by Mark Mazower
The coronation festivities allowed for a very public display of harmony, led by the town’s religious leaders. The Orthodox Metropolitan Ioacheim, a man greatly respected in the town, was seen to embrace the defterdar, the provincial treasurer, while the mufti “wept like a child.” The metropolitan hailed “this glorious event,” and when the chief rabbi offered prayers for the new sultan in the main synagogue, the ceremony was attended by four pashas, Turkish officers, the metropolitan himself and Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant priests. A few days later, they all assembled again for public prayers in the Mevlevi tekke outside the city walls: English, Greek and Austrian naval officers, as well as the consular corps added to the throng. The fears and rumours of massacre did not vanish—they emerged briefly again and led to what the British consul termed a “sort of panic” in October—by which time poor, mad Sultan Murad had already been deposed and replaced by his brother Abdul Hamid—but calmer heads knew that rumours did as much damage as the real thing, and needed to be dampened down for the good of the town. When Bairam came round, it was celebrated in an orderly manner after leading figures in the Muslim community urged the importance of taking account of the feelings of Christians and of “disproving all the rumours which are current here of a fanatical rising against the Christians.” Christian notables reciprocated and the local Greek newspaper congratulated the authorities and “Muslim co-citizens” on the “great tranquillity” which prevailed and urged the Orthodox to follow their example at Easter. The proclamation of the first-ever Ottoman constitution that autumn was greeted in the city with prayers for a new era of common brotherhood and communal harmony.29
EASTERN QUESTIONS
IF THE GOVERNOR’S INEPTITUDE and the irresponsible behaviour of a few prominent Greeks had helped turn a minor dispute into an international incident whose reverberations rippled across the Levant, the real causes of the consuls’ deaths lay elsewhere and had been building up for some time. Resistance had been evident among the city’s Muslims to the Porte’s insistence on measures that contravened the natural order of things. This opposition had not been confined to the landed beys. The poor of the city, who were—in Fanny Blunt’s words—“an Allah-fearing people, eating a small quantity of yaghourt, smoking a few cigarettes, hard-working toilers,” also found it difficult to stomach the notion that Christians should be placed on an equal footing with Muslims. The background of the thirty-five men convicted of involvement in the murders show how widespread such views were: they included servants, slaves, a butcher and a barber, several Albanian gunmakers, a Bosnian (described as a “card-player of no profession”), a coffee-house owner, food wholesalers, a carpenter, several masons and several young men who happened to be visiting from the provinces.30
Behind the Christians of the city, of course, lay the European Powers. The symbolic power of the 1876 murders lay precisely in the fact that the victims were consuls, members of perhaps the most privileged political class in Salonica. As the balance of power between the empire and the Great Powers tilted in the latter’s favour, so the importance and confidence of the consular corps had grown. They began to receive return visits from the pasha—something unknown in the eighteenth century—and flew their national flags. Under what was known as the system of capitulations, they also acquired rights to try their own nationals and as they extended their protection and passports to more and more of the city’s non-Muslim inhabitants, anxious to enjoy the immunities conferred by foreign citizenship, so they circumscribed the extent of Ottoman jurisdiction.
By the nineteenth century, the capitulations were clearly being abused. Neither the American nor the German consul in Salonica in 1876 was a national of the country he represented; the former was a Greek notable named Hadzilazaros, the latter was one of the Abbotts. Jews and Christians often declared their immunity before the authorities as Spanish, Tuscan, Neapolitan or Austrian subjects. Moses Allatini, the most influential Jewish businessman and philanthropist in Salonica, was an Italian. One local Christian escaped prosecution by claiming he was an “Ionian” (and therefore under British protection) despite never having been to the Ionian islands nor even knowing where they were. The system had become so corrupt that people changed nationality as it served their interests. James Roggotti was born in Macedonia as an Ottoman subject but acquired first a Greek and then, by the time of his return to the city as an adult, a British passport. “Signor Tavoulari” began life as a Bulgarian Christian, made his fortune under Russian and Swedish protection, importing counterfeit Turkish coin from Greece, and left the city with an “Ionian” passport (at that time the Ionian Islands were administered by the British) for Syra before finally returning as a “Hellene.”31
The presence of a Greek consul in the city since 1835 particularly affronted Ottoman sensibilities, as did the deliberately assertive and hostile behaviour of the “Hellenes” who came there from Athens. In 1846 the Greek corvette Ludovick docked during joint Ottoman-Greek operations against pirates, and the British consul noted that “many of the Greek officers indulged openly in remarks in the Coffee Houses respecting the Turks which did them little credit.” One man boasted openly that “in two years the Greek flag would fly upon the Castle of Salonica.” In 1851 old Greek passports were supposedly circulating in the coffee-houses of the town, as part of a scheme—or so the Ottoman authorities suspected—of encouraging Christians to emigrate to the Kingdom. In 1863 the local authorities forbade any public demonstration or celebration after Prince George of Denmark was elected as King of Greece. Seamen were a predictable source of trouble. When a pasha of the old school ordered a Greek flag painted on the signboard of a wine shop by the port to be taken down, Greek sailors came on shore with their arms, and immediately replaced it.32
The 1876 crisis brought all these factors to the fore. For the Christians, there was the fear—later shown to be unfounded—that the woman was under-age and had not converted of her own free will: abductions, it should be noted, were commonplace in the countryside among both Christians and Muslims; nor, sadly, was it unknown for Muslim beys to carry off Christian women with impunity. For Muslims, on the other hand, there was anger at the thought that Christians now believed themselves so powerful that they could flout custom and the wishes of the pasha and prevent a potential convert from presenting herself at the konak. Both sides saw the woman as embodying the honour of the community, needing to be protected against their enemies. Above all, there was the presence of the consuls throughout: a consular carriage had been used to spirit the girl into hiding; it was rumoured—falsely as it turned out—that she had been hidden in the American consulate itself; and crucially, there was the presence of the French and German consuls on the scene, presenting themselves before the mob as intermediaries and bearing out popular Muslim suspicions of their role in the whole affair.
And one final factor played a decisive role: these events unfolded against the background of the most serious diplomatic and military crisis of the entire century—the Near Eastern crisis of 1875–78. Beginning with a peasant uprising in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the troubles spread in 1876 to Bulgaria and the Danubian provinces and ended with an invasion by the Russian army the following year. The Treaty of San Stefano, which Russia imposed on the empire early in 1878, created a vast new Bulgarian state which passed just to the north of Salonica itself and cut it off from its hinterland. Even after the other Great Powers forced Russia to back down and tore up the San Stefano agreement, there was no disguising the humiliation suffered by the Porte: at the Congress of Berlin, Serbia was declared independent, an autonomous (if smaller) Bulgaria was established under Russian control, Cyprus was occupied by British troops (as the price for supporting the Turks) and the Great Powers forced the Ottoman authorities to pledge a further programme of administrative reforms.
These events deeply affected Salonica. As always in time of war, the city was in a febrile state—filled with soldiers, requisitioning agents, tax-collectors and rumours. Muslim notables criticized the diplomacy
of the Porte and feared for the first time “being driven out of Europe.” The Bulgarian insurrection actually broke out just three days before the killing of the consuls in Salonica; rumours of the rising had reached the city, together with reports of outrages on Muslim villagers and of plans to drive them from their homes. At one point the authorities feared that Salonica’s Christians too would rise to prompt a Russian advance on the city itself, and the Vali warned he would quell any insurrection in the harshest manner. “I know him to be of the party in Turkey,” wrote the British consul, “who believe the Eastern Question can only be solved by the destruction, or at least the expatriation of all Christians from the European provinces of Turkey, and replacing them by Circassians and colonists from Asia.”33
The spectacle of vast forced movements of populations crisscrossing the region was no fantasy. While the eyes of Europe were fixed—thanks to Gladstone’s loud condemnation of the “Bulgarian horrors”—on the Christian victims of the war, thousands of Muslim refugees from Bosnia, Bulgaria and the Russian army were headed south. Added to those who had earlier fled the Russians in the Caucasus—somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 Circassians and Nogai Tatars had arrived in the empire between 1856 and 1864—the refugee influx which accompanied the waning of Ottoman power was well and truly under way. A Commission for the Settlement of Refugees was created, and the figures provided by this organization show that more than half a million refugees crossed into the empire between 1876 and 1879 alone.34
In January 1878, the Porte ordered the governor of Salonica to find lodging for fifty thousand throughout the province. The following month it was reported that “the whole country is full of Circassian families, fleeing from the Russian army and the Servians, in long lines of carts … panic-stricken, they strive to embark for Asia Minor and Syria.” While Albanian Ghegs and uprooted Nogai Tatars settled around the town, thousands more left weekly on steamers bound for Smyrna and Beirut. Many of these refugees had been settled in the Bulgarian lands only a decade earlier; now for a second time they were being uprooted because of Russian military action. Destitute, exploited by local land-owners, many—especially Circassian—men formed robber bands, and became a byword for crime in the region. Two years after the end of hostilities, there were still more than three thousand refugees, many suffering from typhus or smallpox, receiving relief in the city, and another ten thousand in the vicinity. The Mufti of Skopje estimated that a total of seventy thousand were still in need of subsistence in the Sandjak of Pristina. By 1887, so many immigrants from the lost provinces had moved to Salonica that house rents there had risen appreciably.35
The political outlook for Ottoman rule in European Turkey was grim. Only Western intervention had saved the empire from defeat at the hands of the Russian army; the consequent losses in Europe were great. The powers openly discussed the future carve-up of further territories, and Austrians, Bulgarians and Greeks fixed their eyes on Salonica. As discussions began at the Congress of Berlin on the territorial settlement, one observer underlined the need for a further sweeping reform of Ottoman institutions and the creation of an “impartial authority” to govern what was left. In view of the patchy record of the past forty years’ reform efforts, few would have given the imperial system long to live. Indeed many expected its imminent collapse, especially after the youthful Sultan Abdul Hamid suspended the new constitution barely two years after it had been unveiled. But they had to wait longer than they thought. The empire had another few decades of life left, and in that time Salonica itself prospered, grew and changed its appearance more radically than ever before.36
PART II
In the Shadow of Europe
AT THE ZENITH of Ottoman power, no Christian state could match it. In the sixteenth century, the French came to the Porte as supplicants and Elizabeth I was so desperate for an alliance that she told Sultan Murad III that Islam and Protestantism were kindred faiths. In 1623 a French political theorist placed the “great Turke” above all the rulers of Christendom, second in power only to the pope. Defeat at the gates of Vienna in 1683 is often taken as the moment when the rot set in, but in fact the empire performed respectably against its enemies for much of the eighteenth century as well.1
Only during and after the Napoleonic wars did the balance of power shift unambiguously against it, which was why successive sultans devoted so much energy to centralizing the state and modernizing its institutions. The main challenge they faced came from Christendom’s successor, Europe. Initially the empire lay outside the so-called Concert of Great Powers. But in the Treaty of Paris which concluded the Crimean War in 1856 it was recognized for the first time as forming part of the “Public Law and System of Europe,” a curious phrase that implied its entry into a broader civilization. Europe stood for a set of values and the Ottoman empire was being asked to sign up to these much as the European Union has recently required its successor to do. Another article of the 1856 treaty spelled out the price of membership, the sultan declaring his intention to improve the condition of his subjects “without distinction of Religion or of Race” and to make manifest his “generous intentions towards the Christian population of his Empire.”2
As this odd combination of commitments suggests, “Europe” stood for a complex mixture of ideas—freedom of worship and equal treatment for all, on the one hand, and special solicitude for Christians on the other; respect for state sovereignty, and at the same time, concern for the rights of the individual. With time, other ideas bubbled out of Europe as well—the rights of nations to independence, as manifested in the rise of Italy, France and Germany; the expansion of free trade and the notion of an autonomous market; the redefinition of religion as a matter of private individual conscience. Into the Ottoman lands poured Europeans of all nationalities—businessmen and investors, soldiers and relief workers, reporters and government advisers. Salonica changed faster and more dramatically than ever before: as the nineteenth century progressed, it became simultaneously more European, and more “Oriental,” more closely integrated in the empire, and more threatened by nationalist rivalries, more conscious of itself as a city and yet more bitterly divided. But all these paradoxes and apparent contradictions were nothing more than the manifestation of forces evident in the empire as a whole, an empire transforming itself in the shadow of Europe.
9
Travellers and the European Imagination
SEARCHING FOR THE PICTURESQUE
TOURISM CAME TO SALONICA in the middle of the nineteenth century and thereby created a new city—a city of the Western imagination. There had of course been the occasional visitor before that—monks, a curious diplomat or two and a few enterprising young gentlemen deviating from the usual Italian circuit. In 1751 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett were commissioned by the Society of Dilettanti to survey the ruins of classical Greece, and they made the first drawings of Salonica to survive. But the main land and sea routes between western Europe and Constantinople passed north or south of the city, and it figures in barely a dozen eighteenth-century travel accounts. Within fifty years all that changed, and a new image of it arose in books and articles which was eventually to exert a profound influence upon its own evolution.
The catalyst was steam. The first steam cruise in the Levant took place in 1833; a steam boat descended the Danube the following year. By the 1840s British, French and Austrian lines connected the city with the main ports of the Mediterranean. Steam changed time and space, imposing schedules and a degree of standardization unknown in an era when people simply relied on the weather and a friendly captain for a berth one day or the next. It also ushered in some familiar reactions to travel itself: on the one hand, sheer wonder that, for instance, the trip between the Austrian and Ottoman capitals had been cut from three weeks to one; on the other, fears that this acceleration would destroy travelling’s very pleasure and purpose. When one German scholar spent a winter in Salonica in 1841, he boasted that he was “much more fortunate than other travellers, who are always in a hur
ry.” The regrettable shortening of journey times was not be avoided “in our hurried century,” warned one early guidebook. “Three days saved in the time for navigation, the railways and roads substituting for sail, these are the attractions against which the immense majority of travellers lack any defence.”3
Inside the Ottoman City
Yet even after the growth of tourism to Greece, Egypt and the lands of the Bible, the city and its Balkan hinterland remained off the beaten track. “I am the first American woman that has ever visited Salonica,” one Southern belle wrote proudly to her sister in 1839. More than three decades later, travellers were still oddities. On a steamer from Constantinople, a German passenger fell into conversation with a French salesman. Why was he going to Salonica? he was asked. “For amusement? To Salonica? To this boring and most disconsolate of all Eastern one-horse towns? Can it be?” The pasha there complimented him on his enterprising spirit in venturing where few Europeans dared go, but recommended next time he try Crete instead “for a long stay in winter or spring.”4
Not everyone thought the benefits outweighed the dangers of being captured by brigands, murdered by pirates or succumbing to plague, cholera or malaria. “I think the old motto ‘Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle,’ should have due weight with any Englishmen who are purposing to visit the interior of Turkey,” wrote a journalist in 1881. Others felt drawn either by the risks, or by the sense of being at the centre of events. “The traveller in pursuit of the picturesque or in flight from the commonplace will find here what he seeks,” wrote the correspondent-historian William Miller in 1898 as the Macedonian Question hotted up. “Tourists do not come to Macedonia,” wrote a young American journalist in 1906, just before the Young Turk revolution broke out, “but if they did they would find a show that no other part of Europe can produce. Not only is the comic-opera stage outdone in characters, in costumes, and in complexity of plot, but the scene is set in alpine mountains on a vaster scale than Switzerland affords.”5