Turkish People Should Stop Saying They're from Thessaloniki

People should stop saying they are from Thessaloniki. Roughly 10 million people say that... Was it the biggest city in the world or something?

Turks usually say that they are from there but the reality is far from that.

First, since it was a major city, people flocked there after the miserable and humiliating defeat against Serbs and Greeks. People thought they would be safe there, thinking the existence of European embassies would deter blood thirsty Greeks from massacring them - they weren't safe-. But when they came to eastern Thrace and Anatolia they said they came from Salonica and they kept on saying this for no reason, ignoring their original towns but weird thing is that they taught their children the same.

Second, the population had swollen even further before the Balkan wars between 1908-1912 by refugees flocking from Crete, north Bulgaria/old tuna(Danube) province, eastern Rumelia special province and Bosnia - Bosnians/Turks mildly spreading into the area from Kosovo to Salonica (about half of the bosniaks in north Macedonia and kosovo appeared in this area around this time, rest happened during the Yugoslavia era)-

Third, Thessaloniki today is a city in Greek region of Macedonia. It's not the same as in Turkey when most of the time the capital of a province is the city with the same name. Many people are actually from smaller towns such as Serres and Drama and others and the villages nearby them.
These people should say they are from Macedonia region or from the Ottoman province that used to be Salonica which had Thessaloniki as the capital city.

No, your ancestors weren't from Thessaloniki, no, they didn't share the city with Ataturk at some point, no, they didn't possibly play with Ataturk at some point. Every Turk with Balkan background cannot be originating from only one city in an era when only 10% people lived in the cities.