by Mark Mazower
But it was not all the noble pursuit of disinterested scholarship. Archaeology may have been international in its research interactions, but there could be little doubt in late-nineteenth-century Europe that it was also a profession in the service of the nation. There was fierce jostling to grab the spoils for the new state museums springing up like mushrooms in western Europe. And while European professionals toured the Levant, there were growing signs that their predatory activities were angering local opinion. When Adolphus Slade, like many others, was shown round the verde-antico carving which was (one of the sites) claimed to be the pulpit from which St. Paul had preached to the Jews, he found the imam who was guiding him became irritated when Slade proposed to measure it. “The good priest might have thought that if he allowed me to measure it, I should make a corresponding aperture in the roof, and so convey it away at night,” joked Slade. “It would be seen to much more advantage in London; and I dare say that the sultan would give it to an ambassador, if asked. He certainly does not know of it. A trifling gift afterwards to the pasha, and the Greek bishop of Salonica, would cause it to be embarked without opposition from the people.”19 Slade knew the empire well: this kind of enterprise was not so difficult to bring off.
LAS INCANTADAS
THE BRITISH MUSEUM’S MAN in the Levant, Charles Newton, had remarked after a visit that “the most interesting relic of classical antiquity” in Salonica was “the Incantadas.” He went on to describe a colonnade “supported by Corinthian columns half-buried in the ground, above which are square pilasters, each of which has on two faces a figure sculptured in relief. Among these figures are Dionysos, Hermes, Ariadne, Ganymede, Leda, a Bacchante and a Victory.” These spectacular statues, which were built into the walls of a house in one of the central Jewish quarters, were a well-known sight. A century before Newton, other British visitors sketched the house itself—a modest building with a verandah and courtyard—next to two of the colonnade’s splendid Roman columns, the space between another two planked over with a small inset gate, the statues themselves clearly visible towering over the tiled roof of the house. Newton, who would shortly become Keeper of the Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, had his hands full with excavations in Anatolia; it does not appear that more than a half-hearted effort was ever made to bring them to Britain. But others too had felt the spell of the Incantadas—the Enchanted Ones—and eventually they were spirited out of the city for good.20
Salonica’s Elgin was a fifty-one-year-old French savant called Emmanuel Miller, an expert palaeographer with a self-professed “passion for manuscripts.” Miller had obtained the backing of Napoleon III to examine the holdings of the libraries of Ottoman Europe, especially the monasteries of Mount Athos—the Holy Grail of generations of French bibliophiles—in order to collect rare medieval and Byzantine manuscripts. At the time he was Librarian of the French National Assembly; later he would become Professor of Modern Greek in Paris. But that was after the publication of numerous articles, considerable academic politicking and, above all, the fruits of his successful mission to the East.
He teamed up in Constantinople with a photographer-artist compatriot called Guillemet, and the two men spent two months with the monks on Athos before making their first trip to Salonica. There Miller continued his search for manuscripts. “There is a doctor here,” he writes, “very precious for me: he knows everything and no door is closed to him. In a short while he showed me all the antiquities. I also visited the library of the Tchaous monastery … I found there a large manuscript which I believe will greatly interest the emperor.” Miller asked his Greek intermediary, well-connected in church circles, to obtain it and “various other antiquities for the emperor.” Acquiring original medieval manuscripts was not only desirable as a means of impressing Napoleon III back in Paris; it would also help the homesick Miller since “if I am obliged to copy the manuscript, which is considerable, I’ll have to stay in Salonica a long time.”
But to Miller’s chagrin, the monks would not part easily with their treasures: in Athos they remembered disagreeable experiences with his predecessor, a Paris-based Greek savant called Mynas; in Salonica, and in the rock monasteries of Meteora, where Miller took a hair-raising but ultimately fruitless ride, they were also suspicious and reluctant. Bargaining with the pasha was no easier: when Miller mentioned a handsome bas-relief, the pasha said he would need to get permission from Istanbul, and dropped heavy hints that he wanted a French decoration—“an impossible thing” which Miller hesitated to bother the emperor with. Then—good news: “They will lend me the manuscript. Now, if I can get some important stones,” he wrote to his wife, “my mission will be worthy of my reputation, which between you and me, is a little burdensome, since they expect great things from me. There are many Greek monasteries in Macedonia, and I have a list: next spring I will make a tour.”
In the summer of 1864 Miller paid a visit to Thasos, no less beautiful an island then than now, but considerably quieter. It was at this time a curious diplomatic anomaly—technically still part of the Ottoman empire and inhabited entirely by Greek Christian villagers, but a personal possession of the ruling Egyptian dynasty, whose founder, Mehmed Ali, had been born in the nearby port of Cavalla. An Egyptian engineer who was mapping the island proved useful to Miller since he “knows all the stones and monuments which might interest us.” It was on Thasos, amidst its luxuriant vegetation and heavy-drinking villagers, that Miller discovered for the first time the joys of archaeology, its hard but simple life, the discovery of unknown fragments, the pride of the pioneer. The joys, but the sorrows as well: some of the locals, he discovered, were angry at his excavations even though “they burn the most beautiful marbles for building works.”
Everywhere he found “traces of une belle époque,” but everywhere, too, “traces of indescribable barbarism.” The workers drank and shirked and only respected “someone with energy.” And yet “the life of an archaeologist” he found “extremely attractive, despite all the suffering … What emotions one feels when an edge of marble pokes its head out of the soil! Will it be an inscription or a bas-relief? Perhaps a disappointment, merely a simple building block.”
Miller’s procedures were not very professional. Despite his fulminations at Turkish inefficiency and sloth, and his description of himself as “exactitude incarnate,” he made no surveys, and gave no indication of the location of his finds. Guillemet took photographs, but soon ran out of glass plates. Yet Miller’s “archaeological fever” drove him on and soon he had some fifty marbles. “You see it is a good harvest,” he wrote to his wife proudly. “Sure, many are in poor condition, but where antiquities are concerned, nothing is to be ignored.” The French consul from Philippoupolis who visited him was astonished at the haul. “You’re not taking all this away!” he exclaimed. But then it struck him that “it is all interesting, and you should not leave anything otherwise the English will grab it.”
Miller’s biggest catch was to come, however. While he waited for the boat to be sent from France, his thoughts turned again to Salonica and the caryatids. “As obstacle, I foresee the jealousy of the Greeks and the foreign consuls,” he wrote. “If Fortune wishes that I should take away those statues! Think then: eight statues, of a very fine period, mutilated it is true, but so what?” He was pessimistic, but news of the impending demolition of the city’s fortifications made him dizzy with the thought of how much there was to be uncovered. “I know no longer where I am—past, present, future are all confused in my head.” And then, to his wife:
Thasos, 10 October 1864
I rush to send you the good, the great news … The Sultan, through the Grand Vizier, Fuad Pasha, has authorized me to remove and ship to France the eight statues of Salonica which I so wanted …
French diplomacy had done its work: the rest was up to him. The local population was likely to be very angry, and it was not impossible that the Turks would change their mind. He made haste to the town, leaving behind on the beach at Thas
os “two large sarcophagi with very remarkable inscriptions” which were too big for him to get on board. At the French consulate in Salonica, there was a despatch from Paris ordering him to take not merely the caryatids, but “the monument as a whole,” a decision which left him perplexed since the boat he had been sent was not powerful enough to organize the transportation of five to six tonnes of marble. “Thus something which could have brought lively satisfaction to Paris,” he fretted, “will be regarded as a job left unfinished.”
The pasha of Salonica received Miller in a friendly fashion, and presented him with “an ancient vase” found during the road-building. He would, he said, provide Miller with everything he wanted—men, soldiers, carts. But the news of his plans was spreading and there was much upset. “Already the population is getting agitated and tormented,” Miller wrote on 1 November, just two days after his arrival. “People are furious that I am going to remove these statues that have deteriorated so badly.” He could not really understand why, when the janissaries had used to fire at them for fun, while the proprietor of the house which had been built around them used to break off pieces to sell to tourists. Having thus neglected them, how could the local inhabitants now feel angry if they passed into safer hands? It was the usual justification.
The statues were in an alleyway in the heart of the Rogos quarter and Miller planned to ring off the area with soldiers so that he and his men could work without interruption from the locals. But once operations began, the problems multiplied. First, the Jewish proprietor of the house where they stood tried to cause trouble and insisted on seeing Miller’s firman. That problem was solved by the pasha pledging to recompense the owner for any damage. But the popular outrage did not subside. As his sailors prepared the carts which would take the marbles to the waterside, “the word got around, and the population reacted in an extraordinary fashion—wild rumours, gossip, incredible nonsenses. All the foreign consuls are going to telegraph Constantinople to prevent the removal of the statues.” Offers also came flooding in of antiquities, bas-reliefs, sarcophagi; there was even a story that Miller was planning to cart off the Arch of Galerius as well.
Day after day, the operations went on, the crowds increased, and it became almost impossible to force a passage through. Miller was dreaming of bringing up a fire-hose to quench the spirits of the unruly onlookers. But signs of hostility did not end, either from the Jews or the Turks, who still hoped for a counter-order from the sultan. The French sailors were attacked and so too, at one point, was Miller himself. And there were less violent indications of the grief the operation was causing. “One of [the Turks] played a ridiculous comedy,” wrote Miller. “A cawass, a servant, came up to the statue of Victory. He wept and tried to embrace it. Matting almost completely surrounded it; the sailors had left bare only the rear of the statue. Our chap, not seeing anything else, embraced it. Everyone roared with laughter … He must have been mad or a cretin.”
Because the caryatids stood atop a marble colonnade, getting them down without smashing them was a delicate job and required machinery not easily to be found in Salonica. Eventually a large wooden derrick was brought through the narrow alleys on two buffalo carts. It looked alarmingly rotten, especially since “the pieces of marble are so immense!” But by 4 November the preparations had been completed and the operation of removing the statues could begin. Miller started with the massive slab which crowned them. A crowd watched from the street and hung out of the windows of adjacent houses as the first section was removed and brought to the ground; while it was halfway down, the derrick lost its footing, and the huge piece fell to the earth, fortunately without smashing. A couple of statues were removed and again there was a slight accident: “As it touched the ground, the group of two statues received a slight blow and the top section fell, happily, upon the upper part, which is to say that the figure of Victory was unscathed. The marble had evidently long been split, and the pieces were scarcely holding together as we could see from the break.”
Although the upper pediment and the statues themselves were all eventually removed, bringing them to the port required a team of eight buffaloes to navigate the labyrinth of alleys, pitted with ruts and filled with slime and rubbish. Through the bazaar the team picked a way between rotting carcasses and their “foetid odours.” Nauseous, riven with anxiety, suffering from lack of sleep, beset by the throng of onlookers who followed them everywhere, Miller and his team took an hour and a half before emerging at the port where the statues were embarked on La Truite, a transport ship, without difficulty, alongside his Thasos gains. The marble blocks on which the caryatids had rested were even heavier, and the Bulgarian carters became worried for their buffaloes. A sharp bend nearly defeated them; then, face to face with a deep, muddy cesspool which caused the animals to slip and lose their footing, they stopped. They were forced to leave one block in the bazaar overnight. Next day it took five teams of buffaloes to get it to the boat, and Miller began to despair of ever shifting the rest.
He had not given up thoughts of shipping the entire monument—“there is not, I believe, in Paris, another ancient monument of this size”—when word reached him that no more ships would be sent out from France. “That would have been fine,” he complained, “at the start when the monument was still in one piece, but now the position is not the same, since all the marbles are in the street and we cannot leave them there. I’d have to break them to free the road but what a deplorable necessity! Then they would be justified in calling us barbarians. Better it would have been to leave the monument and rest content with taking only the statues. To destroy it, take down all the pieces which make it up, then smash them, that is the act of a Vandal.” Winter was approaching: the rain had been followed by freezing cold, and the buffalo drivers were refusing to show up. He had the remaining marbles placed along the wall so as not to impede the traffic, and left four large slabs to one side. Either they could be fetched at a later date, or they could be given to help build the new church of Saint Nicolas, which was being constructed in the vicinity. By now Miller was exhausted, homesick and fed up. In the middle of December he sailed for Paris, having been forced to leave the larger pieces behind, most of the columns, and the dismembered remains of what had once been perhaps the most striking antiquity in the city.21
Over the next century, fires and urban redevelopment entirely erased all trace of the edifice. Because Miller failed to note its location or to draw a plan of the site, we have no means of knowing where it stood or what its function was. And the caryatids themselves? Initially intended to enrich the royal collection of Napoleon III, a latecomer to the museum business, they were only deposited in the Louvre once the idea of an imperial Musée Napoleon III was abandoned. Since Miller failed to number the pieces he did deliver, the curators had to reconstruct the ensemble blind. “When the Miller marbles were sent to France and brought to the Louvre,” wrote the conservateur des antiques there in the 1920s, “they were unfortunately not accompanied by any kind of regular inventory.” In fact, the Louvre’s own initial catalogue made matters worse by mixing up pieces from Salonica with others from Thasos, and by failing to note that some pieces Miller had collected in Salonica had gone astray. After the Second World War, the reconstruction was dismantled, and the pieces were dispersed through the museum.22
The Miller affair left its mark on the Ottoman authorities and after it was over they tightened up their supervision of the foreign archaeologists. They did not prevent their activities; far from it, there were probably more serious investigations undertaken after 1880 than at any time previously. But, as one scholar reported, “they have become sufficiently alive to the possible value of archaeological finds no longer to allow the wholesale deporting that has often been practised, more especially by the French.” In 1874 legislation controlled the foreign acquisition of antiquities for the first time, for officials had become conscious of their cultural and financial value. The regime began to collect on its own account, and major finds were reserved
for the Imperial Archaeological Museum that Abdul Hamid established in 1880 in a fine neo-classical building in Istanbul. In Salonica the municipality began excavating the statues and sarcophagi uncovered in building works and stored finds in the courtyard of the governor’s mansion, before sending the best pieces on to the capital. “In the past we did not appreciate the value of antiquities,” declared Münif Pasha, minister of education, at the museum’s opening. “A few years ago an American took enough [of them] from Cyprus to fill an entire museum. Today, most [objects] in European and American museums are from the stores of antiquities in our country.”23
Despite these words, the traffic in real—and even more, in forged—goods continued. More worryingly, the sultan saw antiquities as a means of cementing international goodwill and was inclined to disregard the protests of his own museum director. In this way, Kaiser Wilhelm, a close ally of Abdul Hamid, acquired the marble ambo from which Saint Paul was said to have preached and had it brought to Berlin. It was only one of the many tangible benefits reaped by the Berlin Museum from the burgeoning German-Ottoman friendship. Although there were plans to build a museum in Salonica itself, these were still on paper only when the Greek army took the city in 1912.24