The Great Fire of Thessaloniki is the 1917 catastrophe that devastates a thriving, religiously diverse city as Dimitri Komninos is born. It establishes the city’s history of upheaval as the backdrop to a family saga shaped by war, displacement, and persecution.

The Fire and the City

The novel’s account places the fire in 1917, amid a city where Christians, Jews, and Muslims live side by side. The blaze devastates Thessaloniki, marking a rupture in the life of a flourishing, shared urban world. The account does not specify the fire’s immediate causes or the scale of its losses.

Place in the Narrative

The fire coincides with Dimitri Komninos’s birth, joining an individual life to the city’s calamity from its first moment. The novel’s framing makes the destruction an opening historical threshold: the story that grows from it will unfold amid war, fear, and persecution, forces that divide the city’s people.