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

by Mark Mazower

  The chief battles they were waging—and from the 1870s winning—were with their own archbishops and rabbis. The Allatinis and Fernandes families among the Jews, the Hadzilazaros, Rongottis and Prasakakis among the Greeks, were not merely the presentable face of the city—its “society”—for Western visitors of standing, but more importantly, they were the architects of a shift of power within the city from the old elites to the new commercial class whose aspirations they embodied. It was the generation of Moses Allatini (1800–1882), educated at Pisa and Florence, the man described by one historian as the “real regenerator of the Jewish community of Salonica” and one of the city’s first industrialists, which initiated the challenge of the moneyed classes to their own religious leaders.

  This clash was produced directly by the contradictory consequences of the Ottoman legislative reforms. As we have seen, one effect of the 1839 Gulhané decree, which aimed to promote equality between the empire’s religious communities, was to throw the weight of the Ottoman state behind the metropolitan and the chief rabbi, the recognized leaders of their communities. But at the same time, the freeing-up of trade, the consolidation of private property rights and the growth of the city’s economy, especially after the Crimean War, increased the fortunes and the political weight of its traders and businessmen. Conservative religious leaders had not bothered much to bridge the cultural cleavage between them. Chief Rabbi Molho, for instance, had tried to play off his support among the poor to criticize the merchant notables for their religious laxity. He had excommunicated a youthful member of the Fernandes family for going hunting with the city’s consuls and eating non-kosher meat; his successor locked up Jewish printers on charges of printing unauthorized books, in an effort to affirm the power of the rabbinical censors and stamp down on secular learning. But in 1856 an imperial decree introduced the principle of representative government within the empire’s millets, leaving it to members of those communities to decide how they wished to govern themselves. Thereafter, the key issue for both Christians and Jews was to establish how much power religious leaders would be forced to hand over to the lay members of the new communal councils. When Abdul Mecid visited Salonica in 1859, he granted a personal audience only to those Jewish notables “with whom he could converse in French,” leaving the rabbinate out in the cold. Under pressure from merchants, doctors and lawyers of liberal views, crucial changes were slowly made at the top of the religious leadership: the increasingly conservative Ascher Covo was replaced as chief rabbi on his death in 1874 by the more flexible Abraham Gattegno—elected for the first time by a vote of the new General Assembly of the community—and the wealthy stratum of the Jewish bourgeoisie eventually persuaded his successor—with the aid of the intervention of the Ottoman governor—to implement the administrative reforms agreed some fifteen years earlier, by adopting communal statutes which limited the chief rabbi’s role in communal affairs. Similar struggles went on between “aristocratic” and “democratic” factions among the city’s Greeks over the introduction of the General Regulations for the Orthodox communities of the empire: there too the new influence granted to lay leaders of the community accompanied a narrowing of the juridical and fiscal powers of the religious hierarchy.12

  The struggle for communal authority was fought out over many areas—care for the poor and sick, the upkeep of cemeteries, the administration of religious foundations themselves—but the key battleground was education. For religious learning alone was no longer enough. Ties with the West meant also that local merchants needed employees to be familiar with modern languages, mathematics and geography. The notable Jewish families pushed hard for the use of Italian and French books in the old Talmud Torah in the 1840s. When they got nowhere, they obtained a firman to found their own pilot school, run by a German rabbi whom the local rabbis regarded as an impious foreigner. But the real educational revolution among Salonican Jewry only came in 1873 when the same notables opened a branch of the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle—the very embodiment of French Enlightenment liberalism—in the teeth of fierce opposition from the elderly chief rabbi. It was an extraordinary success: by 1912 the Alliance was responsible for educating more than four thousand pupils, over half the total number of children in Jewish schools. “I was once invited to an annual gathering of the Israelite Alliance,” wrote a British journalist during the First World War. “There were many hundreds of Jews there, male and female, and a great many of them were once removed only from the street porter class. But they rattled off French as if they had been born to it.” Not only were the majority of the city’s Jewish children receiving an education outside the control of the religious authorities, but they were receiving it on the basis of the principles of contemporary French republicanism. Such a trend had a corrosive effect on the authority of the chief rabbi, and helped turn him slowly into more and more of a purely religious and spiritual figurehead.13

  Within the Greek community similar shifts were taking place. In the old days, children learned reading and writing from the occasional literate priest or from the so-called didaskaloi who gave lessons as they passed through the city. But in 1828 the junior high school was re-established, and a girls’ school was set up in 1845. The primary school population climbed from 1500 in 1874 to nearly 2000 in 1900 and 3900 by the time the Greek army arrived in 1912. An Educational Society was set up in 1872 with its own private library and a commitment to “useful knowledge,” and in 1876 a teacher-training college followed. Salonica’s Greek high school was recognized by the University of Athens, a development of huge significance for the rise of Greek nationalism, and the control of school standards and appointments was also handled by representatives of the Greek state. Through education, in other words, the Greeks of Salonica gradually reoriented themselves towards the new national centre in Athens. The Patriarchate in Istanbul, which had once enjoyed unchallenged authority over the empire’s Orthodox believers, found itself losing ground.14

  Within the city’s Muslim community, pedagogical arguments were also raging. Ali Riza, a minor customs official, quarrelled with his wife, Zübeyde, over how to educate their son, Mustafa. Zübeyde, a devout woman who was nicknamed the mollah, followed the older conception of education and wanted him to attend the neighbourhood Qur’anic school. His father, on the other hand, favoured the new style of schooling pioneered by a renowned local teacher, Shemsi Effendi, who ran the first private primary school in the empire. In the end, the young Mustafa started at the first and finished at the second, before moving to the military preparatory college. Helped by his education and by Salonica’s new beer-gardens and nightlife, he became a pronounced secularist, thereby foreshadowing in his own upbringing the trajectory through which—by then better known to the world as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—he would later lead post-Ottoman Turkey.

  Mustafa Kemal’s experiences were not unusual, for the spirit of Western education was transforming local Muslim cultures of learning. The Ma’min were setting up private schools like Shemsi’s, and state officials like Mustafa Kemal’s father shared their vision of a modernizing Islam. Investment in education had been a priority of the reformers in Istanbul, and in 1869 a new imperial Ordinance of General Education outlined a school system, based partly on the French lycée model, that would promote knowledge of science, technology and commerce among both boys and girls. Reaction from the long-established medreses was fierce but under Sultan Abdul Hamid this was overcome, in part by emphasizing the Islamic character of the new schools. A state schooling sector emerged in Salonica and the city’s first vocational college, the Ecole des Arts et Métiers, trained orphans in typography, lithography, tailoring and music. Later came a teacher-training college, a junior high school, a commercial school and a preparatory school for civil servants—the Idadié—housed in an imposing neo-classical building standing just beyond the eastern walls. (Today it contains the chief administrative offices of the University of Thessaloniki.) In 1908 it was joined by a law school and by specialist colleges f
or farmers, gendarmes and army officers. By the century’s end, there were at least nine public and private schools, teaching more than five thousand boys and girls, including a scattering of Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.15

  Even the Great Powers were piling in to stamp their cultural predominance upon the city’s schools. In addition to the Alliance Israélite, local Francophiles had the choice of the Mission Laïque, the Lycée and the Brothers and Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul; for Italophiles, there was the Scuola Nazionale Italiana, the Principessa Iolanda and the commercial college Umberto I. Romanians, Serbs, Germans and Armenians could all attend schools in their preferred tongue; there was even an International English School for Girls. A typical class at the Petit Lycée Français in 1904 had three French pupils, one Greek, four Jews, a Serb, a Ma’min, an Armenian, a Turk and a Montenegrin. This was the city’s new cross-national cosmopolitan elite in embryo, for whom the ways of European bourgeois life were slowly erasing the old markers of religious and communal difference.

  EUROPEAN FASHIONS WERE ALSO STEADILY INFILTRATING Salonica’s middle-class homes. Around 1840 most people still lived in modestly furnished, almost Spartan surroundings. Perhaps poverty explained why a certain Abu Bakr, for instance, on his death in 1847 left only a wardrobe, two pistols, a bandolier, an amber pipe, a coffee grinder and a grey horse. But at that time even the well-off rarely handed on more than a few kilims and prayer carpets, some chests, a stove against Salonica’s bitter winters, a mattress and a chair or two. By 1900 however, the carpets were often “European,” and the furniture frequently included high marble-topped tables, sideboards, large clocks, mirrors and other signs of alafranga taste.

  Having become commonplace in prosperous Greek and Jewish households, such items were now found also in Muslim homes. Emine, the well-off daughter of Osman Effendi, possessed two wardrobes, half a dozen salon chairs, mirrors and lamps; Iskender Pasha left a huge fortune to his children, as well as a mansion which contained sofas and settees, antique clocks and valuable “European” carpets. Huseyin Husni Effendi, a member of the provincial assembly, must have been among the wealthiest men in the city when he died in 1887; his home contained numerous sofas, glass-fronted armoires, pictures and photographs, two marble-topped side tables, nine large mirrors, eleven armchairs and no less than forty-two chairs. The transformation in attitudes and taste was rapid, and when a Jewish boy at the Petite Lycée was invited home by a Muslim class-mate, he was struck by what he found: “I was not a little surprised at first to find that the women in Shakri’s household, his mother and two older sisters, admitted me to their apartment. But I was still more amazed to find myself in their midst without their making a pretence of covering their faces. They acted as if there was nothing untoward in their behaviour, greeting me in excellent French, and making me feel at home by resuming their sewing and embroidery work.”16

  Typical Salonican bourgeois homes preserved a mixture of European and Ottoman furnishings. The opulence of the Allatini household was certainly not typical—its palatial dimensions left one guest breathless when he stayed in 1888—but it too blended East and West: a “crowd” of magnificently tall servants dressed in the traditional Albanian fustanella, pistols and daggers tucked into their wide belts, offered newcomers the usual sugared fruits, coffee and cigars in a lavishly decorated and brightly lit reception room, before leading them to private apartments decked out with valuable old carpets, cushions and bedside tables equipped with drinks, sweetmeats and writing materials. The furnishings of the “grand old palace” of the British consul were slightly more modest: strewn with Turkish carpets, and adorned with old Spanish chests and what was described as “Chinese porcelain from Bulgaria,” the house suited both Salonica’s governor, Dervish Pasha, who felt comfortable enough to lay out his prayer mat and make his afternoon prayers in the presence of Mrs. Blunt, and the young British naval officers who danced the polka and played tug-of-war in the garden. Soon the European trademarks of success even invaded places of worship. The sheykh of the Mevlevi order had his own visiting cards. And in the synagogue attended by the Modianos, one of the wealthiest merchant families, the festival candles were “Europeanized by having donors’ visiting cards neatly attached with silk ribbons.”17

  It was, above all, in matters of dress that the growing enthusiasm for European fashions hit the eye. When Stefana, the peasant girl whose conversion caused so much trouble, arrived at Salonica that fateful May noon in 1876 and was seized by Christian passers-by to prevent her abjuring her faith, their common religion was not the first thing she noticed; interrogated by the police shortly after, she described the men who had carried her off as Franks—frock-coated and with short beards. In her mind, the gulf in station between peasant and urban bourgeoisie was far greater than anything religion could bridge. Before long the francos were widely imitated. “Soft-hatted, his waist-coat unbuttoned beneath his garish cravat, trousers impeccably pressed, turned up at the bottom to reveal gaudy socks inside his polished shoes,” wrote Nehama, the doyen of the historians of Salonica, satirizing the European style spreading through the new middle-class dandy. “He affects a knowing exoticism, getting himself up with exquisite care, he strains laboriously to set himself above the vulgar herd, to appear at all costs chic, smart, the last word in fashion.” A decade later, an English visitor noticed “the young women copying Athens and Paris in short skirts and high-heeled yellow boots.” Thus adorned, the city’s young frequented the cafés, beer-gardens, clubs and theatres which were springing up to cater for them. They could watch a French balloonist ascend from the garden of the Hotel Colombo, catch the performing troupe of Ambrosio Botini, shop in the city’s new department stores—Stein and Orosdi Back—or merely enjoy its carefully tended public parks and promenades.18

  THE EUROPEANIZATION OF SPACE

  IN 1868, ISTANBUL BECAME THE EMPIRE’S FIRST CITY to be granted a municipal council. Based upon the French model and equipped with powers to expropriate property for the public good, it demolished walls, widened and straightened roads and improved lighting, paving and sanitation. The next year the experiment was extended to Salonica, whose newly prosperous bourgeoisie—led mostly by Jews, Ma’min and Greeks—found a willing partner in the Muslim-led local government. The municipality directed the attention of the Muslim elite away from their landed estates in the hinterland and back to the city itself; hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence, it became the promoter and regulator of urban life.

  In the old days, cities had chiefly been run by the pasha and the kadi—both of whom also had regional responsibilities—aided by guild chiefs, neighbourhood headmen and communal leaders. But pashas came and went almost annually, and lack of proper revenue-raising powers made investing in urban improvement impossible. Just how difficult this was, even when there was strong local pressure for change, had been demonstrated in the sporadic and largely ineffectual attempts to ward off plague and cholera. To fight fires, Salonica traditionally relied on levies of youths drawn from the twelve main trade guilds. Individual householders were assigned the responsibility for keeping roads, gutters and pavements outside their homes clean and in good repair, and could be reported by their imam or neighbourhood head if they neglected their duties. Now these tasks began to be seen as the responsibility of the state.19

  In 1869 Sabri Pasha came as governor from Izmir, where he had carried out an ambitious modernization of the port. His strategy for Salonica was very similar—to open it up by demolishing stretches of the walls and extending its commercial and harbour facilities. Up to then, the old sea-wall had stood as a barrier to the outside world. “I never remember before to have seen a town so closely walled along the seafront,” noted a traveller, shortly before work began. Throughout late-nineteenth-century Europe, urban growth was bringing down the medieval walls—1860 in Antwerp and Barcelona, 1870 in Amsterdam and 1878 in Vienna. Sabri Pasha was thus scarcely behind the times when he took his silver hammer to the sea-wall and cast the first stone
into the water. His timid taps marked the start of the most ambitious building programme in Salonica’s history.20

  In order to enlarge the port, Sabri Pasha proposed to use the rubble from the old walls as landfill to build out into the bay. The new frontage would then be sold off to developers to finance badly needed improvements, as well as providing space for new public buildings, and even a public park. He also envisaged a waterfront avenue with tramways to allow traffic to traverse the city without snarling up the main road through the town. It was a brilliantly imaginative scheme which permitted expansion into the flatter land on either side of the walls. With the demolition of the old Vardar gateway, and the stretch of the eastern walls running up from the White Tower, the city for the first time in its history lay open to the outside world and began the process of suburban growth which has continued with virtually no interruption up to the present.

  Although the Porte approved the scheme, it had to be self-financing and thus its success depended on the willingness of the city’s new mercantile elite to participate. Following an advertising campaign, individual entrepreneurs and state organizations such as the new Imperial Ottoman Bank and the Imperial Post bought up many plots; European investors acquired nearly half. Bounded by the port at one end, and the White Tower at the other, Salonica’s new face to the world included “hotels and modern houses, warehouses and magazines, in the uninteresting style of European civilization.” The Splendid Palace Hotel, the Olympos and the d’Angleterre hosted visitors, and their balconies offered future orators and politicians a new setting: crowds gathered, for instance, to hear the speeches made from the first floor of the Olympos Hotel in July 1908, at the start of the Young Turk revolution. Along the quay were the cafés, cabarets, beer-gardens and music-halls that carried noise deep into the night—“red frocks and shrill music, Turkish guitars, gypsy violins, Greek melodies and dirty French songs,” noted Berard on arriving in 1896. Caiques moored along the front next to the new marble embarkation point, and from 1894 horse-drawn trams carried passengers from the railway station to the garden and restaurant which had been established next to the White Tower.