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

by Mark Mazower

Staying true to “Europe”—the ultimate goal—thus meant encouraging some activities and discouraging others. Mme. Evangelia Paraskevopoulou’s performance of La Dame aux Camélias was highly praised. Tennis matches and the events of the White Star Cycling Club were covered in loving detail. Wrestling, on the other hand—one of the city’s favourite sports—was condemned for its primitivism. “While Paris, London and everywhere else get excited about horse-racing, bicycling, yachting and a mass of other fashionable sports, Salonica, faithful to the cult of the past, will hear only about the fights of the pehlivans. At the news of a bout between famous wrestlers, the Salonican feels the same frisson of pleasure as the Catalan at the corrida.” The epic bouts of Kara-Ahmed and Dramali Ali attracted crowds of eight thousand or more and were still talked about fifty years later; gypsy musicians, drums and clarinos blaring, heralded the fighters’ parades through the streets; beys gave the victor live sheep, and belts of gold. Yet all this was mere embarrassment for the journalists of the Journal de Salonique. They would have been astonished to learn that the heroic Jim Londos and Timonides “the Macedonian” would be fighting it out with Mehmed Mustafa, Black Demon and John Patterson before huge crowds of appreciative Salonicans well into the 1960s.33

  RICH AND POOR

  IN THE 1890S, THE TRAMLINE which ran eastwards out of the city beyond the White Tower facilitated the emergence of a pleasant leafy new suburb along the shoreline of the bay. The municipality lined the avenue with acacias and provided a police station for the protection of its residents. Gradually many of the city’s wealthiest families moved out and built themselves “towers” and villas with views over the sea to Mount Olympos. From their verandahs the fortunate residents could enjoy the evening breeze, watch the spectacular sunsets and see the lights come on in the city itself, a short distance around the Gulf. Here lay the city’s future, at least as imagined by devotees of liberalism and progress—a future defined not by religion or language but by class.

  At the avenue’s end stood the imposing Villa Allatini, behind its park of pines. Sultan Abdul Hamid was exiled there in 1909, following the Young Turk revolution, and was shocked, on entering its doors, to find its owners had been so Westernized that they had omitted to build a Turkish-style bathroom. The road back into town was lined with the palatial homes of prominent Greek, Bulgarian, Ma’min, Jewish and Turkish families—the Château Mon Bonheur, for instance, the Villa Ida and the Villa Bianca—some of which still survive, though their once extensive gardens have shrunk, and their sea frontage has disappeared with postwar infill. Vitaliano Poselli, the elite’s favourite architect, designed the new Ma’min mosque, the Yeni Djami, in a solid bourgeois Orientalizing style, and the Beth Saul synagogue, which survived until blown up by German troops in the summer of 1943. (He was also responsible for the Catholic and Armenian churches.) The merchant Osman Ali Bey constructed a renaissance villa with a magnificent sweeping staircase to the main door; Piero Arrigoni devised the Ma’min industrialist Mehmed Kapanzis a chalet-like residence complete with tower; the popular Greek architect Paionidis built a villa for a Turkish army officer which combined a baroque façade with neo-Orthodox onion-domes at its corners. More conservative Muslims and Jews preferred to remain in the older, crowded city centre where they could hear the familiar chant of the muezzin, the town crier and the nightwatchman. But others sought to avoid the diseases and over-crowding of the town, and enjoyed the distance from poverty, crime and disease the new suburb provided.

  Yet if Kalamaria, with its “marble palaces,” its “fashionable drive by the sea, screened by flowering acacias and garlanded with roses,” was the preserve of the rich, the railway lines on the other side of the city were a magnet for the ever-growing numbers of indigent refugees and newly arrived peasants from villages in the interior. Between the station, the gas works and the new warehouses by the port lay the notorious Bara district, an area which had been a poisonous malarial swamp until it was partially drained in the 1870s. Thereafter as an industrial zone grew up around it, it became a muddy quarter of cheap wooden shacks, taverns and inns. Nearby was the humble Hirsch neighbourhood, an encampment of single-storey homes built thanks to the generosity of foreign benefactors, and the miserable rotten huts of the Mustafa Effendi and Simtov Nahmias quarters where the unheated dwellings were “unfit even for dogs.”34

  By the end of the century, poverty—always a feature of Salonican life—was becoming an overwhelming challenge to the municipal authorities and communal leaders. The city’s rapid population growth—from roughly 30,000 in 1831 to more than 150,000 by 1913—had brought down the cost of wage labour and facilitated the economic boom. The power of many of the old guilds had been broken by the flood of cheap imports, while the new socialistic ideas which frightened some notables were slow to make their appearance; the mass of small artisanal concerns which made up the bulk of the city’s manufacturing did not encourage unionization. When the governor Reouf Pasha shared the first tram ride in the city in 1893 with the company’s Belgian manager, and commented on the cheapness of local labour compared with the cost of horses, the latter replied: “Had I known men cost so little here, I would not have bought horses to pull the cars.”35

  Communal bodies had always handled poor relief among their own brethren; there was, after all, a powerful local charitable tradition, and wealthy Christians, Jews and Muslims generally left bequests for the city’s poor and needy. But the end of the nineteenth century saw private philanthropy applied in what one journalist called a “fever of charity.” New hospitals, orphanages and clinics testified to the concern of community leaders—the colossal Greek Papapheion orphanage was easily the largest building in the city. There were dances, recitals and subscriptions to raise money for flood victims, refugees and the feeding of poor schoolchildren. For its part, the municipality provided free drugs and serums to fight diphtheria and its fledgling medical services attempted to regulate the activities of the many unlicensed doctors and pharmacists who operated there. But as the municipality could not even keep the streets clean, or the garbage collected promptly, the state and smell of the backstreet slums can be imagined, especially as the lack of fresh and safe drinking water in the homes of the poor allowed disease to spread. Out in the western suburbs, several hundred could fall victim to malaria in a bad summer.

  Poverty had always plagued the Jews in particular; the 1835 census reveals a far higher proportion of Jews coming from poor households than anyone else, and their high birth rates (compared with the Christians and Muslims) and low average age of marriage intensified the problem. Towards the end of the century it was clear that despite the impressive wealth of a few, the vast majority of Jews lived in great misery. More than twenty thousand of the poorest of them were rendered homeless by the fire of 1890, and when another two thousand Ashkenazim arrived fleeing pogroms in the Tsarist lands, the “homeless turned the city into a camp.” After the 1911 cholera epidemic which left hundreds dead, mostly from among the residents in the rotten and airless tenements of the centre of town, there was bitter criticism of both municipality and communal leaders. Nearly half the community was in receipt of welfare assistance by this point, and the new bourgeois leadership did not appear to have any more satisfactory answers to the plight of the poor than the rabbinate had had.

  SALONICA’S NEW LINKS TO EUROPE did not strike everyone as an unmixed blessing. Writing in 1888 at the time of the first Paris train’s arrival in the city, a Greek journalist had questioned the prevailing euphoria. “Even fearing lest we be denounced as pessimists,” he wrote, “we cannot hide our opinion and declare that, in part at least, we do not share in the joy which this event has prompted.” He went on to warn of the importation of “political ideas and opinions which scarcely serve the interests of our empire and which were not till now able to develop on account of the difficult and indirect state of communications.” As for the moral aspect, he frankly anticipated the worst—“the poisonous seeds of social dissipation and corruption which we euph
emistically call European civilization.”36

  Visitors greeted at the quay by the prostitutes from the Alcazar di Salonico, or surrounded by crowds of young Jewish men offering “every kind of encounter we might desire,” knew what he meant. The city’s flourishing prostitution trade was merely a symptom of social immiseration, however. For bringing the values of Europe to Salonica turned out to mean bringing its divisions too. The new cosmopolitan elite sought to bridge the gap between Christians, Muslims and Jews, but as they did so other, more fundamental social chasms opened up, between the rich and the poor, between factory-owners and workers. In the days of the old, walled city, rich and poor had lived as neighbours, sharing membership of congregations, and suffering Salonica’s misfortunes together. But after 1880, as it expanded, they grew further apart.37

  12

  The Macedonia Question, 1878–1908

  CATEGORIES

  TRUSTING IN CAPITALISM and the prestige of the sultan to create common interests and allegiances, the leaders of fin-de-siècle Salonica promoted the idea of an Ottoman identity uniting the city’s different communities. But how far were these really becoming more integrated? After all, Muslims still dominated the public sector, and there were hardly any non-Muslims employed by the municipality, or indeed the army. Because the 1856 Ottoman reforms had led each non-Muslim community to develop its own regulations for self-government, they seemed more rather than less self-contained at a time when the absolutist rule of Abdul Hamid stifled moves towards representative government in the country as a whole: in the words of historian Niyazi Berkes, they turned into “little non-territorial republics and incipient nations.” “The most diverse civilizations shared [the city] but did not penetrate one another,” wrote a local scholar in 1914. “The city was not one. Jews, Orthodox, Donmehs, Muslims, lived side by side, without mixing, each shut in its community, each speaking its language.” Or as the city’s main workers’ newspaper wrote in 1911: “Salonica is not one city. It is a juxtaposition of tiny villages. Jews, Turks, Donmehs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Westerners, Gypsies, each of these groups which one today calls ‘Nations,’ keeps well away from the others, as if fearing contagion.”1

  As European visitors arrived to “form an accurate opinion on that most important question—the present state and future destinies of the Levant,” they were struck by the bewildering variety of languages and religions the city contained: it was, in the words of two British travellers, “historically Greek, politically Turkish, geographically Bulgarian and ethnographically Jewish.” “The population is hotchpotch,” wrote another, “but you have to note the features, the eye, the walk, the general manner, to decide whether this man be a Turk, a Greek, an Armenian, a Bulgarian or a Jew. The shifty eye tells the Armenian, the swagger of demeanour proclaims the Greek, the quiet alertness reveals the Jew.”2

  Victorian theories of anthropology encouraged foreigners to see character, costume, physiognomy and physical beauty or ugliness not as the property of individuals but as the attributes of the race. Most visitors had their favourites—the Jews in the case of Braun-Wiesbaden, the Greeks for Choisy. The Slavophile Misses Irby and Mackenzie thought the Greeks compared badly with the Bulgarians: “The one is commercial, ingenious and eloquent, but fraudulent, dirty and immoral; the other is agricultural, stubborn and slow-tongued, but honest, cleanly and chaste.”3

  But whether positive or negative, the assumptions of racial nationalism which shaped most European travel accounts were highly misleading when applied to the Ottoman context for they did not fit how people inside the empire saw themselves. Despite the prejudices of Irby and Mackenzie, for instance, most Slav Christian peasants in the Salonica countryside probably did not count themselves as either “Greeks or Bulgarians” at the time of their visit. Moreover “Turk” was a term which made little or no sense when applied to a Muslim population which ranged, as a German visitor noted, from “the black of Ethiopia” (in reality, slaves brought over from the Sudan and beyond), to fair-skinned Circassians, blue-eyed Albanians, and Hungarian, Prussian and Polish converts.4

  To understand the forces of nationalism and their impact on the late-nineteenth-century city we need above all to appreciate their novelty. Much time, money and effort was required by disciples of the new nationalist creeds to convert its inhabitants from their older, habitual ways of referring to themselves, and to turn nationalism itself from the obsession of a small, educated elite to a movement capable of galvanizing masses. The Macedonian Struggle, which swept across the city and its surroundings, started out as a religious conflict among the region’s Christians but quickly turned into a way for activists to force national identities—“Greek” or “Bulgarian” or even “Macedonian”—on those who refused them. By the first decade of the twentieth century, thanks to years of fighting, there were indeed Greeks, Bulgarians and even Turks in a national sense, and their rivalries were threatening to undermine Salonica’s cosmopolitan Ottomanist façade.

  The late Ottoman Balkan peninsula

  BEYOND ORTHODOXY

  TO THE OTTOMAN AUTHORITIES what had always mattered were religious rather than national or linguistic differences: Balkan Christians were either under the authority of the Patriarch in Constantinople or they were—more rarely—Catholic or Protestant. The Patriarchate shared the same outlook; it was indifferent to whether its flock spoke Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian or any other language or dialect. As for the illiterate Slav-speaking peasants tilling the fields, they rarely felt strongly about either Greece or Bulgaria and when asked which they were, many insisted on being known simply, as they had been for centuries, as “Christians.”

  In Salonica itself, the growth of the Christian population had come from continual immigration over centuries from outlying villages, often as distant as the far side of the Pindos mountains, where many of the inhabitants spoke not Greek but Vlach (a Romance language akin to Romanian), Albanian or indeed various forms of Slavic. The city’s life, schools and priests gave these villagers, or their children, a new tongue, and turned them into Greeks. In fact many famous Greek figures of the past were really Vlachs by origin, including the savant Mosiodax, the revolutionary Rhigas Velestinlis, as well as the city’s first “Greek” printers, the Garbolas family, and the Manakis brothers, pioneers of Balkan cinema. “Twenty years ago there was nothing in Balkan politics so inevitable, so nearly axiomatic, as the connection of the Vlachs with the Greek cause,” wrote Brailsford in 1905. “They had no national consciousness and no national ambition … With some of them Hellenism was a passion and an enthusiasm. They believed themselves to be Greek. They baptized their children ‘Themistocles’ and ‘Penelope.’ They studied in Athens and they left their fortunes to Greek schools and Greek hospitals.” So many Vlachs settled in Salonica that in 1880 a Romanian paper claimed, to the fury of the Greek community, that there were no genuine Greeks there at all. Changing—or rather, acquiring—nationality was often simply a matter of upward mobility and a French consul once notoriously boasted that with a million pounds he could make Macedonians into Frenchmen.5

  Money affected nationality in other ways as well. In the Ottoman system, the Orthodox Church was not merely a focus of spiritual life; it was also a gatherer of taxes. Peasants in the countryside, just like wealthy magnates in Salonica itself, chafed at the power and corruption that accompanied these privileges. But while most bishops and the higher ecclesiastical hierarchy spoke Greek—the traditional language of the church and religious learning—and looked down on the use of Slavic, most Christian peasants around Salonica spoke Bulgarian—or, if not Bulgarian, then a Slavic tongue close to it. This started to matter to the peasants themselves once they identified Greek with the language not merely of holy scripture but of excessive taxation and corruption. In 1860, the Bishop of Cassandra’s extortions actually drove some villagers under his jurisdiction to threaten to convert to Catholicism: French priests from Salonica contacted the families concerned, promising them complete freedom of worship and a “Bishop of yo
ur own creed who will not take a single piastre from you.” Other villagers from near Kilkis demanded a bishop who would provide the liturgy in Old Church Slavonic, and got one after they too started to declare themselves for Rome.6

  Yet what these peasants were talking was about shifting their religious not their national allegiance and it took decades for the discontent of the village tax-payer to be further transformed into nationalism. Greek continued to be the language of upward mobility through the nineteenth century. As for Bulgarian self-consciousness, this was slow to develop. Sir Henry Layard visited Salonica in 1842 to enquire into “the movement which was alleged to be in progress amongst the Bulgarians,” but he did not find very much. “The Bulgarians, being of the Greek faith,” he wrote later, “were then included by the Porte in classifying the Christian subjects of the Sultan, among the Greeks. It was not until many years afterwards that the Christians to the south of the Balkans, speaking the Bulgarian language, were recognized as a distinct nation. At the time of my visit to Salonica no part of its Christian population, which was considerable, was known as Bulgarian.”7

  What led Slavic speakers to see their mother tongue in a new light was the influence of political ideologies coming from central and eastern Europe. German-inspired romantic nationalism glorified and ennobled the language of the peasantry and insisted it was as worthy of study and propagation as any other. Pan-Slavism—helped along perhaps by Russian agents—gave them pride in their unwritten family tongue and identified the enemy, for the first time, as Greek cultural arrogance. “I feel a great sorrow,” wrote Kiryak/Kyriakos Durzhilovich/Darlovitsi, the printer, “that although I am a Bulgarian, I do not know how to write in the Bulgarian language.”