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

by Mark Mazower

  Once in possession of the city, the Greeks seemed unconcerned by the possibility of Ottoman revanchism and permitted the imperial gendarmerie to continue to help police it. For several weeks incoming troops were astonished to see armed Turks still patrolling the streets. They also allowed many of the mosques which had been converted from Byzantine churches to remain in Muslim hands, at least for the initial weeks. “What good to have conquered the Turk?” wrote an outraged philhellene in the first days of Greek rule, “to be obliged still to wander through a mosque of Allah when one wanted to go and pray to Saint Dimitrios?”6

  In fact it was not the Turks but the Bulgarians who were provoking the Greeks’ anxiety. Having sparred over Macedonia for several decades, Greece and Bulgaria had been unable to agree on how to carve it up and the treaty they had reached earlier in 1912 was an essentially defensive alliance eloquent in its silence on this critical issue. Once hostilities began, both armies headed for the city, but the Bulgarians were bearing the brunt of fighting against the Ottoman forces elsewhere and the Greeks got there first by just eight hours. Sixteen thousand Bulgarian troops, accompanied by numerous komitadjis, were streaming down the Langada road and insisted on making their own entry two days later. They did not disguise their dissatisfaction at the course of events. “The hatred and loathing felt by the Bulgarians for the Greeks are only intensified by the war,” reported a journalist. “If they hated each other before, they now loathe each other a hundred times as much as they did in the past.”7

  Over the next few months, the tension built up. The Greeks had made it clear that the city was under their sole control and to underline the point, King George and his court transferred themselves there from Athens. Meanwhile, Sofia was presenting Salonica’s liberation as its achievement. Most of the Bulgarian troops were soon withdrawn under Greek pressure, while an influx of civilian administrators, gendarmes and fresh troops strengthened the Greek hand. Nevertheless, even the reduced Bulgarian presence constituted a daily challenge to the legitimacy of Hellenic rule at a time when internationally the Great Powers had still not determined the city’s future. There were almost daily incidents involving Greek and Bulgarian soldiers, while the komitadji bands themselves stirred things up further. In March 1913, the two sides clashed openly about thirty miles northeast of Salonica. It was a harbinger of worse to come.8

  When the First Balkan War ended formally in April 1913, the diplomats gathered in London to discuss the terms of peace. Greece and Serbia had won far more than they had dared hope for; Bulgaria had ended up with much less. Greece’s population and territory both nearly doubled, as did Serbia’s, and Ottoman Macedonia was largely partitioned between them. Bulgaria’s gains, on the other hand, were largely confined to Thrace, even though it was not Thrace for which it had gone to war. Feeling cheated of the spoils of victory, the Bulgarians prepared to fight for what they wanted. A second conflict, this time among the former Balkan partners, was clearly in the offing, and Greece and Serbia hastened to conclude a defensive alliance. “Trains are being hurried to Salonica, packed full of men, guns and horses,” reported the Manchester Guardian at the start of June 1913. “There are all the signs of a very pretty quarrel.”9

  On 29 June, the Second Balkan War broke out, when Bulgaria launched an attack on the Serbs. The following morning the atmosphere in Salonica was electric: shopkeepers boarded-up their stores, and patrols of Cretan gendarmes “passed slowly up and down the deserted tramway lines.” Fighting broke out the same afternoon and ended—after a night’s worth of “the incessant din of musketry and the churning crackle of machine guns, punctuated by the boom of the deeper-throated artillery fire”—with the outnumbered and surrounded Bulgarians surrendering; thirteen hundred soldiers and over five hundred komitadji were transferred by steamer to the prisons of Old Greece where they sat out the end of the war.10

  The repercussions went further than this. Hundreds of long-time Bulgarian residents of the city were arrested by the Greek authorities; others left on Bulgarian steamers. The Bulgarian gymnasium, which had been a base of operations, was looted by Greek soldiers, and the Exarchate was banned. The Second Balkan War—over in barely a month—brought, in effect, the end of Salonica’s Bulgarian community. By April 1914 the British consul was writing that “almost all those who wished to go have gone. Those who remain have either conformed to the Patriarchate or are living as best as they can as Exarchists.” Saint Dimitrios had triumphed again—over the Slavs. In November 1913, the Greek claim to the city finally received international recognition and the Bulgarians, who had been roundly beaten on all sides, were forced to acknowledge their defeat. But the threat they posed never really went away. In both world wars Bulgarian troops crossed the frontier, and both times the city’s inhabitants trembled that they might take their revenge for the events of 1912–13.11

  THE GREAT POWERS were not overjoyed at the thought of Salonica becoming Greek either. Their subjects had enjoyed a privileged status under the Ottomans, and many questioned whether the small Balkan state was capable of rising to the challenge of effectively administering such a potentially important city and guaranteeing its prosperity. Austria-Hungary coveted Salonica for itself, and continued to criticize the Greek administration there for some time. Italy, Germany and France, while not making direct claims of their own, hoped to extend their influence by offering their protection and passports to the city’s Jewish merchants. Britain was concerned about its holdings of the Ottoman debt, and wondered whether the Greeks would be ready to take this over.

  Within hours of Greek forces assuming control, a French naval commander in the port was threatening to sink their two vessels unless he received a public apology for an incident with Turkish ships he claimed were under his protection. The Greeks had to comply but the humiliation smarted. The consuls themselves not only brokered the Ottoman surrender but tried to throw their weight around as well. The German consul sought to take all the city’s Muslim subjects under his protection and distributed passports to several Turkish officials before he was forced to back down. On the streets, German, British and Habsburg flags challenged the primacy of the Greek blue-and-white as the city’s foreign nationals publicly proclaimed their own divided allegiances. In six months, 2400 Jews changed nationality to avoid Greek citizenship—Spain and Portugal being, alongside Austria, the preferred options, while prominent Muslims took French and Austrian papers, and investigated the chances of emigrating not only to Anatolia but also to Tunisia, Marseilles, Belgium, Egypt and India. The vogue for changing citizenship allowed local fraudsters to enrich themselves by offering new passports in return for large fees. Only after it abolished the Ottoman capitulations, which had allowed foreigners sweeping immunities from domestic law, was the Greek state finally able to enjoy full sovereignty in the city.12

  SALONICA’S JEWS HAD GIVEN the victorious Greek army a cool welcome as well. “It must be said that the Jew was not in a mood for celebration,” wrote a Jewish schoolteacher shortly afterwards. “He adopted a correct and appropriate stance, as befitting someone who had lost … Only when we lose what we have do we value it truly, and the Jews who had never forgotten the rare virtues, the patience and generosity, of the Turkish people, feel today … that they have just lost their most secure and stable foundation.” Many had serious doubts about a future Greek administration. Warning that annexation by Greece would be economically disastrous, cutting off the city from its traditional markets, some Jewish leaders proposed instead that Salonica and its environs should, in effect, become an autonomous statelet guaranteed by the Great Powers, a Jewish-run metropolis detached from the rivalries of its Balkan neighbours. The internationalization project was discussed with émigré Young Turks in Vienna, with Salonican Ma’min acting as intermediaries. In Istanbul a Turkish-Jewish-Vlach Macedonian Committee was formed to promote the idea. Some prominent Jewish Ottoman sympathizers may have gone even further and promised the Ottoman government financial support if it continued to fight against the B
alkan states.13

  None of this went anywhere—the Great Powers were not going to reverse the Greek fait accompli—but it was more than enough to anger many Greeks. The local Greek press whipped up anti-Jewish feelings and there were incidents, widely reported abroad, of troops breaking into houses and assaulting civilians. In March 1913 the city was transfixed by the news that the much-loved elderly King George had been assassinated while out for his daily stroll in the city suburbs. Suspicion immediately fastened on the Jews and Muslims, and fuelled new assaults before the authorities clarified that the culprit was a deranged Greek with a history of mental disturbance.14

  The soldiers’ disorderly conduct, however, contrasted with the liberal aspirations of the Greek leaders. Proclaiming martial law on the morning after his entry into the city, the military commander, Prince Constantine, issued a statement—in the city’s four languages, Greek, French, Turkish and Judeo-Spanish—in which he hailed the “will and courage of the Hellenic army” which had spent “glorious Hellenic blood” in order to “safeguard the rights of nationalities and of Man considered as individual and citizen.”15 Gradually, as the troops were brought under control, the solicitous policies of the Athens government bore fruit. After all, the maltreatment of non-Greeks—whether Muslims, Bulgarians or Jews—undermined its own international standing and jeopardized the position of Christians in the Ottoman empire itself. The country’s leadership, led by the royal family, endeavoured to reassure Salonican Jewry in particular of its good intentions. In a policy it defined as “hyper-semitism,” it proclaimed its willingness to protect Jewish interests in particular and the country’s new minorities in general. The Jewish community, for its part, came to accept that the Greeks were there to stay: Greek flags hung outside Jewish homes on state festivals; rabbis and bishops attended each other’s holiday ceremonies. The last Ottoman mayor, a Ma’min called Osman Said Bey, was kept in his post and the town council continued to include members drawn from the city’s non-Greek confessional groups.

  HELLENIZATION

  THE TASK OF INCORPORATING THE CITY into the Greek state was entrusted to Constantine Raktivan, the new civilian governor-general of Macedonia. Raktivan was a leading jurist and the minister of justice in the Liberal government of Eleftherios Venizelos—itself perhaps the most energetic and reformist administration in Greek history. In his first proclamation, Raktivan declared that the war had been waged to remove “the tyranny and poor administration which the existence [of the Ottoman Empire] had allowed to last for centuries, and to bring the benefits of liberty to all the inhabitants of the country.” Genuine liberty, he continued, presupposed “a complete equality between the different races living under the aegis of the same state” and he promised an administration “worthy of a civilized State, strong and impartial at the same time.”16

  Building up a modern bureaucracy would take time, however. There was no direct rail link between Salonica and Old Greece (it only arrived in 1916), and the post which should have taken no more than a day sometimes took weeks or even months. Raktivan remained in ignorance of the negotiations taking place in London and even lacked the drachmas with which to pay his civil servants. Turkish currency, law, weights and measures continued to be used alongside the Greek for several more years, and it was not until 1915 that the International Financial Control, which had supervised Greek money issue since the bankruptcy of 1897, permitted the National Bank of Greece to issue drachmas to the New Lands in the north. The capitulations were abolished but the “Company”—as the Belgian firm which ran the gas and tram concessions was known—retained its powerful position in the town. The new governor of the northern territories was getting a first frustrating taste of what rule from Athens—by a state at once centralizing and distant—really implied: it was a problem with which his successors, and the inhabitants of the city, would quickly become familiar.

  Some elements of Salonica’s Ottoman legacy were easily targeted. War was waged on the fez (though less than a century earlier it had been seen in Ottoman society as a dangerous sign of modernity), and the local authorities instructed railway, tram and electricity managers to dismiss employees who wore it to work. Those who refused Greek citizenship were fired: many Muslims, choosing to remain Ottoman subjects, quit; most Jewish workers conformed. Greek became the language of administration, and Greek customs tariffs replaced the Ottoman. Meanwhile boats arrived daily from Piraeus bringing a new ruling class of policemen, gendarmes, judges and lawyers—the first wave of Greek officialdom. Some came from Athens, many more from Crete and the Peloponnese. Their new posting—hardly a plum—was regarded as tantamount to being “exiled to Bulgaria.” Even so, many settled and put down roots. Eighty years later, Elias Petropoulos noted that “in practice Salonica has been ruled for decades by the Pan-Cretan Brotherhood and the Union of Peloponnesians.”17

  Changed street names now testified, as an observer ironically put it, to “all the most beautiful glories of Hellenism.” Aristotle, Alexander and the city’s favourite Byzantine emperor—Basil the Bulgar Slayer—were inscribed on the small French-style enamelled plaques. The Hamidié, the main thoroughfare from the earlier phase of Ottoman modernization, and home to most of the city’s consulates and administrative headquarters, was named Union Avenue, then Prince Constantine, then King Constantine, National Defence (twice) and Queen Sofia. Shops signs were re-painted with prominent Greek characters, often in blue and white—indeed many patriotic shopkeepers and householders painted their entire shop-fronts and even the pavement so that the city itself seemed to some “an unreal landscape.” But for the next few years, more substantial plans for urban renewal remained on paper, building work “started and ended with the baptism of streets” and the roads were paved “with good intentions.” Rainstorms still made it impossible to cross what was now known as Rue Salamina, except on the back of a Jewish porter. The nightwatchmen continued, as in Ottoman times, to make their rounds, and the fire service was still manned by volunteers. Moving from the devolved—even uninvolved—state apparatus that had served the city for centuries to the Prussian-style bureaucracy that liberals like Raktivan believed was appropriate would not be achieved any time soon. The completion of a small new pleasure garden around the White Tower was the most visible fruit of municipal activity. Writing in 1914, an Italian journalist summed up the changes that had taken place in the preceding two years: “There are no more Bulgarians, the donmehs have disappeared into their lanes and the cafés of the Upper Town, the Jews have adapted themselves to the new authority, the colonies of remaining Europeans—Italians, French, Germans, keep to themselves … The capitulations have been abolished, and what is worse, so have the foreign mails of the city.”18

  One important matter was quickly seen to, however. Since one could scarcely govern a city whilst remaining in ignorance of its composition and size, Raktivan organized a census, the first of any accuracy since the sixteenth century. Although there had been two more recent Ottoman efforts, no one familiar with the procedures they had employed placed much confidence in their results. The Greek governor created local subcommittees to visit householders, and groups of literate Jews, Muslims and Greeks patrolled their neighbourhoods, knocking on doors (rather than inviting householders to come to them, as had been done in the past). The aims behind the operation were lofty. “As is well known,” wrote the organizers, “the first concern of every civilized State aiming at its overall progress, is to ascertain its population in all its varied aspects.”19

  In fact, though never published, and soon rendered out of date by huge wartime shifts of population, the 1913 census gives us a first reasonably accurate snapshot of the modern city’s ethnographic composition and a last view of the Ottoman confessional balance which was to vanish in the months and years that followed. The overall population came to 157,889, of whom just under 40,000 were listed as Greeks, 45,867 as “Ottomans,” in other words Muslims, and 61,439 as Jews. The Greek population probably included those street-traders, refugees a
nd others who had entered the city since the previous October, from Old Greece, Egypt or the Ottoman empire, as well as some who had previously been registered as “Bulgarians.” Among those categorized as “Ottoman” must also have been several thousand refugees from the countryside. The predominance of the Jews is thus strikingly confirmed: there were more Jews in the city than in the whole of Serbia, Bulgaria or Istanbul. “Even today,” wrote an Italian journalist in 1914, “when for three years Greece as master has left no means neglected for Hellenizing Salonica … when 1908 seems so remote in the city’s history, she still at certain moments, almost everywhere gives one the impression of being a strange Jerusalem, very modern, very Macedonian, a little international, but Jerusalem to be sure, because of the great quantity of Jews who inundate her, so much so that they make all the other nationalities of secondary importance.”20

  At this point, more than two-thirds of the inhabitants lived within the old walls; suburbanization was in its infancy. The Upper Town remained, even after 1912, largely Muslim, while much of the lower town nearest the sea was between 60% and 90% Jewish, and the Greeks lived mostly in their traditional quarters on its eastern and western sides. But perhaps more striking and unexpected was the high degree of residential mixing the figures revealed. There were no ghettoes in Salonica and few neighbourhoods belonged exclusively to one religion or another: in fact less than one-third of the city’s inhabitants lived in such quarters (defined as more than 80% of one faith). The tendency to stick together was most pronounced among Muslims, but even so, under half of them lived in exclusively Muslim areas. In short, the census shows how intermingled the religious communities of the late Ottoman city were. Thanks to the remarkable performance of her armies, Greece had required less than three weeks to bring Ottoman rule in Salonica to an end. But after nearly five centuries under the sultans the city would need longer than that to become truly Greek.