Little Jerusalem

Thessaloniki, also known as Little Jerusalem, is one of the symbolic places of the multicultural and complex life/history in the Balkans. The fact that the city can still find a place in the family memories of a great many people spread over different countries with completely different pictures, is a concrete indication of both its infinitely fertile and castrated nature.

Little Jerusalem: A Summer Day After the Fall of The Walls of Thessaloniki is a graphic novel precisely about memory or in other words, oblivion. With its discontinuous and intense lines, it is a provocative narrative that invites the reader to follow a family story in Thessaloniki’s modern history and to find Thessaloniki’s place in our own story.

Little Jerusalem, following the Italian and Greek editions, is now in Turkish as a revised and expanded edition with the storytelling of Elettra Stamboulis who follows and discusses the geography she lives in, and Angelo Mennillo’s innovative, contradictory drawings.

“Thanks to Little Jerusalem, I began to get a real impression of Thessaloniki, which I had never had the chance to see. … This book is a city narrative, woven with the tales of the people. The beauty of it is that the comic book form suits this kind of narrative very well.”

– Cem Dinlenmiş, a preface for Little Jerusalem