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

by Mark Mazower

  Before the age of the guidebook, conscientious travellers to the Levant had been forced to pack a veritable library of tomes to help them make the most of whatever they encountered. “I am particularly in want of Wood’s Description of the Ruins of Palmyra and Balbec, a work very valuable and very scarce, in two volumes in folio,” John Tweddell wrote from the Greek archipelago to a friend in 1798. “There is also a book published lately by Robinson, in two volumes octavo—View of the Ruins of Palmyra in the Desert of Syria … Add to this, Anselm Banduri’s Imperium Orientale, Du Cange’s Constantinopolis Christian, Bryant’s Attack upon Homer’s Topography etc. etc.”6

  The nineteenth-century traveller was not supposed to escape the duty of extensive reading either. Murray’s 1840 Handbook—the herald of a new age—sternly advised the traveller to the Levant to “refresh his memory by an attentive perusal” of Dr. Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, and referred him to Gordon’s History of the Greek Revolution for the recent background, to Neale’s History of the Holy Eastern Church for ecclesiastical matters, and to Colonel Leake’s Researches in Greece and Thiersch’s Über die Sprache der Tzakonen for those hoping to try out their classical Greek on the modern natives. But for the essentials the Handbook alone was intended to suffice. Here at last was a guide in the modern mode, with tips on how to travel, what to see and where to stay. Murray, Baedeker and Isambert all aimed, in the words of Isambert’s 1861 Itinéraire descriptif, historique et archéologique de l’Orient, “to furnish the tourist with all the practical information necessary for a voyage which the new means of transportation facilitate.”7

  Inspired by “a scrupulous exactitude in details, a preoccupation with being always useful to the traveller,” nothing was to be left to chance. From the construction of mosquito nets to the procuring of visas, obtaining letters of introduction, equipping oneself with provisions, employing servants and interpreters and bestowing appropriate gifts (“a few pairs of English pistols, knives, pocket-telescopes, toys for children, and ornaments for ladies … New periodicals, caricatures etc from London are most prized by English residents in the East”)—all the practicalities of life on the road were covered. Travellers passed on tips of their own, especially regarding diet and disease. One advised dressing warmly in Macedonia, even in summer, to avoid chills. Another insisted on a morning coffee and a diet of cucumbers. The eccentric but highly erudite David Urquhart—among whose claims to fame was the introduction of the Turkish bath to England—advised shaving one’s head to “prevent chills by cooled perspiration,” taking as little liquid as possible (for the same reason), and just one meal a day—preferably nothing more than “pilaf, yaoort [a species of sour milk] and eggs … the first two form together a light, nutritive and not unpalatable diet.” Everyone used quinine against the marshy fevers for which Salonica was notorious.8

  Keeping as aloof as possible from the locals was also recommended. In 1798 John Morritt had ridden through Thessaly dressed like a janissary to avoid trouble; but by 1830 the janissaries were gone, and wearing European dress was the safest way to demonstrate power: the general attitude—though Urquhart for one would have disagreed—was that it was most important to avoid being taken for a native. “It is simply ridiculous in an English traveller to assume the Greek or any other Oriental dress,” admonished Murray, “unless he is a perfect master of the local language and manners; and even in that improbable case he will still find an English shooting jacket and wide-awake the most respectable and respected travelling costume throughout the Levant.” Caught up in a brawl in the streets of Salonica, one visitor escaped harm because “thanks to our clothes which allowed us to be taken for Franks, the cawasses [guards] let us enter the [Greek] consulate to … watch the riot from upstairs.” It is an image—the frock-coated traveller standing above the fray on a consulate balcony—which perfectly expresses the attitude of superior detachment with which most travellers from Europe approached the mysteries of the Orient.9

  ARRIVAL

  COMING BY SEA, one left the islands behind and entered the calmer waters of the Gulf. To the right was the Halkidiki peninsula and the mysterious realm of the Holy Mountain, a mountainous presence falling away in the far distance; on the left, looming above the foothills, the home of the gods, Olympos itself, descended to the coastal flats of the Vardar plain. After another hour’s sailing, the city walls gradually came into view. “The approach to this city from the sea is very imposing,” wrote Henry Holland. “It is seen from a great distance, placed on the acclivity of a steep hill … surrounded by lofty stone-walls … and surmounted by a fortress with seven towers. The domes and minarets of numerous mosques rise from the other buildings, environed as usual by cypresses, and giving a general air of splendour to the place.”10

  From whatever angle it was viewed, the lovely setting inspired dreamy effusions. Having described the “glorious panorama of old red roofs, graceful minarets, green trees and the blue of the Aegean beyond,” Goff and Fawcett paused before the “towering snow-capped ‘Home of the Gods’ ”—Mount Olympus in the distance: “Such is the picture—so clear that it might almost be a fitting illustration by a fanciful artist to an Eastern fairy tale. For indeed is not the East one huge fairy tale? Are not the white minarets and the mysterious old houses, the storks on the roof, the beggar at the fountain, the very cobble-stones and above all, the deep blue sky and the star-strewn night the very essentials of magic and romance?”11

  One huge fairy tale? Tourists, it is clear, were seeing very much what they had come to see. Their own culturally determined appetites demanded to be satisfied—how could they not be?—inspired by a romanticism which valued new landscapes for the states of mind they induced. Victorian travel writers tried hard to convey the intense individuality of their experiences—even if they were often having much the same ones. The concrete realities and economic possibilities of the place no longer really interested them. They did not show much curiosity about the fertility of the soil, the range of local produce or the solidity of the city’s fortifications, as earlier generations of visitors, less enmeshed in their own subjectivity, had done. Instead the East was now an aesthetic construct:

  So perfect is the composition of the picture that it seems to have been controlled and set out from the sea, just as the expert window-dresser directs his scheme from the pavement. The tiers of white, red-roofed houses, interspersed with graceful minarets, stretch in a vast amphitheatre from the upper gallery of the ancient walls down to a proscenium of deep blue sea. With a fringe of boats as the foreground, the mauve-tinted heights in the distance and a middle theme made up of the multi-coloured terraces of the town, the picture seems almost unreal in its perfection.12

  What they found was that most-prized of nineteenth-century scenes—the picturesque. “It is one of the most picturesque cities from the water that I ever saw,” wrote M. to her sister in 1839. Offering a different kind of beauty to that earlier favourite—the sublime—the picturesque prompted not terror or a sense of human insignificance but rather delicate musings on the harmonious interplay of nature and civilization, of a kind evoked by gentle inclines, graduated tones, and ruins. Edward Lear traversed the Balkans looking for such scenery and his sketches of the view across the gulf to Olympos are fine examples of the genre: in one, a small group of local men, their vermilion fezzes a contrast with their white Albanian fustanellas, sit on the bare slope of a hill within the walls of the Upper Town; below them, a broad dusty path winds lazily down past cypresses and minarets into the town itself, half-hidden in the lethargic haze of an August afternoon. A cholera epidemic was raging at the time of his visit, and Lear found inspiration even in the squalor of the lower town where, in his words, “I saw an infinity of picturesque bits, cypresses, and minarets, and latticed houses” before fear of the quarantine forced him out.13

  The picturesque retained its grip on the sensibility of visitors for generations, long after the demolition of the old sea-walls had altered the prospect from the sea beyond r
ecognition. According to the Guide Joanne, “the most agreeable promenade” in the city emerged as a result of these changes, but as modernity fringed the quay with hotels and warehouses, tramlines and street-lights, giving an “entirely European effect to this new quarter,” searchers for the painterly landscape of the past encountered obstacles. “The walls which protected the city from the sea have unfortunately been removed in these days of peace,” lamented the classicist J. P. Mahaffy, “more convenient no doubt but not half so picturesque.” “Behind the quay,” wrote R. H. Russell in 1896, “the modern tramway, with busy cars running to and fro, does much to destroy the Eastern atmosphere of the place, forcing you to close your eyes to this feature of the foreground … before you can believe that you are really in an Oriental port.” Yet for many foreigners Salonica remained an ideal place to glimpse those elements which had vanished in independent Greece, where in Lear’s words, “war and change” had deprived her of “the charm of Oriental architecture, the picturesque mosque, the minaret, the fort and the serai.” As Athens and Belgrade erased the traces of their recent Ottoman past, Salonica was turning into nothing more than a style—an “unmistakably Eastern look”—which became ever more pronounced, its anomalous character in a European setting ever more seductive. The more the world—and the Balkans—changed, the more Oriental the city was coming to seem. One or two commentators, trying to draw attention to its dynamism, reacted angrily to the tyranny of literary fashion: “One ought to flog the fanatics of the picturesque in public,” thundered a frustrated journalist. His very irritation betrayed the continued resilience of an approach which lingered on beyond the First World War. Most European travellers screened out modernity and focused on what they had come to see.14

  BRAVING THE REALITIES

  AFTER THE ENCHANTMENT, a rude awakening invariably followed the discovery that the city had a life of its own. “It is the oriental city,” wrote de Vogüé, “which one ought to pass from afar in a dream, without approaching it.” This stance was in itself part of the aesthetic ideal of the picturesque for by definition, it kept humans at a distance, and guaranteed disappointment, irritation or at the least grudging readjustment, as what had been an enchanting prospect hove into closer view. Almost without exception, travellers to Salonica were shocked by the reality of a bustling, polyglot commercial port. “Few places can exhibit a greater discrepancy than here between external splendour and internal squalor,” stated Murray’s 1884 Handbook—a judgement which would carry more weight if it were not so easy to parallel with similar verdicts on Smyrna, Beirut and Istanbul itself.15

  As the ship’s lighters brought passengers to shore they felt disenchantment, revulsion and anxiety at the host of unruly gesticulating figures filling the foreground. Edward Lear, landing at the slippery wooden-planked quay, was fearful of the “crowds of black-turbanned Hebrews at the water’s edge” who seized him, his dragoman and his luggage and carried them bodily out of the boat before fighting over who would have the right to carry his belongings to the hotel. Melville, who visited the town briefly a few years later, watched in fascination the “vast crowd and tumult” when the Austrian steamer arrived from Constantinople: “Imagine an immense accumulation of the rags of all nations, and all colors rained down on a dense mob, all struggling for huge bales and bundles of rags, gesturing with all gestures and wrangling in all tongues. Splashing into the water from the grounded boats.” And before the sanctuary of consulate or hostel could be reached, the newcomer still had to brave the warehouses, customs sheds, taverns and muddy alleys of the city’s docks.16

  Once inside the harbour gate, the marvellous light-filled vista gave way to a grimmer, ill-lit reality—“suffocating streets, wretched wooden houses, leprous constructions, unmentionable cesspools.” In a setting where even the main street was unimpressive in its dimensions, there were none of the broad avenues, spacious squares or vistas to be enjoyed in the increasingly sanitized and planned urban environments of northern and western Europe. Even the well-disposed German traveller Braun-Wiesbaden wrote that “the interior of the city is disappointing and … evokes in one an irritated disillusionment.” “After telling you of the romantic appearance of the city from without,” wrote M. to her sister, “I must not forget to say that the first object I encountered on entering was the fish market—a long dark, covered way, redolent with the most disgusting perfumes. Alas! for all romance in a Turkish city.” The bazaar struck one unimpressed tourist as “quite large but filthy. Streets all narrow, like cow lanes, and smelling like barnyards.” Another found the odour hard to bear, a strange, sweet “unpleasant and yet aromatic whiff like balsamine,” mixed with damp wood and lamb fat. The open drains, which stank in all weathers, the effluent which collected against the walls in the lower town, the mean, crooked streets and poorly paved roads, harsh enough to tax the strongest feet on a day’s sightseeing—this “sad labyrinth” tested the sympathies of all but the most open-minded visitor. The houses, so attractive from afar, looked jerry-built on closer inspection. “Aspect of streets like those of Five Points,” noted Melville, alluding to a notorious slum back home. “Rotten houses. Smell of rotten wood.” In the centre of the town, the throng of humans and packs of dogs worried such an experienced traveller as the Reverend Edward Clarke, who justified his cursory scrutiny of the Arch of Galerius on the implausible grounds—given that it was right by one of the main gates—that “it is situated in a very crowded part of the city, which made his stay dangerous, and would have rendered its examination difficult.”17

  But then Ottoman towns were hard for Western visitors to decipher. To many, as to generations of Western urban historians since, they did not really behave like towns at all. They lacked public spaces such as squares or boulevards; they were often curiously silent since there was little wheeled traffic; they were dark and deserted at night and there were no street names or numbers. The first detailed map for Salonica dates from 1882 and was almost immediately rendered out of date by the devastating fire of 1890. Even time failed to work as Europeans understood it, and the muezzins’ calls to prayer did not help them much: there were few public clocktowers but there were at least three calendars in use (four if one counted the Jewish), and when one asked the time, one had to specify whether one meant alla turca (which began at dawn) or alla franca. Travellers were understandably thrown, wrote Lucy Garnett, by being asked: “At what time is noon today?” To add to the sense of disorientation, signs and shop placards could be written in one of four scripts and conversations overheard in more than half a dozen languages, or—more likely—an ever-varying amalgam of them all.

  Manners were very different too: rooms lacked basic furnishings such as chairs or tables, and table manners were decidedly peculiar: how, for instance, could it be a mark of honour for the master of the house to stuff morsels in your mouth with his own hand? There were chibouks and hookahs to master, endless pilaffs, the ubiquitous cucumber, more salads than Europeans were used to, and meat stews peppered with strange spices, fruits preserved in syrup, sherbets, and the fermented millet drink known as boza, Albanian halva and yoghurt. Salonica was in fact renowned for its cuisine—it still is—but not among the Europeans. An early guidebook warned that “if culinary science is foreign to the Turks, the science of dining well is still more unknown.”18

  This daunting prospect made it imperative for the traveller to find a place where “amidst the dirt, decay and disorder of the Orient, one is surrounded by all the cleanliness and comfort of Europe.” For Europe now stood for propriety in every sense, and Victorian travellers commented, as their predecessors never had, on differences in hygiene, noise and smell, and sought to create small islands of civilization for themselves to escape these. Staying in Turkish caravanserais and khans—as Ottoman subjects did—was too awful a prospect for most Europeans: they generally only endured them if already in the company of Turks—like geologist Warrington Smyth—or when venturing into the hinterland, where nothing else was available. “Travellers ac
customed to the luxurious hotels of civilized Europe can form no idea of what must be endured in the search after the picturesque in the interior of Turkey,” wrote Mary Adelaide Walker. Reaching the khan in Pella, just outside Salonica, she was reminded of the delights of travelling in Switzerland, Germany and France—the comfortable hotels, the bowing maître d’, carpeted staircases, smart chambermaids and warm, clean beds. In Pella what awaited her was a grumbling inn-keeper, clad in “a ragged caftan, greasy turban and tattered sheepskin cloak,” crumbling walls, a broken staircase, rotten flooring and a mud floor spattered by the rain coming in through the roof. “One must be endowed with a certain dose of energy and courage to travel in the provinces of Turkey in Europe,” cautioned the Guide Joanne.19

  According to Boué, writing in 1840, inns with glass in the windows, beds, tables and chairs were only to be found in the capital, Scutari, the Danubian towns and Salonica; in the absence of separate toilet facilities, courtyards and windows served the needy, an additional hazard for travellers choosing to sleep outside at night. Most visitors of any standing lodged with their consul, until they found rooms of their own: Salonica possessed a single café, whose proprietor made available a living room, a bedroom and a gallery on the first floor. Edward Lear, passing through in 1848, records “a Locanda—a kind of hotel—the last dim shadow of European ‘accommodation’ between Stamboul and Cattaro.” Later there was the Hotel Benedetti, where travellers could enjoy a coffee and cigarette over breakfast in the central courtyard, possibly the same establishment which the Guide Joanne sniffily referred to as “une mauvaise auberge” run by an Italian. In 1874 James Baker noted “two hotels, which are moderately comfortable.” By 1890, however, with the coming of rail, things were much altered: the Colombo, the Splendid Palace, the d’Angleterre, the Imperial and the Grand Hotel stood in modern buildings on the new quay, or in the Frank Quarter. Old Balkan hands were struck by the change: Who talked of Salonica fifty years ago? asked a French writer in 1888. “Only the antiquaries. Today her name is on every lip.”20