Dismantled lives

In 1917, at the height of World War I, a fire destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a staging post for Allied troops. The centre of an ‘Ottoman polyglot culture’, Salonika was at the time home to large numbers of refugees, many of them Jewish and Roma. It was in one of the refugee hovels that the fire started, an ember from a makeshift stove igniting a bundle of straw. From that single ember grew an inferno that burned for thirty-two hours, obliterating three-quarters of the city and leaving 70,000 people – by some estimates half the population – homeless.

The Great Fire of Salonika, as it came to be known, is the starting point for Gail Jones’s elegant and intensely ruminative new novel, Salonika Burning. ‘By midnight,’ Jones writes, ‘all was blaze and disintegration.’ Those watching from a distance, ‘[wondered], every one of them, what might afterwards remain’.