For people who know barely anything

• Book: The Thread
• Location: Thessaloniki (Salonika)
• Author: Victoria Hislop

For people who know barely anything about the history of Greece in the last centurey, this is, I think a very informative book. The author has cleverly used a few families of different origin to illustrate Greece’s history. Fact follow fact – don’t expect any emotional passages – the characters remain rather wooden. The dramatic movements of population – The Greeks from Turkey, the Turks from Greece, not forgetting the ant-semitism prevalent in Greece at the time, and the allmost total exticntion of the Jews by the Germans must have been traumatic. There was scope to elaborate in detail on personal tragedies but this would probably have gone beyond the frame of this book.

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