A: Portions of this sketch of the Albanians are drawn from an
article which I wrote some years ago for _The Independent_. E.A.P.]

CHAPTER IV

UNDER THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT

Salonika is superbly situated. To gain it from the seaward side you sail
through a portal formed by the majestic peaks of Athos and Olympus. It
reclines on the bronze-brown Macedonian hills, white-clad, like a young
Greek goddess, with its feet laved by the blue waters of the AEgean. (I
have used this simile elsewhere in the book, but it does not matter.)
The scores of slender minarets which rise above the housetops belie the
crosses on the Greek flags which flaunt everywhere, hinting that the
city, though it has passed under Christian rule, is at heart still
Moslem. Indeed, barely a tenth of the 200,000 inhabitants are of the
ruling race, for Salonika is that rare thing in modern Europe, a city
whose population is by majority Jewish. There were hook-nosed,
dark-skinned traders from Judea here, no doubt, as far back as the days
when Salonika was but a way-station on the great highroad which linked
the East with Rome, but it was the Jews expelled from Spain by Ferdinand
and Isabella who transformed the straggling Turkish town into one of the
most prosperous cities of the Levant by making it their home. And to-day
the Jewish women of Salonika, the older ones at least, wear precisely
the same costume that their great-grandmother wore in Spain before the
persecution--a symbol and a reminder of how the Israelites were hunted
by the Christians before they found refuge in a Moslem land.

There are no less than eight distinct ways of spelling and pronouncing
the city's name. To the Greeks, who are its present owners, it is
Saloniki or Saloneke, according to the method of transliterating the
_epsilon_; it is known to the Turks, who misruled it for five hundred
years, as Selanik; the British call it Salonica, with the accent on the
second syllable; the French Salonique; the Italians Salonnico, while the
Serbs refer to it as Solun. The best authorities seem to have agreed,
however, on Salonika, with the accent on the "i," which is pronounced
like "e," so that it rhymes with "paprika." But these are all
corruptions and abbreviations, for the city was originally named
Thessalonica, after the sister of Alexander of Macedon, and thus
referred to in the two epistles which St. Paul addressed to the church
he founded there. Owing to the variety of its