The history of a rarely written about, bewilderingly exotic city: five hundred years of clashing cultures and peoples, from the glories of Suleiman the Magnificent to its nadir under Nazi occupation. Salonica is the point where the wonders and horrors of the Orient and Europe have met over the centuries. Written with a Pepysian sense of the texture of daily life in the city through the ages, and with breathtakingly detailed historical research, Salonica will evoke the sights, smells, habits, songs and responses of a unique city and its inhabitants. The history of Salonica is one of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded. For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims have succeeded each other in ascendancy, each people intent on erasing the presence of their predecessors, and the result is a city of extraordinarily rich cultural traditions and memories of extreme violence and genocide, one that sits on the overlapping hinterlands of both Europe and the East. Mark Mazower has written a work of astonishing depth and originality about this remarkable city; magnificently researched and beautifully written, it is more than a book about a place; it studies in detail the way in which three great faiths and peoples have inhabited the same territory, and how smooth transitions and adaptations have been interwoven with violent endings and new beginnings.

Salonica, City of Ghosts : Christians, Muslims and Jews

Mark Mazower

HARPER/COLLINS

Hitler's empire was the largest, most brutal and most ambitious reshaping of Europe in history. Inspired by the imperial legacy of those such as the British, the Third Reich cast its shadow from the Channel Islands to the Caucasus and ruled hundreds of millions. Yet, as Mark Mazower's groundbreaking new account shows, it was an empire built on an illusion. From Hitler's plans for vast motorways crossing an ethnically cleansed Russian steppe, to dreams of a German super-economy rivalling America's, Mazower reveals the lethal fusion of mass murder, modern managerialism and colossal incompetence that underpinned the Nazi New Order. Ultimately Hitler's empire ended up consuming its own, leaving destruction in its wake and finishing not just with the downfall of Germany, but an entire continent.

Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

History

Penguin??Books

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe

Penguin Books, Ltd.

The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the making of modern Europe

Allen Lane.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 NEW STATESMAN AND EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Brilliant ... a staggering story' Robert Fox, Evening Standard, Books of the Year 'Fascinating, vast and rich ... a dramatic family memoir' Guardian Uncovering his family's remarkable and moving stories, Mark Mazower recounts the sacrifices and silences that marked a generation and their descendants. It was a family that fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the ranks of the Wehrmacht . His British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping the civil war and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against tsarist troops, but never spoke of it. His wife, Frouma, came from a family ravaged by the Great Terror yet somehow making their way in Soviet society. In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What You Did Not Tell recounts a brand of socialism erased from memory - humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But it also explores the unexpected happiness that may await history's losers, the power of friendship, and the love of place that allowed Max and Frouma's son to call England home.

What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home

Historical Study & Educational Resources

At the end of the twentieth century people spoke as if the Balkans had plagued Europe forever. But two hundred years earlier, the Balkans did not exist. It was not the Balkans but the ‘Rumeli’ that the Ottomans ruled, the formerly Roman lands that they had conquered from Byzantium, together with its Christian inhabitants. To westerners, too, familiar with classical regional terms such as Macedonia, Epiros and Dacia, the term ‘Balkan’ conveyed little. ‘My expectations were raised’, wrote one traveller in 1854, ‘by hearing that we were about to cross a Balkan; but I discovered ere long that this high-sounding title denotes only a ridge which divides the waters, or a mountain pass.’ In this dazzlingly original account of the region Mark Mazower dispels current Western clichés and replaces stereotypes with a vivid account of how mountains, empires and religions have shaped its inhabitants’ lives. As a bridge between Europe and Asia it has been exposed to a constant incursion of nomadic peoples across the centuries. Mountain ranges made farming hard and political control almost impossible, and allowed small communities to live side by side through to the end of the twentieth century. Empires based on religion not ethnicity shaped customs and beliefs in ways that did not entirely vanish with the coming of modernity.
Mazower’s narrative ranges broadly both in time - from the Romans to the present, including the Byzantine and Ottoman experiences - and in space, treating the former Turkish domains in Europe as part of a common if complex historical inheritance. One of our outstanding historians of modern Europe, he has written a book of extraordinary richness and concision, which provides not only a vital historical and cultural background to contemporary Balkan politics but also offers the reader a fresh view of the region’s relationship with Europe as a whole.

The Balkans (Universal History)

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Salonica, City of Ghosts is an evocation of the life of a vanished city and an exploration of how it passed away. Under the rule of the Ottoman sultans, one of the most extraordinary and diverse societies in Europe lived for five centuries amid its minarets and cypresses on the shore of the Aegean, alongside its Roman ruins and Byzantine monasteries. Egyptian merchants and Ukrainian slaves, Spanish-speaking rabbis–refugees from the Iberian Inquisition–and Turkish pashas rubbed shoulders with Orthodox shopkeepers, Sufi dervishes and Albanian brigands. Creeds clashed and mingled in an atmosphere of shared piety and messianic mysticism. How this bustling, cosmopolitan and tolerant world emerged and then disappeared under the pressure of modern nationalism is the subject of this remarkable book. The historian Mark Mazower, author of the greatly praised Dark Continent, follows the city’s inhabitants through the terrors of plague, invasion and famine, and takes us into their taverns, palaces, gardens and brothels. Drawing on an astonishing array of primary sources, Mazower’s vivid narrative illuminates the multicultural fabric of this great city and describes how its fortunes changed as the empire fell apart and the age of national enmities arrived. In the twentieth century, the Greek army marched in, and fire and world war wrought their grim transformation. Thousands of refugees arrived from Anatolia, the Muslims were forced out, and the Nazis deported and killed the Jews. This richly textured homage to the world that went with them uncovers the memory of what lies buried beneath Salonica’s prosperous streets and recounts the haunting story of how the three great faiths that shared the city were driven apart.

Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950

Europe

KNOPF

"A useful, important book that reminds us, at the right time, how hard [European unity] has been, and how much care must be taken to avoid the terrible old temptations." --Los Angeles Times Dark Continent provides an alternative history of the twentieth century, one in which the triumph of democracy was anything but a forgone conclusion and fascism and communism provided rival political solutions that battled and sometimes triumphed in an effort to determine the course the continent would take. Mark Mazower strips away myths that have comforted us since World War II, revealing Europe as an entity constantly engaged in a bloody project of self-invention. Here is a history not of inevitable victories and forward marches, but of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, where townships boast a bronze of Mussolini on horseback one moment, only to melt it down and recast it as a pair of noble partisans the next. Unflinching, intelligent, Dark Continent provides a provocative vision of Europe's past, present, and future-and confirms Mark Mazower as a historian of valuable gifts.

Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

Vintage

Dark Continent: Europes Twentieth Century

Hitler's Empire - Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

Military

Allen Lane/Penguin

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Books by Mark Mazower