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

by Mark Mazower

  In fact there was, as the French consul noted, no reaction from the Muslim population. (Another of the anarchists had planned earlier to blow up a mosque during Friday prayers in order to provoke a massacre of Christians, but had been arrested beforehand.) The prisons were overflowing—by early May nearly eight hundred prisoners were held—and a court-martial tried those responsible. The chief culprits were sentenced to death, and the ring-leaders were transferred to the notorious jails of Fezzan in the Libyan Sahara where several of them died. The two surviving members of the plot, Shatev and Bogdanov, returned to Macedonia in the amnesty of 1908: Bogdanov died a few years later, but Pavel Shatev lived until 1952, becoming a lawyer in interwar Bulgaria and then minister of justice in the postwar Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.20

  IMRO sputtered on, although the bombers had dealt a near-fatal blow to the organization in the city. The better-known Ilinden uprising which took place on St. Elias’s Day a few months later was the IMRO leadership’s own anxious attempt to arouse a peasant revolt against Turkish rule. But its chief consequence was that several thousand more Christian peasants were killed by Ottoman troops in reprisal. The only success IMRO could claim after this series of bloody failures was a further diplomatic intervention by the Great Powers—their last significant involvement in the tangled Macedonia question before the Balkan Wars. The Ottoman authorities were forced to swallow the appointment of European officials to supervise the policing of the province. Among the younger army officers stationed there, resentment and a sense of humiliation led to the first stirrings of conspiracy against the Porte. On the other hand, Macedonia remained part of the empire and Hilmi Pasha continued as inspector-general. The one conclusion to be drawn from the rise and fall of IMRO was that ending Ottoman power in Europe would not come that way: the use of terrorism to embroil and involve the Great Powers was futile when the Powers upheld the status quo.

  THE MACEDONIAN STRUGGLE

  MANY GREEKS HOWEVER FELT Macedonia was slipping from their grasp. From their point of view, the situation looked desperate. Serbian and Romanian propaganda was having an effect among the Slavs and Vlachs, and Bulgaria seemed to be in the ascendant. “I myself imagined there could be no doubt that the northern littoral of the Aegean is Greek,” wrote an informed British observer. “But a few years ago the Greek Archbishop of Gürmürjina complained to me that his flock were all turning Bulgarian and speaking that language.” “Is your village Greek … or Bulgarian?” the British journalist H. N. Brailsford asked a wealthy peasant in the Monastir market. “ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘It is Bulgarian now but four years ago it was Greek.’ ” By 1904, according to the Ottoman census of that year, which gives an approximate picture of the ethnography of the disputed provinces, there were 648,962 Patriarchists to 557,734 Exarchists. Figures based on language groups gave a more alarming impression—896,496 Bulgarians compared to 307,000 Greeks, 99,000 Vlachs and 100,717 Serbs. Either way, Greek activists decided that if they did not enter the fray, they would lose the hearts and minds of the Christians in the countryside. Thus the stage was set for what would come to be known in Greece as “the Macedonian Struggle.”21

  Between 1904 and 1908 the Greek bands—often in fact Hellenized Slav or Albanian brigands loyal to the Patriarchate—went about their patriotic work in the hills. Forced to declare themselves for one side or the other, reluctant peasants were encouraged by beatings as well as money. Exarchists were shot. “Hostile” houses and some entire villages were burned—by both sides.22 New battle-lines were being drawn. The “Bulgarians” were the Greeks’ main enemy, the Antichrist, heretics, against whom anything was permissible. Villagers were warned that Exarchist priests were schismatics and that those they buried would not lie at peace. At the Greek gymnasium in Salonica, a priest taught his classes that the Bulgarians were “murderers, criminals, infidels and should be cleared from the face of the earth.” Those who did this were “naturally heroes, protectors of our Church.” In retrospect, it seems obvious that the Greek strategy simply reproduced the flawed assumptions of the Bulgarians before them; nor indeed is there any indication that the gallant patriots who stirred up trouble in the Macedonian villages contributed very much to the ultimate triumph of Greek arms in 1912. But that was not how it seemed at the time: according to the over-heated logic of fin-de-siècle national rivalries, every thrust had to be answered with counter-thrust, and passivity was a sign of weakness not wisdom. “By the autumn of 1905,” noted Brailsford, “a reign of terror had settled down on the whole of central Macedonia.”23

  The centre of operations was Salonica’s Greek consulate whose elegant neo-classical building today houses the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. An energetic new consul, Lambros Koromilas, had been posted there to build up a network of activists and bands. Patriotic activity was organized through “the Organization,” an underground movement led by a young army cadet called Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaides. His agents collected information on enemies of the Greek cause, and carried out assassinations of leading members of the Bulgarian community. They also engaged in more peaceful propaganda activities—Souliotis wrote a brochure entitled Prophecies of Alexander the Great which he circulated among the peasantry in a Slavic translation to persuade them that only the Greeks could liberate them from Turkish rule. He also tried to make Greek shopkeepers in the city alter their shop signs so that the Greek lettering was largest, placing Turkish and French in subsidiary positions. Greek was not usually set first, and Souliotis thought the change would impress “the Slavophones who came into the Macedonian capital from the villages” and help “Hellenize” the city.24

  In 1907, Souliotis urged Greeks to boycott Exarchist or Bulgarian businesses, and Greek employers were told not to hire Exarchist workers. One man was killed when he ignored these instructions, and an Exarchist priest’s house was burned down when he tried to build in a Greek neighbourhood. Later the practice of ethnic boycotts spread to other communities: Turks and Jews boycotted Austrian products after the Habsburg annexation of Ottoman Bosnia, Greek goods after the uprising on Crete, and Italian goods in 1911 at the time of the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania. This last episode drove away the city’s richest family, the Allatinis, who had Italian citizenship. What thus started on a small scale as part of the Macedonian Struggle became something much more pervasive: indeed one might view the boycott—as indeed the Struggle itself was in a wider sense—as the moment when nationalist politics imposed its own logic upon interactions in the Ottoman city. Before then, politics had been a limited affair which concerned only municipal elites; now it affected everyone and demanded total participation. Against its power, even a family as influential and wealthy as the Allatinis was helpless.

  13

  The Young Turk Revolution

  AT THE START of the twentieth century, Salonica became a hive of plotting against Abdul Hamid. A branch of the émigré Ottoman constitutionalist organization, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), had been founded there as early as 1896. But it was only a decade later that it was invigorated by growing discontent among the officers of the Third Army Corps which was stationed in the city. The loss of Greece, Serbia, Bosnia and Bulgaria, and the growing interference of the European Powers in the life of the empire, alarmed many Muslims and renewed demands, dormant for nearly thirty years, for reform, constitutional liberties and imperial revival. For Ottoman society too was entering the era of mass politics and the same institutions—the schools and the army—which were politicizing young men in neighbouring states were doing so in the empire itself.

  The Young Turks behind the revolution of 1908 were youthful figures who aimed to break the hold of the traditional grey-bearded Istanbul statesmen. They were practical men such as Selanikli Nazim, the director of Salonica’s municipal hospital, who succeeded in unifying the Paris and Salonica branches of the Committee of Union and Progress in 1907; Talaat Bey, a civil servant in the telegraph office; and a charming young army officer in the service of Hilmi Pasha,
Enver Bey, the son of an Anatolian bridge-keeper and an Albanian peasant, who would become the most famous Young Turk of all. Many of them were freemasons, for the city’s masonic lodges formed a useful means of making secret contacts and shared the plotters’ progressive goals. They cultivated close ties with local Greek notables and used Greek agents to help them get in and out of the country. There were also numerous young army officers like Salonica-born Mustafa Kemal. In 1907 Kemal succeeded in getting himself reassigned from a cavalry expedition in Syria to the staff of the Third Army Corps in his home town. There he tried to organize a local branch of a rival party but was forced to give up when he realized how strong the CUP had become in his absence.1

  Even outside the ranks of the army and the civil service, many supported the idea of restoring the 1876 constitution—Mustafa Rahmi, a member of the Evrenos land-owning dynasty; Ma’min such as Mehmed Djavid Bey, the economics professor and future finance minister; as well as Salonican Jews like the journalist Nissim Rousso or Hilmi Pasha’s adviser on legal matters, the constitutionalist Nissim Mazliah. Hilmi Pasha himself was whispered to sympathize with the plotters. Many commentators then and since even saw the Young Turk revolution as a product of the city, holding its cosmopolitanism, its close links with Europe, for some also its large Jewish and Ma’min population, responsible for the dramatic changes forced on the empire in 1908. This was flattering to the city’s image of itself as the place where Ottoman and European values and aspirations met. But it is probably closer to the truth simply to say that it was in European Turkey that external meddling was most troublesome and that imperial authority was most sharply thrown into question.

  THE YOUNG TURK REVOLUTION

  WITHIN THE CITY, the spring of 1908 was filled with assassinations. An unknown gunman shot the interpreter at the Greek consulate; then Greek gunmen took revenge, first shooting a Bulgarian chemist in his shop on Vardar Kappesi, the main street, and then, a few days later, killing a prominent Bulgarian notable, Hadji Mischeff, “a highly respectable and inoffensive old gentleman of 67,” as he was going to his office. The cycle continued: a seventeen-year-old Greek youth attacked a Bulgarian workman with an axe on his way to the Allatini brickyards, and someone else fired at the dragoman of the Bulgarian consulate. “The rapid succession of these outrages, most of which have occurred in broad daylight and in one or other of the most frequented thoroughfares of the town,” noted the British consul, “is attracting universal attention to the inadequacy of the Police.”2

  In June, even more troubling and unusual events took place suggesting the ferment was spreading beyond the familiar Greco-Bulgarian bloodletting. On 3 June, the vice-consul in Monastir reported that he had received a memorandum “which is clearly the work of the ‘Young Turk’ party and bears the signature and seal ‘Comité d’Union et de Progrès Ottoman.’ ” He took little notice at first. But then a few days later, there was a sensational attempt on the life of the military commander of Salonica—sensational because the would-be assassin was apparently a Turkish officer, who had made his attempt in the centre of the town, close by the gardens of the White Tower where “half of Salonica society were assembled at an open-air concert.” More such shootings followed: a regimental chaplain narrowly escaped, and Lt.-General Shemsi Pasha was killed in Monastir. The sultan sent his senior intelligence officer from the capital to investigate rumours of disaffection in the Third Army Corps, and as he uncovered details of the CUP network in the city, the plotters brought forward their plans.3

  At dawn on 23 July, news reached the city that proclamations were being distributed in Monastir calling for the satisfaction of the Young Turks’ demands. In Salonica itself crowds started to gather outside the prefecture building and discussed what was happening. Then, at ten in the morning, the Greek archbishop, the president of the local Bulgarian Committee and the mufti came out onto the balcony, embraced one another and called on the onlookers to do the same in the name of fraternity. A great shout of joy erupted, and an enormous flag was held up with the words “Long Live the Constitution!” in Turkish, and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Justice” inscribed in its four corners. Standing in front of it, an excited hodja raised the cry “Long Live the Constitution!” The crowd responded immediately. “There was indescribable delirium,” wrote a French officer watching the scene. Soon army officers and civilian CUP supporters—including Jews, Greeks and Bulgarians—were speechifying from the steps of public buildings, on café tables and hotel balconies, “enthusiastically cheered by crowds of all nationalities.” The streets were filled late into the night with groups waving the Ottoman flag as well as the red and white stripes of the CUP.4

  The government’s capitulation the next day—the plotters had threatened to march on Istanbul if a commitment to restore the constitution was not immediately forthcoming—produced further public jubilation. Hilmi Pasha presented himself on the steps of the town hall in front of a crowd estimated at fifteen thousand and announced the reconvening of the General Assembly in the capital. Few were aware of the astute way in which this experienced bureaucrat had brought his master into line; all they could see was that the sultan had finally brought back the constitution he had scrapped three decades earlier. “The rest of the day was given up to demonstrations of popular rejoicing of which I doubt the like has ever been seen in Turkey,” wrote the British consul. “The whole town was dressed in flags, processions paraded the streets, speeches were delivered in every public place—the populace, half-intoxicated with a sense of unwonted freedom applauded uproariously on every possible occasion. At nightfall the city was illuminated and the wildest enthusiasm prevailed when Enver Bey … who had fled from Salonica to form one of the earliest insurgent bands, returned about nine o’clock from Ghevgheli and was conducted in triumph through the town to the Garden of the Tour Blanche.”5

  A few days later, the same Enver Bey, a dapper mustachioed figure, addressed a large crowd outside the cafés in what had just been renamed Place de la Liberté. “Citizens!” he began. “Today the arbitrary ruler is gone, bad government no longer exists. We are all brothers. There are no longer Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, Jews, Muslims—under the same blue sky we are all equal, we are all proud to be Ottomans!” Europe, he continued, would be forced to recognize that its mandate over the empire was finished, for the empire had been reborn, as a state belonging not to the sultan but to all its citizens. This was the official ideology of nineteenth-century reform pushed to its limits. “Yesterday massacre and words of hate, today the unanimous joy of liberty and fraternity,” wrote a French observer. “We could hardly believe our eyes and ears. After having witnessed five years of carnage and horrors, we believed we were living in a dream. And yet it was unquestionably reality. This new situation, created by the committee, responded well to the secret sentiments of all the populations whatever their race and religion. Everyone thirsted for a little peace and tranquillity.”6

  Enver himself stood at the beginning of the dizzying ascent which took him in just a few years from the post of staff officer to pasha, ruler of the empire and husband of an imperial princess. Later there would be the disastrous decision to enter the Great War on the German side, the ensuing military catastrophe in the Caucasus, the Armenian genocide and eventually his flight and death on the battlefields of central Asia during the Russian civil war. That lay in the future, but his astonishing talents were already on display. For a moment it seemed as though the vision of social harmony he had conjured up might bring peace even to Macedonia. Brigands and band leaders made their way down from the hills to pay homage to the empire’s new masters. Sandanski—the man responsible for kidnapping Ellen Stone a few years earlier—delivered an anarchist speech from the balcony of the Hotel d’Angleterre and declared his loyalty to the CUP. Under pressure from the Young Turks, the men of violence were being diverted temporarily into the path of peaceful politicking. Electioneering began for the new assembly.

  The main obstacle to reform was the sult
an himself. On 1 September, the anniversary of his accession, Yeni Asir, a loyalist Turkish newspaper, declared that “the Ottoman CUP has torn down the curtain which separated the sultan from his people. July 11th has opened a new horizon of happiness to the Nation and the State.” But few people saw things that way. “Long Live the Sultan!” cried Hilmi Pasha, after he had read out the firman announcing the restoration of the 1876 constitution to a large crowd: there was no answer. Twice he repeated the traditional formula: the crowd remained stubbornly silent. Abdul Hamid himself resented the humiliation the revolution had caused him, and believed he could eventually marginalize and dispose of these new opponents as he had with others so often in the past.

  This time, however, they controlled a powerful section of the army as well. Or did the army control them? In April 1909, news came in of an attempted counter-revolution in the capital. Fearing that the sultan was scheming to suspend the constitution again, the “Salonica Army” advanced on the imperial capital. General Mahmoud Shefket Pasha—Hilmi Pasha’s successor as inspector-general of Macedonia—assumed control, not in the name of the CUP, but “in the interests of the Army and … of the Nation … whose constitutional liberties the Army had been the principal instrument in defending and remains the only power capable of defending from the threatened reaction.” The struggle had begun for the right to lead the nation, a struggle between the men on horseback and those in frockcoats that would bedevil Turkey (and for that matter Bulgaria and Greece) long into the twentieth century.7