Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950

by Mark Mazower

  The vakf was a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a vakf relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands involved, vakf status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from the often burdensome irregular state taxes, vakf properties thrived and contributed to the city’s prosperity. For the donor, turning his (or her—the donors included many wealthy women) possessions into a vakf was also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of the foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running of their institutions down to the smallest details—saffron rice and honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school regularly.13

  The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old capital Bursa and the noble mosque he was building in Edirne, commissioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well as the great central hamam complex. He also repaired the city’s old Roman and Byzantine aqueduct system and settled colonists to look after it. His son, Mehmed the Conqueror, although hostile to the vakf idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new six-domed stone bezesten (market building), for the storage of valuable goods which is still in use today. Across the road from the Hamza Bey mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commercial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling perfumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and also used the income to support the mosque he created when he ordered the church of Ayios Dimitrios to be turned over to the faithful in 1492.14

  In addition to numerous chapels, schools, soup kitchens and Sufi lodges, vakfs financed the spread of the wells and fountains necessary both for performing ablutions and for keeping the city alive. Public baths were constructed near places of worship and religious study so that people could fulfil their obligation to make sure they were clean before entering the mosque to pray. Murad II built the sprawling Bey hamam as a place to prepare for the city’s main mosque, only a stone’s throw away. Its steam-filled rooms and private suites, where young masseurs pummelled and oiled their clients as they stretched out on the hot stones, were also a place for sexual and social interaction in an urban environment with few public spaces. Bath-attendants always had an ambiguous reputation, but work in the hamam offered access to the powerful and a step onto the ladder of imperial service. Salonica’s Bey hamam, with its separate baths for men and women, is one of the outstanding examples of early Ottoman architecture in the Balkans. Until the 1960s, travellers could still wash themselves in what were latterly called the Paradise Baths. Today the constant flows of hot and cold water mentioned by seventeenth-century travellers have dried up, but thanks to the Greek Archaeological Service it is possible to walk through the narrow passages from room to room, and admire the intricacy of its internal decorations, the marble slabs where clients were massaged, and the cool vaulted rooms with their stucco honeycombed muqarnas illuminated only by bright shafts of light which burst through holes cut deep into the domed ceiling.15

  Vakfs fostered trade too. In addition to Bayazid’s central market building, and quarters for flour, textiles, spices, furs, cloth and leather goods, there was the so-called “Egyptian market” just outside the gate to the harbour, which (according to one later traveller) contained “all the produce of Egypt, linen, sugar, rice, coffee.” Nearby were the city’s tanneries, which were already flourishing by the late fifteenth century. Ship’s biscuit was produced here, and later on coffee-houses and taverns sprang up to cater to the needs of sailors, travellers, camel-drivers, porters and day-labourers. At the heart of this bustling district lay the Abdur-Reouf mosque—“a beautiful and most lovely sanctuary, a place of devotion, respite and recovery”—founded by a mollah of the city, who built it to serve the traders, since there was none other outside the walls, endowing this too as a vakf. “Day and night,” reports a seventeenth-century visitor, “the faithful are present there, because Muslim traders from the four corners of the globe and god-fearing sailors and sea-captains make their prayers in that place, enjoying the view of the ships in the harbour.”16

  It is worth pointing out that Christians could form vakfs as well as Muslims and indeed had had a similar institution in Byzantine times. By 1498, the canny monks of the Vlatadon monastery, for example, owned properties throughout the town: they had one shop in the fish market (next door to that owned by someone the scribe referred to only as “the bey”) as well as another seven nearby, (adjacent to the premises of a Christian, “Kostas son of Kokoris”). They also had three stalls in the candle-makers’ market, and two cobblers’ workshops next to those owned by “Hadji Ahmed” and “Hadji Hassan.” They rented out cook-shops, wells and outbuildings in the old Hippodrome quarter, water-mills outside the walls, and a vineyard on the slopes of Hortiatis. With the revenues from these, they supported the life of the monastery and acquired yet more properties.17

  Further afield, vakfs financed the construction and maintenance of bridges, post-houses, stables, caravanserais and ferries, all of which were essential both for trade and for the speedy military advances through which Ottoman power was projected into south-eastern Europe. Robert de Dreux, a seventeenth-century French priest, was impressed by the khans, hostelries as large as churches, “which the Bachas and other Turkish signors build superbly to lodge travellers, without care for their station in life or religion, each one being made welcome, without being obliged to pay anything in return.” As the key naval, mercantile and military strong-point for the sultans’ fifteenth-century advance westwards, Salonica benefited from the pacification of the countryside and the consolidation of Ottoman authority along the old Roman Via Egnatia. For the first time in centuries, after the acute fragmentation and instability of the late Byzantine era, a single power controlled the region as a whole.18

  RUNNING THE CITY

  IN THE BALKANS the Ottomans conquered a region whose cities were already in decline as a result of the political and military instability of the previous centuries. They had, therefore, not only to repopulate them but to reorganize them administratively as well. Salonica itself was brought under the direct control of the sultan and placed by him under the supervision of appointed officers. There was no clear legal or institutional demarcation between the city and its rural hinterland—the same officials were often responsible for both and in contrast to the Romano-Byzantine tradition there was no municipal government in the strict sense. City-based tax farmers controlled the local salteries and city officials were instructed to look after the mines in the Chalkidiki peninsula. Moreover large areas within the walls were given over to vineyards, orchards and pasture, so that the countryside came within the city as well: indeed the Christians who patrolled the sea-walls nightly, as ordered by Murad (in return for tax exemptions) were mostly local shepherds and farmers. Nevertheless, the needs of the urban economy and rhythms of urban life themselves required special attention.19

  We lack documents which would show us precisely how Salonica was run in the fifteenth century. But on the basis of what was happening in other provincial towns we have a good idea. There would have been a governor who combined military and urban functions—overall responsibility for the garrisoning of the fortifications, gates, local troop contingents and horses on the one hand; and on the other, keeping an eye on the local tax officials, especially those who had bought concessions for customs duties, and on the needs of the city in general. The collection of
taxes and the running of the market were the Ottoman state’s priorities. It laid out, in enormous detail, the duties to be levied on each good brought into the city, and the governor was supposed to check that these were properly paid. The guardian of the gates examined the produce and animals brought in by farmers and traders. Another official regulated the buying and selling of “all that God has created.” He and his assistants paid weekly visits to the flour market and the slaughter-houses, checking weights and measures and monitoring the price and quality of silver. He also kept an eye on the behaviour of slaves and made sure they prayed regularly, looking out for any signs of public drunkenness or debauchery. Production itself was organized in trade guilds, some—like the butchers, confined to one religion—others (like the shoemakers), mixed. But guild members did not cluster together in the same residential areas as they did elsewhere.

  The Ottoman legal system was one of multiple legal jurisdictions. The governor and several of his subordinates had powers of arrest and imprisonment. The city’s chief law officer and public notary was the kadi but there was sometimes another judge, subordinate to him, whose remit covered “everything that could trouble public order”—murders, rape, adultery, robberies—crimes which in the Balkans at least were often judged not according to the divine law but “on the basis of custom” or royal decree. For the empire had a triple system of law with the shari’a providing a foundation, alongside the body of customary law—adet—which varied from place to place, and the decrees and regulations issued by the sultan himself—the kanun.20

  With no municipal authority to watch over the city, it was up to the governor to organize its policing, fire prevention, sewage disposal and hygiene. Policing came out of the pockets of merchants and local people who paid the pasvant (from the Persian word for nightwatchman) to patrol their neighbourhood. Four hundred years later, visitors to Salonica were still being kept awake by the unfamiliar sound of his metal-tipped staff tapping out the hours on the cobbles as he made his rounds. Householders also paid for rubbish to be collected, and were supposed to be responsible for the condition of pathways outside their homes. Guilds had the responsibility to provide young men for fire duty, but the frequency with which the city was hit by devastating conflagrations was testimony to their ineffectiveness. On the other hand, the water system was surprisingly sophisticated—early travellers commented on the abundance of public wells and fountains—and the flow could be controlled and directed in an emergency to where it was needed.21

  Thanks to the survival of a 1478 cadastral register, the third which the conscientious Ottoman scribes had prepared since the conquest (but the first to survive), we have a fairly precise picture of who was living where roughly half a century after the conquest. The pattern of settlement indicates a kind of transition from the Byzantine period to the Ottoman city in its heyday. A total of just over ten thousand people lived there—so the population had barely recovered to the level it was at when the Ottoman army burst in—roughly divided between Christians and Muslims, with the former still very slightly in the majority. The Muslims were immigrants and there do not appear to have been many converts from among the Christians, in contrast with some other former Byzantine towns.

  The Byzantine past lingered on, and could be discerned in the Greek names which continued to be used for neighbourhoods and districts. The Ottoman scribes faithfully referred to Ayo Dimitri, Ofalo, Podrom (from the old Hippodrome), Ayo Mine, Asomat after the old churches. Even Akhiropit (Acheiropoietos) was mentioned although the church had been converted into a mosque; it would be replaced by a Turkish name only in the next century. Large churches—such as Ayia Sofia—and the Vlatadon Monastery still lived off their estates. The garrison was made up of Ottoman troops, but Christians were assigned the responsibility for maintaining and even manning the sea-walls and the towers—an arrangement which a later governor at the start of the seventeenth century regarded as a security risk and put an end to. As the details of the Vlatadon monks’ property portfolio show, Muslims and Christians lived and worked side by side, probably because Murad had settled newcomers in the homes of departed or dead Christians. Indeed Christians still outnumbered Muslims in the old quarters on either side of the main street.

  Only in the Upper Town—a hint of the future pattern of residence—were Muslims now in the majority. There they enjoyed the best access to water and fresh air. The poor lived in humble single-storey homes whose courtyards were hidden from the street behind whitewashed walls; the wealthy slowly built themselves larger stone mansions with overhanging screened balconies and private wells in their extensive gardens, connected to the city’s water system. Cypresses and plane trees provided shade, and there were numerous kiosks which allowed people to escape the sun and drink from fountains while enjoying the views over the town. The highest officials were granted regular deliveries of ice from Mount Hortiatis, which they used mostly in the preparation of sherbets. In the eighteenth century if not before, they started painting their houses and ornamenting them with verses from the Qur’an picked out in red.22

  Imperial edicts had successfully replenished the city with the trades for which it would shortly become renowned—leather and textile-workers in particular—together with the donkey and camel-drivers, tailors, bakers, grocers, fishermen, cobblers and shopkeepers without which no urban life could be sustained. The city was now producing its own rice, soap, knives, wax, stoves, pillows and pottery. Saffron, meat, cheese and grains were all supplied locally. Fish were so plentiful that local astrologers claimed Selanik—as it was now known—lay under the sign of Pisces. Scribes provide one badly needed skill; the fifteen hamam attendants—a surprisingly high number at this early date—another. And the presence of merchants, a furrier, a jeweller and a silversmith all indicate the revival of international trade and wealth.

  Yet the city was still far from its prime. Many houses lay abandoned or demolished, and great stretches of the area within the walls, especially on the upper slopes, were given over to pasture, orchards, vineyards and agriculture. Two farmers are mentioned in the 1478 register, but many more of the inhabitants tended their own gardens (the word the Ottoman scribe uses is a Slavic one, bashtina, a sign of the close linkage between the Slavs and the land) or grazed their sheep, horses, oxen and donkeys on open ground. Centuries later, when the population had grown to more than one hundred thousand, the quasi-rural character of Salonica’s upper reaches was still visible: Ottoman photographs show isolated buildings surrounded by fields within the walls—the Muslim neighbourhood inside the fortress perimeter was virtually a separate village—while the city’s fresh milk was produced by animals which lived alongside their downtown owners right up until 1920. In fact, most of the time under the sultans there was more meadow within the walls than housing. A Venetian ambassador passed through at the end of the sixteenth century and what struck him—despite the “fine and wide streets downtown, a fountain in almost every one, many columns visible along them, some ruined and some whole”—was that the city was “sparsely inhabited.”23

  Yet not nearly as sparsely in the 1590s as it had been a century earlier. For after 1500 Salonica’s population suddenly doubled, and soared to thirty thousand by 1520, putting pressure on housing for the first time, and necessitating the opening up of a new water supply into the city. The newcomers emanated from an unexpected quarter—the western Mediterranean, where the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella were taking Christianization to a new pitch by expelling the Jews from their kingdom. Attracted by Bayazid’s promises of economic concessions and political protection, Spanish-speaking Jews arrived in droves. Some went on to Istanbul, Sarajevo, Safed and Alexandria, but the largest colony took shape in Salonica. By the time the Venetian ambassador passed through, it was a Jewish guide who showed him round, and the Jews of the city were many times more numerous than in Venice itself. Of the three main religious communities contained within the walls—Muslims, Christians and Jews—this last, which had been entirely absent from
the population register of 1478, had suddenly become the largest of them all. The third and perhaps most unexpected component of Ottoman Salonica had arrived.

  3

  The Arrival of the Sefardim

  WHEN EVLIYA CHELEBI, the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller, came to describe Salonica he provided a characteristically fantastic account of its origins. The prophet Solomon—“may God’s blessing be upon him”—had been showing the world to the Queen of Sheba when she looked down and saw “in the region of Athens, in the land of the Romans, a high spot called Bellevue.” There he built her a palace “whose traces are still visible,” before they moved on eastwards to Istanbul, Bursa, Baalbec and Jerusalem, building as they went, and repopulating the Earth after the Flood. Chelebi ascribes the city’s walls to the “philosopher Philikos” and his son Selanik “after whom it is named still.” Later, he says, Jews fleeing Palestine “slew the Greek nation in one night and gained control of the fortress.” Hebrew kings did battle with Byzantine princesses, the Ottoman sultans eventually took over, and “until our own days, the city is full of Jews.”1

  Evliya’s tall tale conveys one thing quite unambiguously: by the time of his visit in 1667–68, the Jews were such an integral part of Salonica that it seemed impossible to imagine they had not always been there. And indeed there had been Jews in the city before there were any Christians. In Byzantine times there were probably several hundred Greek-speaking Jewish families (or Romaniotes); despite often severe persecution, they traded successfully across the Mediterranean, at least to judge from the correspondence found in the Cairo Genizah many years ago. Shortly before the Turkish conquest, they were joined by refugees fleeing persecution in France and Germany. Whether or not they survived the siege of 1430 is not known but any who did were moved to Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror to repopulate it after its capture in 1453, leaving their home-town entirely without a Jewish presence for perhaps the first time in over a millennium. This was why in the 1478 register they did not appear. But then came a new wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Christendom, and the Ottoman willingness to take advantage of this.2