During the
First World War, Thessaloniki had been the headquarters of the British Salonika Force, containing eighteen various hospitals. Three of the hospitals in Thessaloniki were Canadian though no Canadian soldiers were members of the Commonwealth force. Commonwealth forces had been interred in local Protestant and Roman Catholic cemeteries, prior to the opening of the Mikra cemetery. Additionally the Anglo-French Military Cemetery, on the Lembet Road, was used from November 1915 to October 1918. The cemetery holds 1,810
Commonwealth burials of the First World War, and 147 other war graves from other nationalities. The Mikra Memorial within the cemetery commemorates almost 500 members of the Commonwealth forces, including nurses and officers, who were killed when their
troop transports and
hospital ships were sunk in the
Mediterranean Sea. The identified victims from these ships are buried in Thessaloniki. ==References==