Vlachs

This is not a city of one people.

It is a city of many tongues layered atop one another like sediment: Turkish spoken in government offices, Greek murmured in the markets, Ladino sung by the Sephardic Jewish families who have called this place home since their expulsion from Spain four centuries before, Bulgarian and Vlach and Albanian threading through the alleys near the harbor.

Salonica belongs, at least on paper, to the Ottoman Empire, a vast and aging dominion that once made the entire eastern Mediterranean tremble at the mention of its sultans.

But paper is a patient material, and it does not object when the truth beneath it begins to shift.

Until about 1800, the Rum or Romans in the Ottoman Empire are the descendants of the people I talk about in the book.

They are an ethnic group or a nation alongside other Christian groups in the Ottoman Empire, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Vlachs, whatever.

All of those are Orthodox.

They're non-Orthodox groups as well.