent Balkan wars Greece had this claim to Salonika, besides the right of possession. It will be remembered thgt by an extraordinary rapid advance the Greek- army obtained possession of the city just in time to turn back the advance guard of the Bulgarians. This event, it is understood, caused dismay not only at Sofia, but at A ienna, ' which had long contemplated Salonika with a covetousness hardly concealed. The Young Turks alsr were at least as much concerned fee the loss of Salonika as for any othoi of their disasters. Salonika and it? secret societies were the hotbed in which the Young Turk revolution was forced into its unhealthy life, and Enver and his friends have a peculiar interest in the place. STRATEGIC VALUE. Besides its commercial importance. Salonika has great strategic value. No other port in the Aegean, except; of course, .the Piraeus, oers facilities for landing troops which can be compared to those on the quays at Salonika. Its climate is singularly heal'thy. Against any attack from land the town is defended by a great chain of lakes. Around and between these pass the radiating railways to emphasise further the unique importance of that which links Salonika and

Nish. Between the two towns is a distance of 252 miles, and in peace this is traversed in some 16 hoars. The railway, which passes within a short distance of the Bulgarian frontier, has Jo cross the River Vardar a number of times, and can, therefore, be cut with ease. Of this we have earlier in the war had a significant example. It is perhaps not dangerous to suggest that the other railway, which, running parallel to but some miles north of the Aegean coast, connects Salonika with the Maritza Valiev, Adrianople, and Constantinople, might have its uses in certain circumstances. From it one of the few high roads in Macedonia runs up the Struma Valley to Sofia.