Thessaloniki City
Thessaloniki, or Salonica is the second-largest city in Greece and the capital of Macedonia, the nation's largest region. It is officially the Symprotevousa (lit. co-capital) of Greece in much the same way as it was called the Symbasilevousa (co-queen) of the Byzantine Empire. It is the largest city in the wider geographical region of Macedonia, and also one of the largest cities in southeastern Europe. The Thessaloniki Urban Area extends around the Thermaic Gulf for approximately 17 kilometres (11 mi) and comprises 16 municipalities. According to the 2001 census, the municipality of Thessaloniki had a population of 363,987, while the metropolitan population approximates one million inhabitants.
Thessaloniki is Greece's second major economic, industrial, commercial and political centre, and a major transportation hub for the rest of southeastern Europe; its commercial port is also of great importance for Greece and its southeast European hinterland. It has been traditional for the country's Prime Minister to set out his government's policies for each coming year in a speech at the annual Thessaloniki International Trade Fair.
Thessaloniki retains several Ottoman and Jewish structures as well as a large
number of Byzantine architectural monuments. The city has hosted an annual International Trade Fair, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and the largest bi-annual meeting of the Greek diaspora.
History of Thessaloniki
The city was founded around 315 BC by the King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and twenty-six other local villages. He named it after his wife Thessalonike, a half-sister of Alexander the Great (Thessalo-niki means the "victory over Thessalians"). It was an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Macedon. After the 
fall of the kingdom of Macedon in 168 BC, Thessalonica became a city of the Roman Republic. It grew to be an important trade-hub located on the Via Egnatia and facilitating trade between Europe and Asia. The city became the capital of one of the four Roman districts of Macedonia.
When in 379 the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum was divided between East and West Roman Empires, Thessaloníki became the capital of the new Prefecture of Illyricum. The economic expansion of the city continued through the twelfth century as the rule of the Komnenoi emperors expanded Byzantine control to the north. Thessaloniki passed out of Byzantine hands in 1204, when Constantinople was captured by the Fourth Crusade. Thessaloníki 
and its surrounding territory—the Kingdom of Thessalonica—became the largest fief of the Latin Empire. The city was recovered by the Byzantine Empire in 1246 sold it in 1423 to Venice, which held the city until it was captured by the Ottoman Sultan Murad II on 29 March 1430.[5]
During the Ottoman period, the city's Muslim and Jewish population grew. By 1478, Selanik had a population of 4,320 Muslims and 6,094 Greek Orthodox, as well as some Catholics, but no Jews. By ca. 1500, the numbers had grown to 7,986 Greeks, 8,575 Muslims, and 3,770 Jews, but by 1519, there were 15,715, 54% of the city's population. The invitation of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, was an Ottoman demographic strategy aiming to prevent the Greek element from dominating the city.[6] The city remained the largest Jewish city in the world for at least two centuries, often called "Mother of Israel". Selanik was a sanjak centre in Rumeli Eyaleti till 1864. It was centre of Selanik Vilayeti, which consisted sanjaks of Selanik, Serez and Drama between 1864-1912. From 1870, driven by economic growth, the city's population exploded by 70%, reaching 135,000 in 1917.
During the First Balkan War, the Ottoman garrison surrendered Salonica to the Greek Army, on November 8 November [O.S. 26 October] 1912 without any resistance. In 1915, during World War I, a large Allied expeditionary force landed at Thessaloniki as the base for a massive offensive against pro-German Bulgaria. In 1916, pro-Venizelist army officers, with the support of the Allies, 
launched the Movement of National Defence, which resulted in the establishment of a pro-Allied temporary government that controlled northern Greece and the Aegean, against the official government of the King in Athens, which lead the city to be dubbed as symprotévousa ("co-capital"). Most of the old town was destroyed by a single fire on 18 August [O.S. 5 August] 1917, accidentally sparked by French soldiers in encampments at the city. The fire left some 72,000 homeless, many of them Turkish, of a population of approximately 271,157 at the time. Thessaloniki fell to the forces of Nazi Germany on April 22, 1941, and remained under German occupation until 30 October 1944. The city suffered considerable damage from Allied bombing, and almost its entire Jewish population was exterminated by the Nazis. Barely a thousand Jews survived. Thessaloniki was rebuilt and recovered fairly quickly after the war with large-scale development of new infrastructure and industry throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
On 20 June 1978, the city was hit by a powerful earthquake, registering a 
moment magnitude of 6.5. The tremor caused considerable damage to several buildings and even to some of the city's Byzantine monuments; forty people were crushed to death when an entire apartment block collapsed in the central Hippodromio district. Early Christian and Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1988, and Thessaloniki later became European City of Culture 1997. In 2004 the city hosted a number of the football events forming part of the 2004 Summer Olympics. Thessaloniki unsuccessfully bid for the 2008 World EXPO, this time won by Zaragoza in Spain, but another planned bid for 2017 was announced in September 2006 and is now in full development.