Thessaloniki destroyed its 450-year-old Jewish cemetery in December 1942, used the stones to build, and put a university on the land

Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain founded the Jewish cemetery of Salonica in the late 15th century. It covered about 350,000 square metres. The city had planned since the 1917 fire to expropriate it. Jewish law requires that graves stay undisturbed, and the community refused to move the dead. In 1926 Aristotle University was founded next to it. In 1937 the community gave up 30,000 square metres on the university side in return for keeping the rest. In 1942 the Germans conscripted thousands of Jewish men for forced labour, and the community paid a ransom to free them. On 17 October 1942 the governor-general of Macedonia told the community to move the graves outside the city. An agreement at the end of November would have spared graves less than 30 years old. In the first week of December 1942 the municipality, with 500 workers, began destroying the whole cemetery. Families ran between the tombs gathering their relatives' remains. The stones were sold to contractors and used for the church of Hagios Demetrios, roads, walls and a swimming pool. The university was built on the land. Almost all of the city's Jews were later deported to death camps. The community was never paid for the land, valued at 1.5 billion drachmas in 1943. Gravestones still turn up in pavements and walls. In November 2014 the university unveiled a memorial on the site.