by Mark Mazower
With terrors ranging from dogs to stone-throwing little boys, walking around town unchaperoned was still only for the brave. Cultural intermediaries and protectors were needed, especially the interpreter (dragoman) and security guard (cavass). It was they who negotiated on the voyager’s behalf for horses and provisions, dealt with Ottoman officials, and guided him or her through the narrow streets of the lower town to the sights. “I had to get organized, or what came to the same thing, to find someone to do it for me,” wrote Auguste Choisy in August 1875. Nikolaos Hadji-Thomas was, in the words of his satisfied customer, “the model dragoman: a well-built man of open countenance, loyal, speaking Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Italian and able to make himself understood in French.” The Romanian Hermann Chary, who was interpreter at the Hotel Imperial on five francs a day, spoke “nine or ten languages fluently” and had served Gordon in Egypt before being employed by Whitman of the New York Herald during the 1897 Greco-Turkish war.21
In fact, more or less the only activity which the average European undertook alone in the city was shopping for gifts in the Kapalı Çarsi—one of the largest and most impressive covered arcades in the Turkish provinces. “Sightseeing and visiting being accomplished, we had only to look if there was anything in the shops,” wrote the Misses Irby and Mackenzie. Then, as now, obtaining souvenirs and presents took up time and energy—avoiding the pestering boot-blacks while browsing among the shoes, belt-knives, “gaudy pistols,” silks, gold-embroidered trousers, rose oil and carpets. Shops were not organized as at home, and there were “no ‘Stores’ or general shops in which goods of various kinds are collected.”
But the modern traveller’s obsession—the search for authenticity—was already being obstructed by modern tourism’s nightmare creation—consumerism—and local markets were gearing themselves to the visitors far more quickly than the visitors liked to realize. Local photographers began to churn out series of hand-coloured postcards of the main sights, and ethnographic street scenes, local trades and costumes—“the Lemonade Seller,” “the Travelling Butcher,” “Negro Slave chatting at her door”—appeared alongside views and vistas and the rich repertory of monuments. One traveller bought some local writing materials, a pair of white half-leather slippers, and an impressive dagger that looked “extremely Turkish”—only to discover too late that the blade was stamped with a German mark. “Ver’goot Johnnie, anyting you like, Sair, souvenir Salonik,” rang in the ears. “The Salonician quickly realized the Westerners’ weakness for souvenirs,” wrote another, “and it was not long before a number of shops were doing excellent business selling cheap modern jewellery and antiques, such as Turkish swords and pistols, Greek daggers, Albanian cartridge-cases and old coins dating from the Byzantine and Roman eras.” The city was turning itself and its past into an object of consumption. What remained unchanged in the city was both despised and treasured for its difference; what adapted and modified itself to “European civilization” was both demanded by Europe itself and decried by it as depriving the “Oriental life” “of a large part of its colour and picturesque relief.”22
MYSTERIES OF THE EAST
ONE AUGUST DAY IN 1828, an Austrian diplomat was amusing himself by pacing the circuit of the city walls—like Evliya Chelebi before him—and had reached the upland fields behind the citadel which served as a Muslim graveyard, when he noticed a small group of Turkish women sitting together under the plane trees and admiring the view. Even though they were not veiled, they called him over. The youngest got up and asked him if he was a medical man. When he said he was, they asked him to test their pulse, claiming they were all feeling feverish. Anton von Prokesch-Osten describes the scene:
A negress indeed, the companion of the young beautiful woman, was not at all surly. She listened attentively with her mistress to my advice and spoke in a friendly fashion. The younger woman’s colouring was wonderful, her eyes bright and her hair deepest black. Her carriage was careless but her arms and hands were carefully made up. She did not bother about covering up her breasts and appeared interested in what impression this would make on me. “I love the Franks,” she told me, while I took her pulse, and added, in a tone that would have done honour to a Parisienne, “because they are all doctors.”23
To foreigners, Muslim women had always symbolized the unattainable mystery of their society and culture. Hidden behind their veils, they were remote figures, well guarded from Western eyes. When a French chaplain wanted to climb a minaret for the view of the town, local householders stopped him, saying he might be able to glimpse inside their homes. Similar considerations delayed the spread of glass windows, especially on high buildings. On the streets of the city, approaching women was no easier, unless they were slaves out on an errand. Bisani and his companions were foolishly attracted by a beautiful pair of eyes, until they were driven off by a little boy throwing stones at them. “Here comes trouble!” was the usual way in which Muslim women greeted the approach of unknown men. Doctors were in fact about the only kind of male strangers who might on occasion get closer.
Jewish women were similarly secluded, especially during the violent eighteenth century: many took to the veil as rabbis forced local custom on their congregations, and did not venture out unless accompanied by a man. Christian women also kept off the streets if they could, preferring the networks of paths and gates which inter-connected private houses. But, then as now, it was the Muslim woman who captured the imagination of the Western visitor. Or to be precise, of Western men, for there were a few women—especially if they could converse in Turkish, like Fanny Blunt or Lucy Garnett—who mingled socially with them and did not find them especially mysterious. Having spent many afternoons chatting politely and drinking coffee in the haremliks of the city, Fanny Blunt numbered among her acquaintances women like Besimé, originally a Circassian slave and a former member of the imperial harem, who lived in quiet retirement in Salonica and confided to her “all the sorrows of her adventurous life.” For men, on the other hand, all remained fantasy where local women were concerned, especially when, as one visitor wrote, their “refined coquettishness piqued the curiosity and provoked desire.”24 Nowhere was this desire expressed more forcefully than in one of the most curious works ever to be inspired by an Ottoman city.
Salonica.
Loti’s Journal. 16 May 1876
… A beautiful May day, bright and sunny, a clear sky … When the foreign rowboats arrived, the executioners were putting the final touches to their work: six corpses hanging in front of the crowd underwent their horrible final contortion … Windows, roofs were thick with spectators; on a nearby balcony the Turkish authorities smiled on the familiar spectacle.
Thus, with a characteristic blend of his favourite themes—death, Oriental despotism, voyeurism—did one of fin-de-siècle France’s most popular novelists begin his first best-seller, Aziyadé, a book which appeared shortly after the murder of the two consuls, and showed Western self-absorption turning the Ottoman city from an object of aesthetic and sentimental contemplation into nothing more than a mirror for the individual psyche. There was only one ingredient missing, and this was soon supplied:
One fine spring day, one of the first that we were permitted to circulate in Salonica of Macedonia, a little after the massacres, three days after the hangings, around four in the afternoon, it happened that I stopped before the closed door of an old mosque to watch two storks fighting. The scene took place in a lane of the old Muslim quarter. Decrepit houses flanked tortuous little paths, half-covered by the projecting shaknisirs. Oats pushed between the paving stones, and branches of fresh greenery overhung the roofs. The sky, glimpsed at intervals, was pure and blue. One breathed everywhere the balmy air and sweet smell of May.
The inhabitants of Salonica still displayed a constrained and hostile attitude towards us. The authorities obliged us to carry a sword and full military kit. In the distance, some turbaned men passed the walls, and no woman’s head showed itself behind the discreet grilles of the hare
mlik. One would have said it was a dead city.
I felt so perfectly alone that I felt a shock when I perceived near me, behind iron bars, at the height of a man’s head, two great green eyes fixed on mine.
The brows were brown, lightly frowning, pushed together so that they nearly joined. The expression in that look was a mixture of energy and naivety. One would have said the glance of a child, it had so much freshness and youth.
The young woman whose eyes they were stood, and displayed to the waist a figure enveloped in a Turkish cape (feredje) with long, stiff folds. The cloak was of green silk, embroidered with silver thread. A white veil was carefully wrapped around her head, letting one see nothing but her forehead and her large eyes. Her pupils were green, that sea-green tint of which the poets of the East once sung. That young woman was Aziyadé.25
Pierre Loti—the “lotus”—was the pen-name of a young writer called Julien Viaud, acrobat, officer and adventurer, who was to become one of the most successful of Europe’s Orientalists with his novels of decadent sensibility and exotic seduction. Many others, of course, had mined the same vein: the literature of Oriental fantasy erotica stretched back well before Loti’s day. But if the earlier versions of the genre figured the lustful Turkish male able to exert his power over the helpless captives of his harem, the sexual balance of power was shifting. The once all-powerful Turk was reduced to impotence—his city was “dead”—and now it was the West that was penetrating the East. Of this moment Loti was the master storyteller, and it was in Salonica that his literary career took off with a tale of forbidden love, between a Frenchman, himself, and Aziyadé, a young woman in the harem of a Turkish bey.
Viaud was not making it all up. Writing from first-hand experience, he had actually spent some time in Salonica in 1876 as a naval cadet on a ship sent there after the killing of the two consuls. The novel opens with a scene showing the hanging of the supposed ringleaders of the mob—an event which did take place. What followed, however, showed how far the city had escaped even the loose moorings of picturesque romanticism to become nothing more than a foil for human subjectivity itself, a stage-set of imaginative possibilities in the mind of a talented writer.
Taking the form of a fictitious epistolary exchange between Loti and two young British naval friends in London, Brown and Plumkett, the story describes Loti’s passionate but secretive affair with Aziyadé. They are assisted by a third person, a bearded man with “a very handsome head, a great sweetness in his eyes and resplendent with honesty and intelligence,” the Jewish boatman Samuel. Of course this book is “about” Salonica only in the sense in which, say, D’Annunzio’s writings are about Venice or Rome. The city serves as the stimulus for Loti’s exploration of mood, sensibility, subjectivity and emotion. It is in its way a highly modern approach.
Everything, even the city itself, has become insubstantial and nothing is what it seems. Loti describes himself as “plaything of illusions … an illusion in Salonica, an illusion elsewhere.” He escapes from the foreigner’s trademark—visibility—by being dressed in Turkish costume by three elderly Jewish women, and this allows him to wander unremarked through “an absurd city, the Eastern bazaars, the mosques, the multi-coloured crowds.” Embracing Aziyadé on a boat, draped in carpets, floating in the bay at night, is “drunkenness.” “You will say that this wants a terrible egoism; I would not disagree,” writes Loti. “But then I came to think that everything that pleases me is worth doing and that one should always spice up life’s insipid stew.” When he came to after the night’s delirium, Salonica “presented a paltry picture. Its minarets had the air of a collection of old candles, set on a dirty, black city where the vices of Sodom flourished.” The city’s appearance mirrors the artist’s mood: the world has shrunk to feeling and sensibility. All that matters is to keep away “the disheartening void and the immense ennui of life.”
“It was at first nothing more than an inebriation of the imagination and the senses,” Loti writes to his friend Brown in London. But gradually, the city’s charms impress themselves on the lover. “It was happiness to take a stroll at sunrise. The air was so light, the freshness so delicious, that one had no trouble living. One was, as it were, penetrated by well-being. Some Turks began to circulate, dressed in red gowns, green or orange, in the vaulted lanes of the bazaar, hardly visible in the transparent half-glimmer … The evening was an enchantment of a different order for the eyes. All was pink or gold. Olympus was tinted as though smouldering or molten, and was reflected in the still sea like a mirror. No smoke in the air. It seemed as though there was no more atmosphere and that the mountains were floating in the void, so clearly delineated were the farthest ridges.”
Curiously, Loti’s novel was published at the same time as Gladstone—the liberal campaigner against Ottoman tyranny—was insisting on the importance (and the possibility) of Europeans acquiring real knowledge of the peoples of the Balkans in order to prepare them for civilization. Loti belonged to a younger, more mystical generation which embraced what could not be known: the Orient was not the origin of civilization, but its opposite, the mysterious spiritual alternative to Western rationalism. Knowledge was possible, but only of oneself. At bottom there was only ennui and excess. Loti simply carried the romantic style of travel writing—the voyage as internal exploration into the world of feeling, the escape from the conventions of sedentary, bourgeois Europe—to an unprecedented extreme.
By the outbreak of the First World War, he and Salonica had come to be equated in the minds of anyone with a knowledge of French literature and an interest in the Levant. He was increasingly popular in the city among the new middle classes and as for the French themselves, the memoirs and belles-lettres they produced when they visited during the war showed him to be inescapable. One wartime satirical squib—A Salonique sous l’oeil des Dieux—shows Loti’s melancholic fascination with the Orient turning into contempt: Aziyadé has become a prostitute, Ayché, with “a chosen clientele of officers many of whom had read Loti” and are keen to meet a Turkish woman. “For the European man,” the author continues ironically, “the Turkish woman is Mystery, Forbidden Love peppered with danger, the anticipation of variation in the unchanging melody of desire.”26 Another disillusioned new arrival wrote: “The Oriental woman! Well then, so [Loti] showed us one of these beautiful odalisques. Have you seen one yourself? In more than a year that we are at Salonica, behind the Villa of the Red Sultan, have you seen the sultanas? No, you have only been able to see those ugly women of the disgusting brothels in the Vardar, the three dancers of the Odeon.” “But what of the Muslim women,” wrote another, “the mysterious veiled women who sing in such a soft voice, behind their moucharabiehs? The voluptuous Aziyadé …”27
Sex-starved pilgrims searching for the scenes of Loti’s infatuations retraced his steps much as others followed the Apostle: “I am at Salonica barely a week and since then I have been looking for the shadow of Aziyadé,” wrote an infantry officer. “I know I shall never find her, but how not to be obsessed by that simple and marvellous story of love and death?”28 The author was impressed by the affinities between himself and its hero—“the same way of feeling and of thinking, the same mix of scepticism and naivety, an identical need to love and be loved, a similar disgust of certain conventions, certain obligations, certain habits, the same desire for the infinite.” And like Loti he found “all the charm of the Orient” working on his senses. “Behind those hermetically sealed blinds,”—he was strolling idly in the Upper Town—“no doubt pretty eyes shone and crimson lips smiled. Ah, mirage of the East! Aziyadé! Loveable fantasies of Loti!”29
Thanks to Loti, what had previously been regarded by travellers as the least knowable and inaccessible aspect of the city’s life now became the centre of the Western erotic imagination; what was formerly regarded as worthy of description was reduced to the mundane and the banal. The European obsession with the city’s Oriental nature had not died away; but now, it was concentrated in the fantasy of a Weste
rn conquest of the feminine East. And why not? Had not the West by this point conquered everything else?
10
The Possibilities of a Past
ALONE WITH ANTIQUITY
IN 1916 A WRITER for the National Geographic was struck by Salonica’s seeming indifference to the needs of the tourists who came on the trail of its past. “So little indeed has she yet taken in, as the remainder of Europe has so profitably done, the possibilities of a past that I was unable to find there a map of the city … And as I went from shop to shop in search of photos of the churches, I was followed by an officer looking vainly for a Baedeker.”1 It was history, after all, which attracted the majority of visitors. What was the present for them but a backdrop to antiquity? Greece “has no modern history of such a character as to obscure the vividness of her classical features,” asserted Murray’s Handbook. “A modern history she does indeed possess, various and eventful, but it has been of a destructive not a constructive character. It has left little behind it which can hide the immortal memorials of the greatness of Hellenic genius … In all parts of the country, the traveller is, as it were, left alone with antiquity.”2