church into the Kassimié mosque, and the great fire of August 18, 1917, and among them is a portrait of the saint between a bishop and a local magnate. Nor was St Demetrios the only Thessalonian saint. The city also cherished the tomb of St Theodora of Ægina, who had died at Salonika in the ninth century. Its walls contain the name of Pope Hormisdas. Like Constantinople, Salonika was devoted to the sports of the hippodrome; and, in 390, the imprisonment of a favourite charioteer on the eve of a race, in which he was to have taken part, provoked an insurrection, punished by a massacre. Theodosius I, then on his way to Milan, ordered the Gothic garrison to wreak vengeance upon the inhabitants; the next great race-meeting was selected, when the citizens had come together to witness their favourite pastime, and 15,000 persons were butchered in the hippodrome. St Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, refused to allow the Emperor to enter the cathedral, and made him repent for eight months his barbarous treatment of a city where he had celebrated his wedding. Of Roman Salonika there still exists a memorial in the arch of Galerius, with its sculptures representing the Emperor’s Asiatic victories; a second arch, the Vardar gate, was sacrificed fifty years ago to build the quay; while a Corinthian colonnade, with eight Karyatides, known to the Jews as _Las Incantadas_, a part of the Forum, was removed by Napoleon III to France. The pulpit, from which St Paul was believed to have spoken, and which used to stand outside the church of St George, was removed—so I was informed when last at Salonika—by a German in the time of Abdul Hamid. Salonika had been chiefly important in Roman times, because the Via Egnatia which ran from Durazzo, “the tavern of the Adriatic” (as Catullus calls it), passed through its “Golden” and “Kassandreotic” gates. But in Byzantine days its value was increased owing to its geographical position. As long as the Exarchate of Ravenna existed, it lay on the main artery uniting Constantinople with the Byzantine province in Northern Italy, and it was an outpost against the Slavonic tribes, which had entered the Balkan peninsula, where they have ever since remained, but which, despite many attempts, have never taken Salonika. Of these invaders the most formidable, and the most persistent, were the Bulgarians, whose first war with their natural enemies, the Greeks, was waged for the possession of Salonika, because of the heavy customs dues which they had to pay there, and who, more than a thousand years later, still covet that great Macedonian port, the birthplace of the Slavonic apostles, the brothers Constantine (or Cyril) and Methodios.