The full accounts of the great fire at Salonica, which
have now come to hand, show the calamity to have been a very great one. The conflagration had burnt itself out by Friday, September 5th, but not before some twenty thousand persons had been rendered homeless and twelve hundred buildings destroyed. The damage covered by insurance is put at £200,000, but the actual damage is, of course, many times greaten Unhappily, the great Mosque, once the Church of St. Sophia, and almost as fine a building as that at Constantinople, was utterly destroyed. The loss, from the artistic point of view, can hardly be exaggerated, as there are very few examples of the best period of Byzantine architecture in existence. Mr. Freshfield, who writes a letter on the subject to Monday's Times, mentions, however, that there are drawings of the Mosque extant, and also that two years ago he had photographs taken of certain details of the building. In this way the student will be able to obtain some idea of the structure. Mr. Freshfield does not say whether the splendid mosaics of the time of Justinian, which, of course, have perished, were among the things he had photo- graphed. We sincerely trust they were.
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