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

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Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 Page 36

by Mark Mazower


  15

  The First World War

  Is she Greek yet, in these days, Salonica? On the new maps, sure; in the colours of the houses and the street signs, yes. But anywhere else? At its heart, the city is not and has never been Greek … This is an international city, par excellence. Or, rather, a denationalized city. Even after its annexation to Greece, the Greeks of Salonica are but a fraction, and not even the largest, of its inhabitants.

  A. FRACCAROLI (1916)1

  THE NATIONAL SCHISM

  IN THE 1940S a statue of Prince Constantine on horseback was put up on the shady side of Vardar Square. Today buses flash past as they carry passengers from the train station into town. The commander-in-chief of the Greek army is riding in from the western suburbs along the route he led his troops when they made their triumphant entry in 1912. Perhaps half a mile away along the central thoroughfare, not one hundred yards from Sultan Murad II’s hamam, stands another statue, this time of the charismatic Greek prime minister Venizelos. The man who started out as a rebel leader in Ottoman Crete, and then became Greece’s most visionary and controversial statesman, the architect of both its domestic modernization and external expansion, bestrides the main square in the heart of the city, stepping forward confidently and looking down towards the sea. The distance between the two men is not accidental. Constantine and Venizelos acted in partnership as Greece’s military and diplomatic leaders during the Balkan Wars and continued to do so when Constantine became king in 1913 after his father’s assassination. But the outbreak of the First World War the following year led to an irreparable breach between them. King Constantine was convinced of the superiority of German arms and wanted Greece to remain neutral; Venizelos, equally convinced that the Entente would triumph, argued for intervention alongside the British and French. Their clash threw into question the constitutional position of the Greek monarchy and plunged the country into the worst political crisis of its history. Eventually the Entente powers intervened with little regard for the niceties of international law, and in 1917 Constantine was forced into exile. Salonica itself played no small part in these events for in 1916 Venizelos formed his own provisional government there, and the city’s rivalry with Athens took on a deadly new meaning.

  BRITAIN AND FRANCE had done their bit to contribute to the imbroglio. When the Ottoman empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, they sent their own forces into the Aegean. In early 1915, they tried to attack Istanbul by sea, and when that failed, by land, via the Gallipoli peninsula. Nearly a year later, they were still confined to their beach-heads as Ottoman troops, led by Mustafa Kemal, blocked the way. Seeking to extricate their forces without abandoning their entire position in the eastern Mediterranean, officials in London and Paris debated the strategic merits of Salonica. Here, some argued, was a convenient port at which to disembark the troops from Gallipoli: from there they could bring aid to their hard-pressed Serbian allies, who had already rebuffed two Habsburg attacks. A waste of time and lives, rejoined those for whom it was axiomatic that the war would be decided on the Western Front. While they dithered, Germany and Austria decided to eliminate Serbia as a military threat, and signed a secret agreement with Bulgaria. At the end of September 1915, the Bulgarians mobilized their forces for the impending joint offensive.

  Facing disaster, the Entente decided to compromise and land a small force at Salonica to march north to help the Serbs. Venizelos welcomed the plan. On 3 October he confidentially told the British and French ambassadors they could use Salonica, even though Greece was still formally neutral. At the same time, confusingly, he covered himself against his domestic opponents by issuing a formal protest. The king was not taken in and on 5 October, as the first contingent of Allied troops sailed into the harbour, forced his prime minister to resign. Brigadier-General Hamilton, commander of the advance party of the British Salonika Force, was understandably baffled by events. Sitting amid his baggage in the Hotel de Rome, he tried to work out what to do next. “Damn. What the devil have they sent us here for?,” he muttered to a fellow-officer. “Here I am—and not a word of instructions. What the devil do they want me to do?”2

  Constantine’s sympathies were certainly not with the Entente. Greek officials gave the Entente troops a frosty welcome, and allowed them to camp on a patch of marshy ground several miles outside the city along the Langada road. Later they ceded the use of the port, and grudgingly made the post, telegraph and railways available. But it was a tense and anomalous situation: the Greeks felt they were being forced into the war against their will, and the consuls of the Central Powers remained at liberty within the city. Much of the population was more sympathetic to them than to the Entente and an army of spies monitored every movement of the British and French troops.

  Barely two months later, things got even worse: in the winter of 1915 the Serb army was pushed back over the snow-bound mountains of Montenegro to the Adriatic sea, Serbia was occupied by the Central Powers and the original reason for sending British and French soldiers to Salonica vanished. The units that had gone north returned, and relations between them and the Greek authorities deteriorated. Once Bulgarian troops had invaded Yugoslav Macedonia, nothing seemed to prevent them descending on Salonica too. They were only six days from the city and could probably have taken it had the Germans not vetoed the idea. Berlin knew that both the Bulgarians and the Austrians coveted Salonica, and they had no intention of allowing their allies in the Balkans to quarrel with each other over it.3

  The British dithered, but the French were determined to stay. Christmas 1915 saw all the remaining troops at the Dardanelles evacuated to Salonica, and within a fortnight one hundred and fifty thousand men had landed there. Outside the city they built up a proper ring of defences; inside, General Maurice Sarrail, the French commander, decided to throw international protocol to the winds. Following a Zeppelin attack, he arrested the consuls of the enemy powers and shut their agents and spies in the mouldering dungeons of the old fortress; these were acts appropriate to a colonial or occupying force rather than an uninvited guest in a neutral state. Next he seized the fort that guarded the entrance to the bay.

  The French and British governments protested they had no intention of restricting Greece’s sovereignty, but this was only because they still hoped to persuade Constantine to come over to their side. Yet there was little chance of this happening, and the king had even threatened that if their troops did not leave Salonica, he would order the Greek army to allow the Bulgarians in. Here he over-reached himself, for this turned his constitutional dispute with Venizelos into a question of Greece’s territorial integrity and national honour. Rolling back the victories of 1912–13 was something not even loyal Greek officers could easily accept and voices of dissent were soon heard in the ranks. In January 1916, anti-royalist posters appeared on the streets. And in March, the Cretan gendarmerie—traditionally loyal to their fellow-Cretan Venizelos—declared themselves ready to support an insurrection against the king.

  With the arrival of spring, the conflict came to a head. Constantine—who had stood firm against Bulgarian pressure in 1912–13—actually carried out his threat and Bulgarian and German troops were allowed to take over Greek border fortifications without a fight, enabling them to occupy eastern Macedonia. Most of the Greek Fourth Army Corps was taken prisoner. But would the Bulgarians stop there, or were all the New Lands gained for Greece four years earlier now at risk? In Salonica, rumours ran riot—the Germans were coming down from Monastir; another three days and they would wipe out the Franco-British force. Outraged at Constantine’s action, the Entente demanded the immediate demobilization of the Greek army.

  On 3 June 1916, Constantine’s birthday, Sarrail declared martial law in Salonica. French troops trained their machine guns on the town hall and took over the main government buildings. What price Greek sovereignty now? Barely four years after the ending of Ottoman rule, the city was once again effectively under military occupation. Noticing a Greek sentry missing
outside the White Tower, a member of Sarrail’s staff wrote that he saw “vanishing thus simply one of the last vestiges of Greek sovereignty in Macedonia … just as one had seen so many go before it.” “Whatever happens,” confided one official to a journalist, “we will not see Salonica in Greek hands any more.” “It is a city with a great future,” wrote an experienced British commentator at this time. “But no one knows what that future will be.”4

  It was this alarming prospect that impelled Venizelos’s supporters to act. There had been demonstrations as the Bulgarians’ entry through the Rupel Pass became known, denunciations of the government’s policies and cries of “Long Live Venizelos!” In the summer, news reached Salonica of the way the Fourth Army Corps, known for its Venizelist sympathies, had been abandoned to its fate. Following angry speeches in the gardens by the White Tower, a committee of army officers raised a volunteer force, made up mostly of Cretan gendarmes and Greek refugees from Asia Minor, and soon claimed a strength of 1400–1500 men. On 30 August 1916, the pro-Entente “revolution” finally broke out and Macedonia was declared “independent” of the Athens government. Token resistance by royalist officers in the city was easily crushed. Several thousand men who had fled Cavalla to escape the Bulgarians joined the ranks of the self-styled new Venizelist Army of National Defence. In early October, Venizelos himself arrived in the city—having journeyed by sea to raise support in Crete and the eastern Aegean—and he immediately established a provisional government of National Defence to control the city and its hinterland. More troops arrived and a Greek battalion was established and left for the Struma front. Ministers were appointed, and political opponents thrown into prison. By the end of 1916, Greece had two governments and two armies: the “Greece of Salonica” faced the “Greece of Constantine.”5

  THE CITY AND THE REVOLUTION

  BUT THESE FRACTIOUS TWISTS and turns left much of the city’s population unmoved. Antoine Scheikevitch, a French intelligence officer serving Sarrail, was struck by the locals’ passivity: “Nothing in the attitude of the Salonican population allowed one to suppose that it was capable of the slightest gesture which could do violence to the fatal course of History.” The Jewish community at this stage was largely for the Central Powers, Muslim residents tended secretly to support the Ottoman empire, and many Greeks remained loyal to the king, whom they still thanked for the glorious victory of 1912. People generally were tired of war.

  Watching the brief stand-off between the Venizelists and their opponents, a British war correspondent was perplexed to see “how little attention the ordinary population of Salonica paid to these happenings. They went streaming past on foot and in trams along the street at the bottom of the parade-ground, hardly turning their heads to notice the blue-coated revolutionaries and the khaki-coated royalists facing each other with arms in their hands at the side of the street. A population,” he concluded, “that has seen so many uprisings and disorders within the last few years could hardly be expected to give great attention to so haphazard a bickering as this.”6

  Sometimes it all seemed rather like a scene from an operetta. At the party he attended to celebrate the success of the revolution, in the Beau Rivage restaurant, Scheikevitch noted the portraits of King Constantine and Queen Sofia turned to the wall, and pictures of Venizelos, cut out of the local newspapers, pasted on the back. The writer William McFee thought the whole affair resembled a “soap opera.” Venizelos himself could see the humorous side. “Well, Mr. Wratislaw, here I am again; in revolt as usual,” he remarked wrily to the British consul, an old friend, who had known him since his days as an insurgent in Crete fighting against the Turks.7

  Yet the stakes were high. By providing a diplomatic fig-leaf for the Entente presence in Greece, Venizelos aimed to give his country a voice when the spoils of war were eventually divided up. And there was appreciable military assistance too: his provisional government eventually sent two hundred thousand recruits to the front. From this point of view, Scheikevitch, for all his sneering dislike of “the immense buffoonery” of “the Venizelist masquerade,” surely hit the nail on the head. Criticizing his fellow-Frenchmen for feeling the need to take sides between Venizelos and the King, he pointed out that both men “sought the same goal—the realization of a Greater Greece. The Venizelist revolt was necessary to preserve Greek control over a Macedonia which threatened to escape them”; the “Army of M. Venizelos is destined much less to fight than to permit the servants of the “Great Idea” to count in the decisions of the arbiters of the peace.” Initially merely tolerated by the Entente powers, and scarcely encouraged even to build on his position, Venizelos’s patience was eventually rewarded by full international recognition at the start of January 1917. Six months later, King Constantine was forced to abdicate and Venizelos left the Macedonian capital for Athens again. With the “union of the two Greeces,” Salonica’s “short heyday” in the political limelight came to an end. But the political consequences for Greece were lasting, and the so-called “national schism” divided royalists and republicans for many years.8

  THE ARMY OF THE ORIENT

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE ARMY of the Orient—or as the British termed them back home, the “Gardeners of Salonica”—transformed the city into “one of the busiest hives of humanity in the world.” “A magic wand,” wrote a local journalist, “seemed to have awakened from its sleep this city which had enjoyed calm and a perfect tranquillity.” Between 1912 and 1916, an influx of Greek refugees, officials, street-traders and businessmen had already lifted the population to close to 170,000. With several hundred thousand soldiers soon camped in and around it, Salonica’s population more than doubled in just over a year. In this period of “feverish activity,” wrote a British journalist, “the great transports that came into the splendid bay discharged troops or munitions daily. There were docks, camps, offices, transport, telephones, dumps, hospitals.” By the summer of 1916, it struck him as “probably the most crowded city in the universe.” Demetra Vaka, a Greek writer who knew the city well from prewar visits, could scarcely recognize it in its new incarnation: “The amount of traffic was incredible to me, who had last seen the city and the bay when it seemed to have been left over, asleep from the Middle Ages. It was now a new city, in which I was completely lost and in which nothing looked familiar.”9

  The war accelerated the growth and expansion of settlements where ten years before there had been estuarial marshlands, abandoned fields and swamp. A French officer arriving by sea in 1917 was startled to discern—on either side of the minarets and city walls of the old town—“Allied camps which extend along the horizon into infinity … thousands and thousands of marabouts and tents which look like white points under the burning sun.” To the west, on the edges of the Vardar plain, the troops were housed in wooden barracks and yellow-brown canvas tents. A new “Avenue de la Base” was cut from the quays directly to the Vardar Gate, where the unprecedented traffic was controlled by British military policemen. Beyond lay fair stalls, cafés and military canteens, then a settlement of Serb refugees, another straggling row of small shops, the Italian camp and the original encampment of Zeitenlik itself—“an entire city of wood and canvas.” “The immense undulating district between Zeitenlick and Salonika is peopled with an army,” a doctor wrote home. “Formerly it was a desert. Now there are fantastically long lines and groups of tents—towns under canvas; there are masses of munitions, a conglomeration of motor cars of every model and form, a hundred motor-ambulances in a line, rows of wagons thirty or forty deep.” To the east, beyond the cemeteries and the villas and tree-lined boulevards of Kalamaria, lay the aerodromes, the military hospitals, the Anzac camps amid the woods by the shoreline and the British staff headquarters in the Depot and on the slopes of Mount Hortiatis. By night, their lanterns shone upon what one described as “the Lilliputian, ephemeral and powerful city of an army.”10

  To an already multi-lingual town, the newcomers added numerous new shades and tongues. Even today visitors to the mil
itary cemetery at Zeitenlik—now hard to locate amid the urban sprawl of postwar tenements—will find the remains of the hundreds of French Senegalese troops who died there of malaria. Both the British and French armies included colonial units drawn from Africa, Asia and the Dominions. Vietnamese tents were pitched just behind the White Tower, and the red-fezzed Senegalese lodged in the suburb of Karagatsia. There were Italians, Russians—fifteen thousand of whom landed in 1916, just before revolutionary slogans started circulating among them—Albanians and the remnants of the Serb army, led by the ageing King Peter. Off-duty, they crowded together in the narrow streets by the waterfront. Weaving their way amid the street-sellers, they shopped for trinkets, or muscled their way to a table at Floca’s, Roma or the Bristol. On the Rue Venizelos—formerly Sabri Pasha—in the early evening where “the agitated fever among the main cafés was so intense that one could not move”—one discerned “many hundreds of warriors gathered festively round those little tables. French, Russians and Cossacks, Italians, British, Serbian, French colonials, Senegalese, Zouaves, and men from Madagascar—Indians, Annanese, Albanians, Macedonians and Greeks” in a kaleidoscope of bemedalled uniforms.11

 

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