Once home to a thriving Jewish majority, Thessaloniki holds fragments of a lost world. One traveller's journey to find them leads to something even more powerful: living memory.

As my family admired the gleaming remodel of Thessaloniki's century-old Modiano Market, local culinary guide Smaragda Marki admitted to me that among the trendy cafes and German delicatessen, she wished it were just a little more Greek. "I wish it were a little more Jewish," I responded, staring up at the colourful Easter decorations.

The newly reopened market had topped my list of places to go in Greece's second-largest city, bringing together my two favourite things to look for while travelling: good food and tidbits of Jewish history. However, Modiano left me dissatisfied on both counts. Though the building still bears the name of its Jewish architect and stands on the site of the former Talmud Torah Synagogue, little else hinted that the nut stand used to be a kosher butcher or that Jews had any other part of its past life.

Thessaloniki was once considered an epicentre of Jewish culture, one of the only cities in Europe where Jews were the majority. Known as Salonika at the time, it was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912. The Ottoman Empire allowed Jews escaping the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th Century to settle there for hundreds of years. But with Ottoman power beginning to wane in the early 20th Century, Greece took over the city in 1912. Five years later, the Great Fire of 1917 devastated huge swaths of the city and left 70,000 people homeless, including much of the Jewish population. The Talmud Torah Synagogue (and 31 others) were destroyed. The one-time centre of Jewish culture and majority Jewish city received its final blow in 1943 when Nazi forces deported 50,000 Jews to Europe's concentration camps.

Eighty years later, I struggled to find traces of the community, and even finding a Jewish guide to show me around proved difficult. It wasn't surprising; Thessaloniki's Jewish community now numbers less than 1,000 people, a small population sample within which to find a niche professional tour guide. Plenty of companies offered tours of Jewish Thessaloniki, most touting bonafides by proximity to, rather than being a part of the small congregation.

Eventually, I booked through a company based in Athens because it was run by a Greek Jew. I still didn't know if my actual guides would be Jewish, though at least I could be sure they were trusted by the community.

When Elia Matalon greeted us the next morning, I let out a sigh of relief. In the lobby of our hotel, he explained that he and his wife Hella Kounio-Matalon run their tours together and they both come from families that go back many generations in Thessaloniki's Jewish community. Later in the eight-hour tour he would tell us about how his mother survived the war by hiding in homes across the border in Albania while Kounio-Matalon spoke of her father surviving Auschwitz. We began walking toward a

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