Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950
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It is not hard to see in such language the sterotypes of cultural immobility and stagnation which have long underpinned the Western diagnosis of Ottoman decline. Yet economically, there was nothing wrong with the empire, and if consumption was low—Captain William Leake noted that “Turks as well as Jews” often carried parsimony “to excess”—this may have reflected life under a government “which makes every one feel danger in displaying his wealth and renders property and life insecure even to its most favoured subjects.” Wills left half a century later show that even wealthy members of the city lived a surprisingly modest lifestyle, with scanty furnishings—apart from carpets, chests and lamps—adorning their homes, and few other possessions to leave their heirs.8
Elsewhere in the city, however, it was a very different story, and new tastes, clothes and manners were leaving their mark upon the tiny but growing European and Europeanizing elite. The French were the first to establish a consulate in the city—in 1685—a sign that the Levant trade now encompassed Salonica on a significant scale. Before 1698 only two Frenchmen actually resided in the city; but by 1721 there were eight French trading houses and about thirty-seven members of the “French nation,” including servants, a baker, inn-keepers and a tailor. An English agent of the Levant Company arrived in 1718, and the same year began the commercial boom which followed the ending of the Venetian–Ottoman war and brought more and more European residents and merchants. By the middle of the century, Venice, Naples, the Duchy of Tuscany, Ragusa, Holland had representatives; Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Spain and Prussia arrived a little later. The consuls—symbols of the power of Europe—had appeared in force, even if at this stage they still had to demonstrate their respect for Ottoman power by lavish gifts to the town’s chief officials, and humble and respectful behaviour.9
Frank Street (Odos Frangōn), now lined with rag-trade outlets and commercial agents housed in gloomy postwar concrete office blocks, still winds past the Catholic church on the western edge of the modern city centre. In this area, taverns opened for foreign sailors, and wine dealers, bakers and butchers provided them with familiar fare. Teachers, doctors, priests, secretaries and housemaids served in the houses of the city’s merchants. Overland mails, run by the Neapolitans, the Austrians and the French, made news from central Europe a mere ten days distant from the city. Each group formed, in the parlance of the day, a “nation” unto itself. Yet mostly the European residents of the city got on with one another. Despite the tensions engendered by the Napoleonic wars, wrote John Galt, “their social intercourse is maintained on a pleasant and respectable footing.” Henry Holland enjoyed several conversazioni at the house of the Austrian consul, where the entertainments included cards and recitals of Greek and Turkish songs, as well as dinner parties hosted by German merchants.
On the other hand, assertive Christians threatened the hierarchies of authority carefully established by Ottoman rule. Through the eighteenth century, even the consuls remained at the mercy of the whims of a pasha or kadi, a target of resentment and a useful scapegoat when needed. When over-enthusiastic Jesuits built a church without permission, and, still worse, constructed illegal bells hidden behind a brick wall, the local authorities quickly had them taken down. Venetian sailors celebrated their religious festivals so noisily they woke up the town. Janissary violence often expressed popular anger at such Frankish arrogance, especially when it broke the silence of the Ottoman city at night. In 1752 a Greek Venetian merchant, recently back from Cairo, was dining and singing with friends in his home when a passing city patrol was disturbed by the noise, entered the premises and on being told angrily by the owner that “I am a Venetian, can’t I enjoy myself in my own house?” beat him up and threw him in prison.10
THE BERATLI
THE EUROPEAN TRADERS knew that despite their growing economic influence they could not function unaided. Few spoke the necessary languages, or understood the Ottoman legal system or local patronage networks. Moreover what had basically brought them to Salonica was the wool export trade, to tap which they required the cooperation of local Jews who controlled the regional supply. Without their help, they had no means of purchasing the wool itself, or of getting round the official restraints on the sale and export of this and other commodities such as cotton, leather and wheat. Credit too was short in the city, and this market was also mostly under local control. This was why, in addition to the usual panoply of servants, bodyguards and attendants, every merchant and consul acquired a dragoman, or interpreter, as well as a general business agent, or censal. These postholders were officially recognized by the Porte through its issue of licences (berats) which brought their holder under the protection of the nation concerned and exempted him from Ottoman taxes, justice and—not least—clothing restrictions. As a result, the post of beratli became highly sought after, and berats changed hands for thousands of piastres. In theory their possessors had obligations to the foreign nationals whom they nominally served; in practice, the consuls competed with each other to issue berats to the leading merchants of the place, hoping in this way to gain influence for their country. David Morpurgo, for instance, scion of a distinguished Italian Jewish family, who had settled in Salonica before 1710, was fought over by the French, Dutch and English consuls. Consuls grumbled at the “disgraceful chaffering” of berats, but they were all at it.11
To almost everyone the beratli were soon an anomaly, if not a disgrace. French merchants in Salonica resented their consul making wealthy Livornese Jews honorary Frenchmen, especially as they often decamped to another nation if offered better terms. But the Livornese—the last in the series of Jewish migrations into the city from the Catholic West—had built up powerful trading houses, dominating the lucrative tobacco trade with Italy, and the consul was not about to lose their goodwill if he could help it. “In this port,” wrote one, “the treasury of the French nation would suffer a significant loss if the Jews, who do big business, were obliged to leave their protection.”12
Many beratli demanded exemption from Ottoman taxes: they had, after all, paid large sums to acquire their favoured status. But in this way, despite being among the richest men in the place, they simply increased the tax burden upon their co-religionists. Thus their assertion of European untouchability did not go down well and it is not surprising that they made themselves unpopular. Community leaders sometimes connived with Ottoman officials to have them imprisoned or beaten up. Nightwatchmen knocked their European hats off their heads. When Greek beratli started to flaunt their status by wearing expensive woven belts and silks, bishops introduced new sumptuary laws. The newly arrived Livornese Jewish francos shocked traditional Jews with their wigs, frock coats and goatees, and rabbis in Salonica and Livorno hotly debated the proper length and shape of beards; some beratli were excommunicated for trimming theirs too fine. “These newcomers are dressed like the Franks,” wrote a Jesuit missionary in the city. “They have only a moustache not a beard; they do not mind eating with Christians; thus the others regard them only as half-Jews and almost as having deserted the Law.”13
The Ottoman officials themselves had little sympathy for these upstarts. When a wealthy Greek merchant, Alexios Goutas, turned out to be working for the Venetian consul while claiming English protection, they queried his entitlement to both. Goutas asked to keep his English protection but to pass on his Venetian berat to his brother-in-law, and this was eventually done. In fact, the Ottoman authorities at the start of the eighteenth century had been most reluctant to encourage the spread of the consular system, precisely because they feared the abuse of the berats, and the consequent drop in their own tax revenues. As a result, they tended to sympathize with local men whenever quarrels arose. In 1732 there was a row between two Livornese beratli under French protection and one of the most powerful Jews in the city, Jacob Kapon, who was the pasha’s money-lender and chief treasurer. Kapon got the rabbis to excommunicate his rivals, so that their goods were left untouched by the local dockworkers; all the French consul’s prote
sts failed to result in his punishment.14
In the longer run, however, the beratli were unstoppable for they had the prestige of Europe behind them. They were a new power in the city, middle-men between the local Jews and Frankish traders, and soon they were not only assisting European merchants but giving them a run for their money. Among the Jews, it was chiefly the Livornese who profited from the expansion of trade after 1718. A certain Raphael Villareal—whose relatives lived in Livorno and Marseilles—bought a ship, named with admirable chutzpah the Archange-Raphael, and hired a French captain: this was the kind of competition which frightened French exporters. But there were also men like “Don” Asher Abrabanel, a member of one of the most distinguished Sefardic families in the city and a man who had inherited “houses filled with luxury … immense wealth and property.” Abrabanel was a leader of the local Jewish community and responsible for the provision of cloth for the janissary corps. From 1738, Jewish beratli were attending consular ceremonies, a striking indication of their relative power vis-à-vis the city’s Christian merchants, who were shocked to receive them on equal terms, and the English consul was careful to send congratulations on the eve of the Jewish New Year.15
Yet the rise of the Greeks threatened to put even the Livornese in the shade. After nearly three centuries on the margins, Salonica’s Greek community was reasserting itself. Greeks were rising to high positions in the Ottoman service, where the most successful became voivodes of Wallachia, or interpreters (dragomans) to the Imperial Fleet; others were powerful tax-collectors around Salonica itself. Hellenized Vlachs from the Pindos mountains traded in tobacco with Vienna, Venice and Trieste, building substantial frescoed mansions which can still be seen in the towns of Jannina and Siatista. With unrivalled connections with Leipzig, the Danubian Principalities and Russia, what one historian once called the “all-conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant” was quick to seek out new opportunities. Russia’s rise under Catherine the Great brought a powerful new protector, interested in the Balkans as never before. “Humble, crafty, intriguing and bold” as the French consul described them, the Greeks became an unrivalled force in Salonican commerce.16
THE RISE OF THE GREEK MERCHANT
BY SEA THE GREEKS were already making their entrepreneurial spirit felt, becoming successful freebooters and privateers. Starting with the Seven-Year War (1756–63) between England and France, Greek corsairs embarked on an illustrious career in the Eastern Mediterranean that would last nearly a century. Flying English colours, the angligrecs preyed on French shipping, while the Ottoman authorities turned a blind eye. The same thing happened in the American war of 1778–83. In between, they participated in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74 on the Russian side. Corsairs had always been a nuisance—or rather, part of the Mediterranean maritime economy: Algerians, Tunisians, Dulcigniotes, Maltese, Venetians and other Italians, not to mention the English themselves, had all flourished. But none of them found it easy competing in the second half of the eighteenth century with the Greeks, who were drawn from the impoverished islands of the Aegean and the Adriatic, and adjusted easily to the seasonal nature of professional piracy. During the 1770 Russian campaign, Greek pirates from the islands entered the Gulf of Salonica in armed caiques, forcing the imperial grain levy for Istanbul to be sent the long way round along the muddy inland roads. Fifty years later, they were more of a nuisance than ever, not least to their own fellow-Christians. “The troubles and misfortunes that have befallen us and continue now for ten days … we cannot relate,” wrote three unfortunate Greek victims in 1827. “Beating us and binding our hands, and with cutlasses threatening us that if we did not confess where we had our money they would take our lives with all that they had already taken from us, all our possessions, and they have left us in our shirts.”17
With some reason, the Porte associated European merchants with piracy, and accused the beratli of more than once sharing their profits with them. The lines between legal and illegal trading were always a little blurred at sea. Nevertheless, it was surely a sign of the Greeks’ growing prosperity that alongside their piratical activities, they were also increasingly involved in legitimate commerce. In the summer of 1776, an Austrian aristocrat, Baron Starhemberg, tried to set up a large new trading company in the Ottoman lands—the German trade was by far the fastest growing partner for the Levant. His agent arrived from the capital on a boat under a Russian flag, captained by a Greek from Smyrna and crewed by Greeks and Ragusans, to buy tobacco from local Greek merchants and ship it to Trieste for the Austrian and north Italian markets. The Venetian consul was understandably worried and passed on the news to his masters: Starhemberg, he reported, planned to monopolize the export of tobacco and cotton in particular not only to “Germany” but also to Italy. The implications for Venice’s traditional predominance in the Mediterranean scarcely needed to be spelled out: “A new flag, the Russian, will come into the harbour, which on the one hand is much more attractive to the fanatical Greeks, and on the other will attract Barbary pirates into the Gulf.” But in fact, it was worse than that: the local Greeks soon realized they did not need the Austrians at all, for they were already running the Vienna trade effectively enough without them. Heavily laden caravans of between one hundred and one thousand horses, well-guarded, were regularly making the thirty-five-day journey by land to the Austrian domains.18
Under the protection of the Russian flag, which they enjoyed since the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji, Greek merchants supplanted the Jews who had dominated the carrying trade with Venice, and established a network of trading houses between Odessa, Alexandria and Marseille. Men like the tobacco and cotton exporter Andronikos Paikos or “the most illustrious Signor Count Dimitrios Peroulis” paved the way. Their new wealth brought them prominence and allowed them to live in a new style: by the end of the century, the firm of one of the wealthiest Greek merchants, Ioannis Youta Kaftandzoglou, was reputedly the largest in all Macedonia: he supported the publication of scholarly and religious books (mostly in Vienna), and married into the family of a local French trader. Even though he himself was under the protection of the Prussian consul, he was concerned enough about the finances of the Greek community to take action against other beratli who were refusing to pay their taxes, and as a result he managed to get the community’s tax arrears paid off.19
This was the kind of attitude appreciated by the Ottoman authorities. In return, they allowed the centrally located church of Ayios Minas, which had burned down many years earlier, to be rebuilt and later the churches of Panagouda and Ayios Athanasios too. Orthodox Christians were also moving into larger houses, previously owned by Turks. But this was still a sensitive business. When a Greek Venetian beratli called Georgios Tsitsis bought a mansion in the centre of town previously owned by a former mufti, he took the precaution of obtaining a positive religious opinion, or fetva, issued by one of the mufti’s successors. Even so, he later ran into trouble with a new pasha who insisted it was against the Qur’an for an unbeliever to live in the house once inhabited by a mufti.20
THE GROWTH OF RUSSIA offered the Ottoman Greeks more than just prosperity and new trading opportunities. After the string of defeats suffered by Venice in the seventeenth century, the rise of a Christian Orthodox power also carried the promise of liberation and redemption from the Turks. Greek monks spread the “Russian expectation” from the time of Peter the Great. “The Greeks are persuaded,” a French Jesuit observed in 1712, “that the Czar will deliver them one day from the domination of the Turks.” Apocalyptic visions foretold the downfall of the empire at the hands of “another Lord, another Macedonian, the monarch of the Russians,” in the words of the most popular of these, a collection of prophecies known as the Agathangelos. The author, a Greek monk, saw “Christ’s victorious banner over Byzantium” and predicted that “then all will be milk and honey. Truth will triumph. And the heavens will rejoice in the true glory. The Orthodox faith will be raised high and spread from East to West.”21
In this cl
imate of expectation, Catherine the Great realized how useful it might be to play to the Balkan Orthodox audience, and to present her self-styled “Greek project”—as the Russian march south was termed—as the revival of Byzantine imperial glories. The 1768–74 war left the Ottomans worried at the bond of sympathy they discerned between the Russians and the Greeks. In December 1768, they ordered the Christians of Salonica and the surrounding region to hand over all their arms. In 1770, as Russian agents fomented Greek uprisings in the Peloponnese, some Muslims in Salonica were sufficiently worried to contemplate killing or driving the Greeks out. But in fact cooler counsels prevailed, with the result that the janissaries grumbled that the mollah and mufti were “pro-Greek,” and attacked their residences, destroying them and carrying off their possessions. So long as the war lasted, and especially after the crushing Russian defeat of the Ottoman navy off Chios, the Christians of Salonica feared massacre.22
The following year, the Eastern Mediterranean was still filled with rumours of imminent salvation. In April 1771, it was reported that on Paros there were Greek and Albanian troops under canvas, serving alongside the Russians. They had built a church there and the former Patriarch Serafeim had celebrated Good Friday mass before departing for Mount Athos. After the service he had blessed the Russians and prayed for their victory, warning them not to accept offers of peace but to continue fighting “until the Greeks had been freed from the heavy Ottoman yoke.”23 Salonica again lay at the mercy of the Russian fleet. Nevertheless, the Russians, despite all the rumours, did not come, the fleet sailed past Athos without entering the Gulf, and when peace was concluded in 1774 the only losers were those few Ottoman Greeks who had been tempted to take up arms in the hope of Russian support.