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

by Mark Mazower

  The travellers’ very guides were often the classics. “We passed from the gulf Syngiticus to that of Thermaicus, and anchored in the bay of Thermes, Thessalonica or Salonica, in the country of the Myrmidons,” wrote Bisani. What the eighteenth century knew as “ancient geography” thus served a practical as well as a scholarly need. Crossing the Vardar on his way to the city, Edward Clarke noted that “it is the AXIUS of Herodotus: separating the Mygdonian from the Bottioean territory [“epi tin Axion potamon hos ourizei chorin tin Mygdonin te kai Bottiaiida, Herodoti Hist.lib.vii.cap.123.p.418, ed. J. Gronov. L. Bat. 1715,” a footnote helpfully confirmed], where Pella stood: and it is now called Vardar. The same river is also mentioned, under the name of AXIUS, by the venerable Scylax.” The learned reverend could scarcely have guessed the enormous cultural and political power such scholarship would turn out to possess: entire landscapes would end up being re-named, and in the twentieth century an official government committee would celebrate the transfer of the region to Greek control by scrapping local Slavic, Albanian and Turkish place-names—the Vardar among them—and replacing them with classical alternatives.3

  From the Upper Town, looking over the domes, minarets and rooftops across the bay to Olympos, one foreigner after another sought access to the spirit of the ancients. “From the mountain on which today the old citadel of Salonica stands, Xerxes saw some two thousand three hundred years ago what today any knowledge-thirsty tourist can see if he doesn’t mind the effort of traipsing between debris and boulders, rocks and burned grass, thistles and especially weeds,” wrote one, trying to recapture the thoughts of the Persian king, as he planned his invasion of Greece. For the high-minded Mary Adelaide Walker, “the sight which inspired Xerxes with the hope of other lands to conquer, may well elevate the mind of the Christian spectator to the world beyond the grave” to that “wondrous future when even the ‘mountains shall pass away.’ ” “It is the same Olympus, empty now of its gods, but still full of its eternal loveliness, on which St. Paul must often have gazed,” mused the Reverend Davies, “deep blue in the noonday, purple in the evening—seeing in it the work and beauty of Him who in His strength setteth fast the mountains, and is girded about with power.”4

  Primed by education, expectation and preparatory reading, the traveller thus came face to face with history itself—classical, biblical, or in the case of Macedonia, the two together. “It is history, which for him had till that point been no more than an ideal, an exercise of memory, or for some only a subject for meditation, the history of the first ages of mankind, which suddenly reveals itself in its proper theatre,” wrote Isambert. “The East is the cradle of our civilisation … In the East, everything takes body, assumes its real proportions … not only in the sight of the ancient buildings which the hand of time has spared, but also by frequenting those peoples, those races conserved through the centuries which are still the most living monument, the most effective demonstration of what their ancestors bequeathed to us!” The task of civilization might have been passed to the West, but the East still offered its own unwitting enlightenment.5

  Thus not only the landscape but also those who dwelled there—their customs, their dress, sometimes their faces—helped conjure up the past. David Urquhart recommended experiencing the East for “what I would call the novelty of antiquity.” Lost to “our times and in our portion of the globe,” the “habits of ancient days still live and breathe” there, he asserted. Layard’s recent excavations in Mesopotamia inspired the excited discovery that “the Assyrian type was widespread” in Salonica. “Certain lanes in the bazaar resemble a bas-relief from Nineveh and Babylon,” readers were assured, “where magnificent Assurbanipals sell melons or watermelons.” Choisy, who liked the Greeks and admired their fortitude and collective spirit, found that they had preserved “a physiognomy up till now which takes us back before the Turkish invasion, as far as the times of classical antiquity.” Such attitudes turned Salonica into a kind of museum, its inhabitant into living fossils. “We set out through the streets of the sleeping town,” recalled Demetra Vaka. “How teeming with history it was. Everything spoke of the past, not the present.” The Jews in particular cast her mind back centuries. “But it is the same with all the other nationalities one sees in Saloniki: they represent the past not the present … The history of ages enveloped us.” By 1905, as the lower town became ever more prosperous, noisy and Western in outlook, even the Muslim quarters on the slopes above could be enlisted, offering one American correspondent “truly a Biblical scene though the characters were Mohammedan.”6

  BUT SOME PASTS were more present than others. To the devotees of neo-classicism, the creed which had held sway in much polite European society since the late eighteenth century, the classical era represented a universal idea of beauty, and later epochs a sad degeneration in taste. It went without saying that the Islamic presence was not worth much in aesthetic terms. As a visiting British army officer put it: “There is very little to see in a mosque.” The general assumption was that the Ottomans were squatters amid the faded glories of earlier architectural achievements. But many were equally dismissive of the Christians who had preceded them. “All that is of the pagan period had been byzantined and all that was Byzantine has been mohammedanized,” wrote Misses Irby and Mackenzie after two days’ sightseeing, “so that while much may be traced to interest the antiquary, there is scarce beauty enough left to delight the unprofessional traveller.” How, after all, could beauty emerge from a civilization whose moral and religious principles were held in deep suspicion by the Victorians? As late as 1893, a Greek scholar noted “the unfavourable impression which even today is provoked by the name of Byzantium.”7

  But Western taste was changing, and its increasing appetite for the medieval past, for Genoa, Venice and the Italian city states, extended slowly to the Levant. The first architectural surveys of Byzantine remains were published, and the field of Byzantine studies emerged. Greek historians argued for the continuity of Hellenic culture from classical to modern times, a view which gave the Byzantine period enormous significance as a transmitter and protector of classical values. And there was also its role in the evolution of Christian architecture. Salonica’s churches, wrote the scholarly Tozer in 1869, “are of the greatest value for the history of art.” This was a novel view at the time, but others soon came to appreciate their importance. “The sole merit of the town,” wrote de Vogüé in 1875, “is to have conserved a series of extremely ancient churches which allow one to follow step by step the evolution of architecture in the first centuries of Christianity … From this point of view Salonica is a unique museum in the Levant and has no equal except for Rome.” By 1890, guidebooks boasted that there were to be found there “a group of Byzantine constructions of a richness which equals and even surpasses in certain respects the buildings of Constantinople.”8

  In the mosques—which otherwise interested them not at all—Christian visitors noted with relief that despite the carpets, painted columns and whitewashed walls, the basic outlines of the original structures allowed them to glimpse the “power of primitive Christianity.” In Salonica, access turned out to be surprisingly easy, and very different from other Ottoman cities. “If the conquerors had showed everywhere the same moderation as at Salonica,” wrote one, “the Orient would be nothing other than a vast museum of inexpressible interest … Imagine for a moment that one of our Eastern Catholic churches enclosed the tomb of some dervish, and that one allowed Muslims to make their prayers there.”9 But others were less impressed with what they found. The classicist J. P. Mahaffy thought the “empty and deserted churches show no care for religion, either in the Turks, who now own them, or in the Greeks, who are permitted on certain feasts to assemble in the basilica. All are in shameful neglect and decay.” In the eighteenth century the Porte had several times ordered the repair of major church-mosques; by the late nineteenth, they seem to have been starved of funds. The eminent Russian Byzantinist Nikodin Kondakov found them “strewn wi
th heaps of rubbish” left behind by refugees; their columns were cracked, the apses stained with soot and windows were boarded up or filled with stones. On the floor of Ayia Sofia, little children hunted for tiny cubes of gold mosaic amidst the rubble.10

  To the majority of Christian travellers, in fact, Salonica’s overwhelming significance lay not in its ecclesiastical architecture, nor its Byzantine art, but in its association with the Apostle Paul. With him they felt the kind of immediate connection they rarely felt with the holy men of Byzantium. “The early triumphs of the Gospel,” wrote a publication of the Religious Tract Society, “have at least an equal share with any classical associations in the enthusiasm which leads the traveller to brave the perils of Macedonia and Achaia.” To Salonica’s classical connotations, wrote Bowen, was added “the more important Christian interest of St. Paul.” Following in Paul’s steps, Bible in hand, they walked the streets where he had preached. Guides showed them his actual pulpit—“the chief lion of Salonica,” noted Melville, though this had miraculously multiplied. “No fewer than six places will be confidently pointed out to him as the identical spot,” cautioned Mary Walker. “There are also clumps of trees in several parts of the plain,” wrote Baker, “which are supposed to mark the spots where St. Paul stopped to preach.”11

  And Macedonia had a particular importance for the devout Victorian in the age of Christian imperialism, for did it not illustrate the truth of the maxim that “westward the course of empire takes its way?” Paul had heeded the call of the “man from Macedonia”—as the Bible said—and come over from Asia, thereby reversing that epic conquest of the East by the West which Homer had described with a “nobler conquest,” the conquest of Christianity. It was in Macedonia, in other words, that Christianity first arrived in Europe. “Out of that expedition, and those words, Christendom arose; and because of them England, America and Australia are great today.” Proud of such a legacy, the traveller could feel that “strange, sad, fascination” brought by tramping the terrain of Apostolic triumph where “the name of Christ is blasphemed by those who still hold sway over these unhappy lands, and even where professedly honoured, it is amid perversions of a corrupt creed and of ignorant worship.”12

  Thus dismissive equally of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, confident that Victorian Protestantism was the true successor to the pure faith of the early fathers of the Church, the nineteenth-century mind unproblematically laid the biblical landscape over the modern. Literally too: Conybeare and Howson’s great Life of the Apostle, like many a family Bible, was illustrated not by historical reconstructions but by engravings of the modern Macedonian port. “The physical features of a spot which was so dear to the man who once worked in its streets, and saw its scenery, are of interest enough to justify me in devoting the remainder of the chapter to a special description of the present aspect of Salonica,” wrote the Reverend Davies. From afar, he went on, the city still looked as it once did to Paul: it was enough for him that walls, fort, towers conveyed an impression of antiquity, irrelevant that none of these features was less than several centuries too late for the Apostle to have clapped eyes on them. For this landscape was more than mere scenery for many of his readers: it was testimony to the Word of God, “to the truth of the Bible record, and to the wonderful and literal fulfilment of Bible prophecy.”13

  COLLECTING THE PAST

  FROM THE VERY FIRST YEAR of Ottoman rule, visitors were struck by the abundant evidence of the city’s ancient past. Roman gates still guarded the main approaches from east and west, and innumerable Greek and Latin inscriptions were embedded in the walls where generations of Byzantine garrison commanders had used the old stones as filler. Crumbling, obscured by shops and homes, the city’s remains attracted no special attention from the Ottoman authorities. The Turks, commented Boué in 1840, “even the most educated, are unable to comprehend the respect which we attach to a lump, however shapeless, of some beautiful architectural remain.” Gazing on the ruins of the Arch of Galerius, a German tourist was struck by the futility of the passion for monumentality, and felt “a shiver at the thought that our beautiful west European towns too might fall into the hands of barbarians, like Salonica today, and that in the future some Australian … of the 28th century will sit before our mutilated triumphal arch and contemplate matters just as I do here.”14

  Not merely viewing, but saving the ruins of the Levant for scholarship and civilization therefore impressed itself as an urgent duty for educated Europeans. Already at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Jesuits were buying up coins and medallions, and tracking down ancient manuscripts through local agents and informers. A French antiquarian, Paul Lucas, spent most of his travels through the Levant collecting curios on behalf of his king. Nor were the French alone: they faced stiff competition from the English and the Venetians. “There are so many people here bidding for coins,” wrote Father Souciet from Salonica in 1726, “that the prices have been driven up” even though most specimens, according to his experienced eye, were not rare.15 Travellers collected what they did not sketch. “Went into the mosque … Tomb of an old Greek saint shown in the cellar … mosaic pieces falling. [Brought away several],” runs an entry in Melville’s journal. He was not the only one. When one young British tourist was taken ill and died, his possessions (which the infamous Lord Elgin was later accused of taking) were found to include:

  Eighteen ancient vases, lamps of pottery-ware etc etc.

  A box covered with leather, containing (amongst other sundry items,)

  A book, entitled, “The Plains of Troy.”

  A little journal, covered with green marbled paper, containing various annotations.

  A purse of blue-striped cotton, containing eighty-seven medals of brass, great and small, entitled, “Macedonia” 1 like to the former, containing one hundred and fifteen brass medals, great and small, entitled, Medals of Greece.16

  Acquiring what could be transported, visitors also trained their eye on what could not. Ironically, the Western passion for the classical past means that we know much more about Salonica’s ancient remains—which were extensively visited, sketched and copied—than we do about the buildings that were surrounding them. Our first visual records of the city focus on its arches, statues and other monuments: the living are included only for scale and colour. Or take the case of Jean-Baptiste Germain, the French consul in the 1740s, who spent much of his time copying fragments for publication back home by the Academie Royale des Inscriptions. His location notes—for he scrupulously identified where each inscription was to be found—act as a virtual map of the mid-eighteenth-century city:

  Inscription on the entrance of a house in the Hippodrome quarter, at the beginning of a small street, on the left as you leave the large square to go to the Calamaria Gate.

  One finds this inscription at the reservoir of the public fountain of the so-called Whirling Dervishes.

  Inscription on the entrance of the hospice of the fathers of the Holy Mountain, in the old quarter of the Franks.

  On the floor of the small back gate as you enter the mosque called Eski Serai—the Old Palace.

  At the reservoir of the fountain outside the city facing the Vardar Gate.

  On the side of a column painted green at the new monument of Ali Effendi.

  Inscription under the first arcade of the guard-house on the left as you enter the gate called Vardar.

  Piece of marble forming the corner of the traverse behind Manoli’s tavern, in the old quarter of the Franks.

  While the inscriptions themselves were subsequently confirmed and corrected by generations of scholars, the urban fabric itself was changing all the time so that without Germain’s notes we would never know about Manoli’s taverna, or the fountains outside the city gates, or the lines of shops, the Kemerleré, which led away into the country beyond the Vardar gate. Entering the historical record, solely in virtue of containing classical masonry in or near them, they also testify to the ubiquity of the past in the city, the stones used
and re-used everywhere one looked.17

  Above all, they show that the modern city existed for Western visitors as little more than a backdrop to what was left of its more significant ancient predecessor. Here, in the activity of amateur curio collectors, part-time classicists and antiquarian priests, one sees the beginnings of what was to develop from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards into a highly professionalized discipline which would ultimately have a huge impact on the shaping and re-shaping of the modern city. For it was at about this time that archaeologists began actually excavating the past on a much larger and more systematic scale. Between Layard’s discoveries at Nineveh in the 1840s and Schliemann’s great digs of the 1870s, a private passion grew slowly into a profession, in tandem with the emergence of great royal and state museums which constituted the primary customers for the resulting finds. Traveller-archaeologists—a new breed—were urged to do their bit for knowledge, not by carrying away mosaics, coins, sarcophagi fragments and shards but by serious work. The time had passed for picturesque views, insisted two scholars in 1876; measurement and analysis were now needed. Salomon Reinach’s Conseils aux Voyageurs Archéologues advised travellers how to make rubbings of inscriptions, how to take advantage of the new techniques of photography, and in particular how to fill in the gaps in maps and charts by recording one’s itinerary “simultaneously in two ways, by means of notes and by drawing.” Many heeded the call. “The appended inscriptions are the outcome of a short visit to Salonica in April of this year,” wrote a British classicist in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1887. “I copied or impressed as many Greek inscriptions as came to my notice in my short stay, the great majority being sepulchral of a commonplace order found in the foundations of houses in the Jewish quarter, and too frequently relegated to the stonemasons’ yards to be cut up for modern gravestones.” The pages of the Archives des Missions Scientifiques, the Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift and the Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts resounded with the clash of debate. Hogarth, the Frenchmen Duchesne, Bayet and Perdrizet, the Germans Wolters and Mordtmann and the Greek Papageorgiou—the only local among these savants—were part of the fraternity of scholars scouring the bazaars, drains, graveyards, and walls of the city.18