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

by Mark Mazower

  THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS WERE MORE INFLUENTIAL than perhaps they knew. For by bringing to light the extensive remains of ancient settlement, they reinforced the view, which as we have seen was so pronounced throughout the age of European travel, that the real city of Salonica lay beneath the Ottoman surface. After 1912, this led Greek (and foreign) planners to reshape the urban landscape, demolishing old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings—today it is doubtful whether half a dozen survive—to clear space for new focal points—the Roman forum, the Arch of Galerius and the main churches—which would bring the ancient city into visual alignment with the modern one. Neo-Hellenic modernization was thus also an assertion of neo-classicism. The origins of this linkage lay in those Western attitudes exemplified by so many travellers and their obsession with antiquity.

  Most of them had regarded the picturesque sight of the minarets to be the only positive aspect of Ottoman rule. Otherwise they blamed the Turks for the city’s squalor, and openly doubted their ability to modernize or reform. “The Turks, although they have borrowed much and destroyed more, have built nothing,” asserted Abbott. Even though they could not miss the signs of change which transformed the fin-de-siècle city—the demolition of the walls, the spread of new suburbs, the docks and railway—Europeans saw these only as ugly blots on the Oriental canvas they had come to admire. In the increasingly racialized vocabulary of the late nineteenth century, “Turks” were seen as Asiatic and essentially nomadic, the antithesis of European civilization and by implication, merely a transient presence on European soil. The idea that the empire might be modernizing itself, and transforming its cities and societies, struck only a few. Yet the great historical irony is that even as Victorian travellers were insisting more and more upon the hopelessly immobile character of late Ottoman Salonica, it was in the process of changing faster and more dramatically than at any other time in its history. Its population rose from around 30,000 in 1830 to 54,000 in 1878, 98,000 in 1890 and 157,900 by April 1913. The city was leaving the Western stereotypes far behind.25

  11

  In the Frankish Style

  DID ANYWHERE IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE EUROPE offer the tourist such a taste of the Orient? Zepdji’s postcards featured women in their yashmaks and feredjés, cafés with elderly turbaned men smoking their narghilés, belly-dancers, snake-charmers and street musicians. Early colour photographers posed Jewish women in their bright aprons and fur-lined jackets, their hair braided and cased in the traditional green silk snoods. Yet none of these ethnographic curiosities were particularly striking to local people. On the contrary, faced with a younger generation raised on a diet of Viennese operetta, buffet dances, aperitifs at the Café Olympos, balloonists, bicycles and moving pictures, many felt the city was changing bewilderingly fast. “The old dress has completely disappeared,” wrote a local scholar in 1914. “The Greeks were the first to adopt the European style. The Jews were quick to follow their example. The Donmehs and Turks imitated the Jews … Today, apart from the occasional Albanian in his fustanelle and the hand-me-downs of some villager who has strayed into town, the quay at Salonica, with its cafés, hawkers, inns and cinemas, its passers-by rigged out in those dreadful bowler hats, is scarcely different from any European port in the Western Mediterranean.”1

  European visitors to the empire had not failed to notice the intrusion of their own values. “The immobile Orient is no longer immobile,” wrote the Guide Joanne, “and in the presence of this peaceful invasion of the European spirit, the old world of Islam feels itself renewed.” But most doubted that the consequences would ever be beneficial. The French engineer Auguste Choisy predicted the attempt to graft European civilization onto Ottoman traditions was doomed to failure: blending cultures, or races, would only foster degeneration. “Generally speaking, the Greek peasant degenerates in Asia, the Turkish in Europe,” wrote Urquhart. “So the Turk in contact with Europeans and the Europeans among the Turks. The two systems, when in juxtaposition, and not under the control of a mind that grasps both, are mutually destructive … Ill-will and hatred are the result of intercourse without reciprocal sympathy and respect.”2

  The first map of the Ottoman city, 1882, showing the new sea frontage

  Yet such opinions said more about the prejudices of Western visitors than they did about Ottoman realities. In the final third of the nineteenth century, “Frankish” values spread quickly throughout Salonica—more quickly perhaps than anywhere else in the empire. A wealthy Greek and Jewish “aristocracy” challenged the power of their own religious leaders: founding schools and newspapers, they subsidized European languages, learning and ideas. Their spreading influence rested on a new prosperity, the fruit of an extraordinary period of growth which saw the city treble in size as its trading activities boomed. For Salonica was escaping the gravitational pull of Istanbul and establishing profitable connections with western Europe. Entire stretches of its walls were demolished, exposing its frontage to the sea and allowing its harbour to be extended. And as the city opened itself to the outside world so its own appearance was transfigured by new suburbs, wide boulevards, factories, retail department stores and trams. For the first time, the city enjoyed municipal government. Indeed, it was perhaps only now that the city acquired a consciousness of itself. Under the leadership of its bourgeoisie, Ottoman Salonica embraced Europe.

  COMMUNICATIONS

  IN 1836 THE FIRST SMALL STEAMBOAT, the Levant, was sent by a British company. Shortly after this the British signed a commercial convention with the Porte to liberalize trade, and Abdul Mecid established a Ministry of Trade and a Council of Public Works. The abolition of monopolies and the freeing-up of the grain trade allowed the city to forge new trading linkages with the dynamic industrializing economies of western Europe. As the Austrian Lloyd Company, the Ottoman Steam Navigation Company and the French Messageries Maritimes established weekly steamer services linking Salonica to Istanbul and the Adriatic, the slow transformation of its prospects began.

  They were not, initially, very bright. After the boom of the early nineteenth century, the Levant trade had stagnated. When an American frigate called into the port in 1834, the captain reported that the scenery was more enticing than its commercial potential. The wooden quay was mouldering away, the harbour itself was uncharted and sandbanks were slowly silting up the mouth of the Vardar. Piracy deterred movement by sea. “The outrages which the pirates commit in this gulf are of a nature beyond description,” wrote the British consul in 1827, “and I am sorry to say that [as] their number increases daily, their inhumanity will prove very detrimental to our trade.” “The Greek pirates still infest some Bays in this Gulf,” reported his American counterpart six years later. The following year a Greek schooner from Smyrna was captured and the crew murdered. The advantages of getting rid of the menace were obvious. “There cannot be a doubt,” wrote the American consul in 1834, “that when the advantages of the commerce of Salonica shall be better known, and our merchant vessels shall be protected from the Pirates which almost constantly infest the Gulf, a trade highly beneficial to the interest of the United States will be carried out.”3

  As a result of joint international naval operations, in which the Greek and Ottoman fleets worked together, the pirates were cleared from the northern Aegean over the next few years and the expansion of commerce got under way. The tonnage of shipping entering Salonica increased five-fold in just three decades. Sail gave way to steam, and regionally based Greek and Ottoman ship-owners lost out to the French and Austrians who dominated the traffic to and from the main European ports. The sea still carried voyagers eastwards—Adolphus Slade’s fellow-travellers in 1830 to Izmir included five Albanians, a Greek tobacco trader, local Turkish women on the haj, a Maronite bound for Lebanon and an Egyptian slave dealer with nine “negresses” whom he had failed to sell in Salonica. Coffee and spices still came from Yemen, and the Azizieh steamer docked regularly from Alexandria. But the city’s orientation was changing. The slave trade, which had linked the c
ity with suppliers from Circassia and the Ukraine to Sudan, Benghazi and the Barbary coast, was targeted by British abolitionists: although it was not formally outlawed until 1880, even before then, slaves had to be smuggled in as domestic servants, or landed furtively outside the town before dawn on the wooden landing-stage in the Beshchinar gardens.4

  Meanwhile, as local raw materials were exported to western Europe from the hinterland, European manufactures poured in: Manchester cottons and Rouen silks, beer from Austria, watches and jewellery from Switzerland, wine and marble, worsteds and cutlery from Germany, French stationery and perfumes, drugs, billiard tables, cabinets and fancy upholstery. The British consul noted the growing demand for “British-made shoes and boots, felt and straw hats, men’s flannels, cotton and linen shirts and vests, handkerchiefs, ties, stockings and socks.” Between 1870 and 1912 the city’s imports nearly quadrupled in value.

  Land communications lagged behind. “Sometimes you overtake long strings of camels led by the invariable little donkey, and laden with bales of merchandise, passing slowly along the road,” noted a traveller in 1860. “And occasionally a train of heavy Bulgarian carts drawn by buffaloes; the wheels of which are never greased, creaking, groaning and screeching in a manner quite inconceivable in civilized countries.” After the Crimean War, the Ottoman authorities tried to improve or inaugurate new “imperial” roads. However, the cash-strapped central government could not afford to provide funds, and the provincial authorities were forced to conscript peasant labour and raise taxes locally. Quickly it became clear that no roads would ever be finished, or if they were finished maintained, by such methods. “My estate is only eight miles from Salonica,” wrote one land-owner in 1877 “and five years ago the magnificent highway road to Serres was made and passes close to the property. The road has never been touched from that day to this and is now impassable for wheeled carriages. The result is that although I have an excellent market only eight miles off, I must send all my grain to it on pack-animals.”5

  It would take a long time before the regional road system was substantially improved—not until French and British technology arrived with the Army of the Orient in the First World War. In the meantime, what finally ended the city’s isolation by land was rail. In 1852 the German scientist and traveller Ami Boué had proposed the construction of four major lines in the Ottoman Balkans, and over the coming years, local entrepreneurs and diplomats promoted the advantages of rail connections. In 1864 two English engineers surveyed the route between Salonica and Monastir, and finally in 1871, work finally began on a line from Salonica to Pristina: the first section of just over sixty miles was opened, after tortuous progress, in July 1872. The line was extended northwards to Skopje and more than a decade later it was linked up to the Serbian network and central Europe. “In a little while,” wrote a local journalist in January 1886, “any one of us will be able, on the third night after leaving our city, to hear the finest musicians in the Grande Opera in Paris, and the merchant in a few days to equip his stores with Parisian or Viennese products.” When, two years later, the connection with Europe was made, the train from Paris was greeted by a crowd of thirty thousand excited bystanders. “For half a mile before the train came to the main station the track was lined on both sides with dense rows of people,” wrote a Prussian reporter. “Never in my life have I seen such an uproar, such a waving of shawls and hands. This reached a tremendous crescendo as the train finally came to a halt in the station, where the noise reached a fortissimo which literally deafened us. It is impossible to describe the shouting and the crush.”6

  The late Ottoman city and its surroundings, c. 1910

  A second track connected Salonica with the important administrative, commercial and military town of Monastir, and a third line later linked it to Istanbul. Abdul Hamid himself had hesitated before granting permission for this but the Ottoman general staff wanted to be able to move troops between Asia Minor and the Balkans. Opened in April 1896, the line proved its value the following year when it became “the right arm of the Ottoman government” in the war with Greece, and the secret of its unexpected victory. Keeping away from the coast, it meandered through the plains of Thrace and the foothills of the Rhodope mountains. Even today, the stretch after Xanthi that follows the Nestos River into its twisting roadless gorge—travelled now only by a few back-packers, gypsies and Turkish tobacco-merchants—makes one of the most dramatic rides in Europe.7

  In just over twenty years, therefore, foreign speculators and engineers equipped European Turkey with more than seven hundred miles of track. The shimen defair as they were known in the city may have been a mixed blessing for Salonica’s hinterland since they diverted traffic away from the roads, and probably helped the latter fall into even greater disrepair. On the other hand, they had a catalytic effect on the city itself, linking it more tightly than ever before to the world beyond.8 A letter travelling from Salonica to Paris in the early part of the nineteenth century took a good month, no different from Roman times. By the 1860s this had been cut to about two weeks by steam-boat, and rail cut it further to sixty-three hours. By this point, the city was also in telegraphic communication with England, Austria, Italy and Istanbul. As a result, foreign reporters—a litmus test of international accessibility—started to arrive: first spotted in the Near Eastern crisis of 1877–78, their numbers increased during the Greco-Turkish war of 1897—Bigham of the Times, Gueldan of the Morning Post, Peel of the Daily Telegraph, Fetzer, the military correspondent for Über Land und Meer—and by the beginning of the twentieth century, they were coming in droves to report every twist and turn of the Macedonian Struggle. Later the trains would carry others too—troops heading inland, and refugees heading out. Without rail, it would scarcely have been possible to engineer the huge forced movements of entire peoples that were to transform the city beyond all recognition over the following seventy years.

  All this had taken place thanks to the Ottoman economy’s opening to European capital and expertise, and the speculative frenzy that accompanied this. “Travel where you will, in any part of Turkey,” wrote James Baker in 1877, “and in every small town you will find many of the wealthiest people who can think and talk of nothing else but Turkish bonds; and there is quite a feverish excitement on the subject.” Talked up, the prospects grew brighter and brighter, despite the imperial government’s large debts. In the early 1880s, pundits predicted that the economy of Macedonia would be transformed by rail: the Serbian trade would be diverted southwards, perhaps even the India mail might be wrested from Brindisi. The British consul forecast that once the Skopje line was linked to the Austrian railway system, Salonica would become the leading centre of commerce in the Levant. “Is it necessary to recall how the entire press was publishing on the exceptional situation of this city, and on the importance which it must inevitably assume once in direct communication with the Balkan powers and central Europe?” wrote the French consul in 1892. In the event, Izmir, Alexandria and even Trieste outstripped the Macedonian port. Yet the dreams and ambitions were important, for they expressed the apparently boundless confidence that was turning a new force in the city—its bourgeoisie—into the motor of municipal change, cultural revolution and economic growth.9

  SCHOOLING THE BOURGEOISIE

  IN 1768 THERE WERE ONLY ONE HUNDRED European residents; by the end of the nineteenth century there were nearly ten thousand. The quarter where they had lodged since Byzantine times was close to the port and the new wheat market, with its warehouses and broking agents. In 1854, before the commercial boom had really got under way, Boué found “houses made of stone, two storeys high, with glass windows and painted blinds. In some of them you might well imagine yourself in Europe.” By the end of the century, the district contained the French and German churches, the Deutsche Klub, the Théâtre Français, banks, post offices and expensive hotels, travel bureaux, consulates, bookshops and chemists. It was here that for much of the century lived the Charnauds, Chasseauds and Abbotts, bearer
s of a way of life which through inter-marriage and long residence combined European and Ottoman traditions, languages and occupations.10

  More important (and richer) even than the Franks themselves were those local honorary Europeans—the prosperous Greek and Jewish merchants under consular protection—whose close commercial and intellectual connections with Europe and prominent position in their own communities within the city made them natural cultural intermediaries. In 1873, the cream of this elite—the Jews Hugo Allatini, Joseph Misrachi, Samuel Modiano and the Greek Perikles Hadzilazaros—combined forces with the British consul John Blunt and the Levantine banker John Chasseaud to found the Cercle de Salonique in order to provide facilities “for society and travellers.” The idea had probably been Blunt’s but the club clearly met a need for it lasted for more than eighty years. It provided a model of sociability that had not existed before—a luxurious meeting-place for the city’s new cross-confessional upper class, and for important foreign visitors. By 1887 there were 159 members, including Jews, Greeks, Germans, Italians, Turks, Armenians and others. Among them were Alfred Abbott (Jackie Abbott’s nephew), the tobacco-merchant and future mayor Husni Bey, Dimitris Zannas, a Greek doctor to the city’s upper crust, the police chief Selim Bey, and the city’s most famous lawyer, maître Emmanuel Salem, a long-standing member of the governing council of the Jewish community and secretary of the new Lawyers’ Guild. These were the city’s new masters—professional men, army officers, diplomats, bankers, land-owners and traders—and they insisted in the club regulations that political or other passions should not be allowed to disrupt the fundamental spirit of social harmony and comradeship.11