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

by Mark Mazower

  REBELLION AND REPRESSION: THE 1821 MASSACRES

  HALF A CENTURY LATER, when the Greeks rebelled in earnest, the impact on the city was devastating. How the life of Salonica’s Greek community would have developed without the 1821 war of independence we cannot say. The previous decades had brought new commercial opportunities and sources of enrichment—increased exports of Macedonian tobaccos to Egypt, for instance, and wool and cotton to Marseille, while Yussuf Bey requested French glass and Lyons carpets for his new palace. But the same trade routes were also carrying dangerous new political ideals. The outbreak of the French revolution inspired activists like Rhigas Ferraios to propagandize for a future Hellenic Republic; the Napoleonic wars too seemed to presage major political upheavals in the Balkans and left Serbia in turmoil.

  When the Greek revolt of 1821 broke out—to Salonica’s north (in the Danubian principalities) and south (in the Peloponnese)—some patriotic agents began an uprising in Macedonia as well. Suppressed quickly by Ottoman troops, the consequences were catastrophic: villages were burned down, fields destroyed and families uprooted. In the city itself, the revolt halted the Greek revival in its tracks, and massacre and exile devastated its most prosperous and successful Christian families. It was a blow from which they did not fully recover for the rest of the century.

  As it happens, our best account of the uprising and the harsh Ottoman response comes from a most unexpected source. The twenty-eight-year-old Haïroullah ibn Sinasi Mehmed Agha was mollah of the city in 1820, where he was accused by some of pro-Greek views. When the revolt broke out, he was dismissed from his post and briefly imprisoned. Later, on his return to the capital, he did something unusual: Shaken by what he had witnessed, he wrote a memoir for the sultan, and his testimony—practically unique as a personal account by a Muslim official on any aspect of Salonica’s life in the Ottoman era—was filed away in the archives of the Top Kapi palace, where it gathered dust for more than a century in the royal library before being discovered by a Greek scholar in 1940.24

  Haïroullah Effendi begins his report with the usual polite disclaimers, excusing his lack of competence and wondering whether he would be up to the expectations placed upon him:

  When therefore the faithful slave of your Excellency, and my powerful master, Halet Effendi, communicated to me your order that I should leave for the God-guarded city of Salonica to take up the high office of mollah, I estimated the weight of the responsibility which I should have in that position for which you had judged me worthy, I calculated my capabilities, and I saw, that with the help of Allah and with as my infallible guide the sacred and holy Laws of our faith, I would be able to appear worthy of my mission, and I prepared for my long journey. Thus, in the middle of Rebiul-Ahir in the year of Hegira 1235 [August 1820], I started out for my post, and after a somewhat difficult journey of several days, I arrived, on 8 Djemaziul-Evel [September 1820] in Salonica.

  The author describes his first impressions of the city—“My God what was my surprise!”—and lauds, in conventional fashion, its wealth and prosperity. “Your Excellency may be proud that among so many cities in His possession, there is included Salonica.” Its mosques, tekkes, markets and fortifications are all found worthy of praise: “They say that the glory of a city and its strength depends upon the number of its mosques. If this be true—and truly it is a wise saying—then Salonica is one of Your most powerful cities, if not the most powerful.” In keeping with the spirit of exaggeration, Haïroullah Effendi goes on implausibly to estimate the number of mosques at seventy, and the inhabitants at one hundred thousand.

  But soon politics and contemporary concerns intrude into his seemingly formulaic account. Describing the Despot-Effendi—the Greek metropolitan—who governed the “unfaithful,” and the churches and schools under his jurisdiction, he mentions the leading church “which they call Mina Effendi [Ayios Minas] and in whose cells all the Christian notables gather and discuss the Patriarchate, the Phanar and the Peloponnese.” The ferment among the Greeks was increasingly evident. “Indeed the day I arrived and went to the Konak they had brought in to Yusuf Bey, a middle-aged unbeliever, Mestané Effendi, because—they say—he was teaching children a song written by an unbeliever from Thessaly which Your Greatness had condemned in a previous firman and forbidden.” (This was almost certainly the revolutionary hymn of the Greek propagandist Rhigas Ferraios, whose execution by the Austrians had helped popularize him among the Orthodox.)

  What was as bad if not worse, he went on, the Greeks in the city rang their church bells, rode through the streets on horseback, wore fine clothes and did not step down from the pavement when they passed a Muslim. To us this indicates the extent of non-Muslim influence there; to Haïroullah it was shockingly bold behaviour which would not have been tolerated in Istanbul; prohibited by imperial decree, it was explicable only in terms of the corruption of local police officials.25

  Despite his dismay, however, at the arrogance of the infidels, Haïroullah did not regard himself as “a fighter of unbelievers”; this was a term he reserved for the high-spending deputy pasha, the notorious Yusuf Bey, whom he also described as “rough and tyrannical,” a man who so intimidated the mufti and the janissary agha that they sat quietly with crossed hands in his presence. Yusuf Bey’s father, Ismail Bey of Serres, had been described by Leake as “one of the richest and most powerful of the subjects of the sultan, if he can be called a subject who is absolute here, and obeys only such of the sultan’s orders as he sees fit, always with a great show of submission.” With wealth based on the booming cotton trade, Ismail Bey was enjoying a quiet retirement while his son exerted an almost unchecked mastery over the city. Haïroullah—according to his own account—dared to challenge him at their first meeting. When Yusuf Bey warned that the Greeks were preparing to rise up and would have to be struck a brutal blow, Haïroullah protested: “My God! Who would dare to revolt against Your just power and strength? Rather than tyrannize them better let us behave towards them as friends, so that they will feel gratitude towards us and will not complain.”26

  Haïroullah clearly saw storm clouds ahead. After consulting the Qur’an, he met with the Greek archbishop and advised him to keep his flock in check, “to be more faithful to the laws of the shari’a and to obey the orders of the governor.” The two men sat and drank coffee together “like old friends,” a fact which spies reported to Yusuf Bey. His suspicions about the mollah’s sentiments were strengthened on learning too that one day, sitting at a large café outside the Kazantzilar mosque, Haïroullah had been upset by the sight of the body of a dead Christian being carried past, and had exclaimed, “May God forgive them!” Yusuf Bey accused him of having become a giaour—only a Christian, he insisted, would thus have sympathized with the suffering of other Christians—and on 27 February 1821, just as the Greek revolt was about to begin, Haïroullah Effendi was imprisoned in the White Tower. It was from that strategic if unpleasant vantage point—life there was frightening, he wrote, “if one is not accompanied by the thought of all-powerful God”—that he watched the terrifying events of the next months unfold in Salonica.

  His fellow prisoners were Christians whose only crime had been to fail to salute Yusuf Bey in the street, or to meet in the cathedral to talk about the Patriarchate, or merely to be a prominent notable in the community. Many were suffering from starvation and thirst. An emissary of the revolutionaries, Aristeidis Pappas, was brought in, badly beaten, before he was handed over to the janissary agha to be executed. “Before he left,” writes Haïroullah, “forgive me for this, Your Majesty, I embraced him and kissed him, because in truth, he was an honourable man and if he was to blame it was out of the goodness of his heart.”

  A few days later another Greek, Nikola Effendi, was brought in. He had shocking news: the Morea was in revolt, and there was intelligence that the Greeks in and around Salonica were planning to do the same. Yusuf Bey had demanded hostages, and more than four hundred Christians—of whom one hundred were monks from Atho
s—were under guard in his palace. All these, naturally, were being beaten and mistreated; some had been already killed.

  Shortly after this the order came through from the Porte for Haïroullah’s release. Yusuf Bey’s attitude towards him now changed entirely, and he was sweetness itself; nevertheless, he would not allow him to leave the city immediately: the countryside was not safe and villagers ready to revolt. To Haïroullah’s horror, he learned that Yusuf Bey intended to put the hostages to death and was unable to dissuade him: “The same evening half of the hostages were slaughtered before the eyes of the uncouth moutesselim. I closed myself in my room and prayed for the safety of their souls.”

  “And from that night began the evil. Salonica, that beautiful city, which shines like an emerald in Your honoured crown, was turned into a boundless slaughter-house.” Yusuf Bey ordered his men to kill any Christians they found in the streets and for days and nights the air was filled with “shouts, wails, screams.” They had all gone mad, killing even children and pregnant women. “What have my eyes not seen, Most Powerful Shah of Shahs?” The metropolitan himself was brought in chains, together with other leading notables, and they were tortured and executed in the square of the flour market. Some were hanged from the plane trees around the Rotonda. Others were killed in the cathedral, where they had fled for refuge, and their heads were gathered together as a present for Yusuf Bey. Only the dervish tekkes—whose adepts traditionally retained close ties with Greek monks—provided sanctuary for Christians. “These things and many more, which I cannot describe because the memory alone makes me shudder, took place in the city of Salonica in May of 1821.”

  IT WAS BY FAR the worst massacre the Greeks of the city ever suffered under Ottoman rule. At other moments of high tension over the centuries, murder had been in the air, or had actually taken place not far away—in Larissa, Serres and Nish, for instance. But to kill perhaps as many as several thousand Christians at one time was unprecedented. It broke with the basic assumptions of Ottoman administration, which dictated that the state care for all those under its sway, and showed how deeply the uprising had shaken the authorities. That spring, Sultan Mahmud II had sent a firman informing the authorities in Salonica of the outbreak of the revolution in Wallachia, and the sheykh-ul-Islam had issued a fetva saying the revolt could be crushed with all necessary means. As Haïroullah Effendi put it, the Greeks “paid for the errors of the unbelievers of Russia.”

  In Salonica, Yusuf Bey’s superiors had wanted above all to secure the city. They were simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign on the other side of the Pindos mountains to eliminate Ali Pasha of Jannina, who seemed at the time a far more serious foe. Even after the massacres, the Greek threat preoccupied them, and reinforcements were ordered in from the capital and Anatolia. In March 1822, another pasha, Mehmed Emin Abulubud—a Syrian of an “energetic and sometimes violent” character—ordered a new mobilization: the city forts were inspected, and brief risings in Halkidiki and on Thasos were quickly snuffed out. In the mountains of Olympos and at sea, the insurgency lasted longer. But Ali Pasha was eventually defeated and killed, and Abulubud’s forces retook the town of Naoussa, which had been held by Greek rebels.27

  In the aftermath, the booty looted from Greek homes was sold off, while the severed heads of Christian worthies decorated the konaks of the leading beys and the western gates of the city. Caravans of Greek captives were auctioned in the Bosniac Han, and others were sent on to the slave markets of Istanbul, Tripolis and Benghazi: ten years later, British officials were still trying to trace them and secure their release. It is not surprising that the Greeks who survived seriously believed that the Turks planned to kill them or to bring them into a condition of “servitude through the total ruin of their fortune.” According to the French consul, Bottu, Abulubud’s “system of spoliation” reflected his view that the Greeks had been inspired to fight for freedom by “the increase in their wealth and their industry, as well as the extreme influence they had begun to exert on affairs in Turkey.”28

  But the Ottoman state had no long-term interest in eliminating the Greeks, or in impoverishing them. On the contrary it needed their commercial acumen, as well as their support whenever it decided to curb the always troublesome Albanians. The policy of terror was becoming ever more counter-productive, bringing business to a halt and alarming non-Greeks too as it rippled outwards. Muslims and Jews were plunged into “the most profound misery, irritation and despair.” “It is chiefly among the Turks of the town,” noted the French consul, “whose self-esteem Mehmed Pasha and the Arabs in his entourage daily affront, and whose livelihood they ruin, that the fermentation is liveliest and most general.” One sees here indications of a Turkish-Arab antipathy which rarely surfaces in the documents. News of Abulubud’s posting elsewhere in August 1823 was greeted with “astonishment and the greatest joy.” Ibrahim Pasha, his replacement, greeted the Greek notables with “sweetness.” “We could have believed ourselves transported into another country and surrounded by other men,” noted Bottu. Considering that at this time the war with Greek insurgents was in full swing, that Greek pirates had blocked access to the Gulf and that the hinterland was also unsafe, this betrayed striking self-confidence. In January 1824, all non-residents were ordered to leave within three days, following reports that armed rebels had infiltrated the city; two years later, pirates nearly succeeded in firing on the Top Hane munitions dump, which would have taken much of the Frankish Quarter with it had it gone up. But memories of the massacre of 1821 were still vivid, and left both Turks and Greeks in the city unwilling to provoke further conflict.29

  These bloody events were a turning-point in Salonica’s history. In the first place, they led to the shrinking of the city’s Greek population and its impoverishment. The loss of several thousand lives, numerous properties and hundreds of exiles continued to be felt for generations. The costs of putting down the revolt were borne by the community itself, a crushing burden, which the Porte was still struggling to apportion in 1827. Five years on, houses still lay empty, at least to judge from an imperial decree permitting the sale of abandoned properties belonging to Greeks, to prevent their dilapidation. The city itself did not recover for more than a decade.

  The second momentous development was the emergence, for the first time in Ottoman history, of an independent Christian successor state scarcely one day’s voyage from Salonica itself. The very idea was an affront to Muslim sensibilities and to Ottoman pride. An imperial firman from 1828—just two years before the declaration of Greek independence—had warned the emperor’s subjects about the extent of the international support for the “Greek revolutionaries of the Morea and the other islands of the White Sea” and underlined the impossibility of ever granting them their goal—“for this would mean—may it never happen—that we set Muslims in the place of rayah and the rayah in the place of Muslims, something which would touch the entire Muslim people and is impossible from the point of view of holy law, politically and religiously for us to accept, or even countenance.” Yet just this came to pass, and Athens—a small town less than half the size of Salonica—eventually became the capital of the new state.30

  The Kingdom of Greece was too weak to mount a serious challenge to the empire for many years to come. Nevertheless, its very existence was a marker of Ottoman failure and a pointer to the strength of a new force in the eastern Mediterranean—nationalism—especially when this was backed up by the Christian states of Europe. In 1835 the first Greek consul took up residence in the city, placing local Christians in a novel situation. Greeks were henceforth torn between loyalty to the empire, which still contained the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Christians in the Levant, and allegiance to the tiny Kingdom; Slav-speaking Christians would in turn have to decide whether they were merely Orthodox or also Greeks, a choice which pressed heavily upon them as the century closed and new Slavic states emerged as well. Jews, and of course Muslims, felt no such tug, and if anything their attachment to the empire took
on an anti-Greek tinge.

  But the sick man of Europe was not dead yet, and Sultan Mahmud II was among the first to draw lessons from his defeats. In 1826 he ordered the disbanding of the janissaries and thanks to his ruthlessness succeeded where many of his predecessors had failed. In Salonica, a few weeks after they burned down the pasha’s palace, the janissaries were systematically hunted down and many were imprisoned in the Tower of Blood (better known today as the White Tower) and killed. Overnight they were eliminated as a force. Some fled to the same dervish monasteries that had sheltered Greeks five years earlier. Others burned their uniforms and payslips. Only occasionally in the years that followed would an Ottoman official, perhaps justifying his conservatism, let slip his regret at their passing, or perhaps even refer to his own janissary past. With their destruction Mahmud could begin the hard work of administrative reform—improving internal security, re-establishing central authority and banishing the memories of the chaos and anarchy which had afflicted the city through the eighteenth century.

  7

  Pashas, Beys and Money-lenders

  THE SULTAN’S VISIT

  SHORTLY AFTER EIGHT O’CLOCK one morning in July 1859, a salute from the town batteries heralded the arrival of Sultan Abdul Mecid. The imperial squadron—a flotilla of paddle-wheel frigates, steamers and cutters—glittered in the bay. On the carpeted wharf stood the heads of the town’s religious communities, the governor, notables and consuls; thousands of curious and respectful inhabitants lined the approaches. The sultan—together with his brother, three sons, the grand admiral and Riza Pasha, the minister of war—proceeded through the town. Their passage flanked by detachments of troops, they made their way along streets specially widened for the occasion to the mansion of Yusuf Bey, the most powerful landed proprietor in the region, and one of the wealthiest men in the city.