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

by Mark Mazower

  The city itself bemused the soldiers with its ambiguities and its sheer commercialism. One saw it as a “coquette” surrounded by cemeteries. “She babbles all the tongues of Europe and speaks none of them aright,” wrote the novelist William McFee. “She has nothing to give but death, yet the nations fling themselves upon her.” Other, less literary types, were not so melodramatic. In the best-selling epic parody of Hiawatha—“Tiadatha”—which an officer in the 6th Wiltshires wrote while there:

  Tiadatha thought of Kipling,

  Wondered if he’s ever been there

  Thought: “At least in Rue Egnatia

  East and West are met together.”

  There were trams and Turkish beggars,

  Mosques and minarets and churches,

  Turkish baths and dirty cafés,

  Picture palaces and kan-kans:

  Daimler cars and Leyland lorries

  Barging into buffalo wagons,

  French and English private soldiers

  Jostling seedy Eastern brigands.12

  And, for the majority of working-class recruits, war provided their first opportunity to travel. “From the boat deck, the rising of the morning was a very lovely sight,” wrote Ned Casey, an Irish working-class boy from Canning Town, six decades later, “so different to the Albert Dock.” The contrast with the “cold hard world” of East London hit him at once, as he caught sight of

  a great big bearded man, his legs scraping along the ground, riding a very small Donkey, while his woman with a bit of rope over her shoulder seem[ed] to drag the old [thing] along. I had pictures in my prayer book that looked exactly like the people I saw in this Greek City. I knew that our Lord, who was a carpenter, had a donkey but he let his wife who was the Virgin Mary ride the Donkey. All my Mates remarked look at that lazy bugger, he ought to be ashamed of himself, treating a tart like that. Christ if that bloke did that along the Barking he would be pinched, and the Cockney Tarts would cut his love affair off. I was to see many such sights while stationed in Greece.13

  The presence of a huge modern fleet in the bay, the camps springing up on the city’s edges, the influx of lorries, bureaucracies, languages had replaced the Turkish past with a “feverish, make-believe pleasure.” “Salonica since the war has lost a little of its Orientalism,” wrote an officer. In this jostling dusty chaos, ranks, tongues and races intermingled in a bewildering fashion. Riding the trams, an American journalist noted that “one of our ‘Jim-Crow’ street-cars would puzzle a Turk. He would not understand why we separate the white and the black man.” This was what one serviceman called “the disagreeable disorder” of the wartime city, though another regarded it as simply “living in the present.” English or French soldiers were astonished at the locals’ ability to speak four or five languages. But even though they could converse in many languages, shopkeepers and shoe-blacks could rarely speak the important ones fluently enough to escape the visiting officers’ ridicule or contempt. The latter particularly disliked the “Hello, Johnny!” with which enterprising local street-sellers greeted officers and men alike. Fighting the summer dust and winter mud, constantly assailed by “intolerable” assaults, the taps on the shoulder of the youthful loustroi (shoe-blacks) and sellers of the Balkan News, the “Gardeners of Salonica” struggled to preserve that tidy, dignified and disciplined appearance to which they attached such importance.

  CIVILIZING MACEDONIA

  MAKING ORDER OUT OF CHAOS was how many British and French officers saw their task. “One has above all to be organized,” a French officer insisted in his discussion of what he termed “this colonial war.” Steeped in an imperial tradition—proud of their civilizing mission in India and North Africa—they were out not only to defeat the enemy on the battlefield, but to demonstrate, before the eyes of the locals, the benefits of European civilization. War could be a “creator of the future, the powerful agent of renovation,” wrote a British war correspondent, and armies could serve to bring progress, method and modern technology to those benighted regions which had suffered from ages of neglect and ignorance. Since 1915, wrote the author of The Civilizing Work of the French Army in Macedonia, Macedonia “will have breathed again, worked, learned many things which she knew not and will not forget.” The British too extolled what one journalist termed “the stimulus of the Great War”; “Our labours,” wrote another, “if they have done nothing else, have stretched the framework of civilization across the country.”14

  Military necessity, after all, demonstrated how “human energy” and force of will could impose themselves on a land and its people. Macedonia—a word pregnant with associations for the Europeans—lay before them, a land of enormous potential fertility gone to waste through misrule and passivity, transformed over the centuries from ally of man to obstacle and impediment. This was not only war “against man alone, but also against Nature—Nature neglected, misused, spurned,” wrote Harold Lake in 1917. One instance of this was the campaign against malaria, which was rife in the marshy plains around the city. Indeed in the first year, the mosquito was a more deadly foe than the enemy himself, and thousands of soldiers died. No sooner had they dug trenches, gun emplacements and fortified concrete bunkers to defend themselves against the Bulgarians than they had to assemble a vast armoury of fly-strafers, whisks, swatters, guns, curtains, nets and papers against the lethal insects. Most of the men who waded through the shallows and reeds of the Vardar River to recover the wreckage of a Zeppelin came down with fever within hours. At one point, no less than twenty per cent of the entire British force was hospitalized. An intense programme of medical research began into the causes of malaria, and quinine was widely distributed, both to the troops and to the civilian population. The water-level was lowered, thanks to the construction of new drainage canals stretching for miles, and ponds were drained, filled in or sprayed with paraffin. In the spring of 1917 troops were pulled back from the valleys to new positions on higher ground. As a result, losses from malaria dropped sharply in the last two years of the campaign and the foundations were laid for the more extensive public works which the Greek state would undertake in the region after the war was over.15

  Drinking water was the other key health problem, especially as the increase in demand had led to an unbearable strain on the city’s supply. General Sarrail created a water service to tackle the problem, built a new aqueduct from Hortiatis, eleven kilometers away, bored hundreds of new wells and restored large numbers of disused fountains and springs. The food crisis that was created by the sudden influx of the Entente forces led him to establish a special provisioning service to take control of the local harvest. A farm school was set up to train peasants in modern methods—metal ploughs, modern mechanized threshing and reaping—and model farms demonstrated the superior productivity of the results. Meantime, fresh vegetables and fruit were brought from southern Italy, and refrigeration ships kept the troops supplied with meat. Special factories producing beer and ice for the men arose on the outskirts of the city; others provided the bricks and planks they needed for their housing. Thousands of civilian labourers laid hundreds of miles of new roads to carry men and munitions to the front as well as new rail lines, in and around the city. For the first time, the hills echoed to the sound of three-ton trucks and occasional aircraft.

  Even the region’s past could be transformed by the new civilizers. “Faithful to the French traditions of Egypt and the Morea,” wrote a propagandist in 1918, “the Army of the Orient will have the honour to establish the foundations of a scientific study of Macedonia.” A wartime French archaeological service was set up which by 1919 had identified more than seventy proto-historic sites in the area, conducted numerous excavations, collected the finds and displayed them to the troops. Not to be outdone, the British ordered all their men to report finds to headquarters as well. Many artefacts were uncovered in the digging of trenches, dug-outs and gun emplacements, while officers and men scavenged among the prehistoric tumuli that dotted the landscape.16

  Ev
er since the eighteenth century, local tomb-robbers and grave-diggers had been busy supplying Europe’s antiquities markets. This time, however, it was not andarte bands who were rifling the sites in Salonica’s hinterland, but officers of the Black Watch, the Leinsters and the Wiltshires. Major T. G. Anderson, a man with some experience of excavating in Egypt, reported a coffin containing bones, dishes and jewellery; the Cheshires sent in funerary objects, while the construction of dug-outs near the Bulgarian frontline at Doiran revealed a prehistoric cemetery (though continuous shellfire hampered detailed investigation).

  The beleaguered Greek inspectors of antiquities sought the support of their allies in setting up a museum locally. In December 1918, they proposed that the Louvre and the British Museum make a grant of prehistoric objects from their collections “as recognition of the interest and love which the British and French Army of the Orient displayed throughout the war for the history and culture of our country.” Traffic was moving in the other direction, however, and strict orders came from London that holdings in British hands were to be shipped back to England. The Greeks were outraged but could do nothing about it as they were hoping to tap the British and French for loans and long-term investment funds to rebuild their new territories. In the 1919 Annual of the British School at Athens we find a scholarly note written by Ernest Gardner, sometime naval intelligence officer and head of the wartime Salonica Headquarters Museum, alluding to the fact that the objects formerly displayed there “have now very generously been given by the Greek Government to the British nation” and placed in the British Museum.17

  16

  The Great Fire

  AUGUST 18, 1917, was a typically hot and sunny summer’s day. That afternoon a strong north wind was blowing across the city, as it had done for two or three days continuously. Henry Collinson Owen, a journalist serving with the British forces, was sitting down to tea when his Greek maid informed him that a cloud of smoke was billowing above the houses in the Turkish quarter. Fires were commonplace in Salonica; curious rather than alarmed, he went onto the roof from where he could see over the entire city. Looking through field glasses, he observed that in the northwestern corner of the Upper Town, on the hill above the port, the fire had set a considerable area alight and was being fanned towards him by the wind. Gradually, the columns of smoke over the old town grew denser, and by dusk the roads and alleys leading down the slopes were congested with refugees fleeing the blaze, crossing the Rue Egnatia to the open spaces of the lower town by the seafront. Those soldiers who battled their way up through the crowds encountered a frantic throng of Muslims and Ma’min, elderly Jews wearing fezzes, slippers and their long gabardine intari, women clutching their children by the hand, sobbing, shouting and imploring for help. British troops burst into a Turkish house, in response to frantic knocking, and found that the master had fled, leaving his veiled wives locked inside their haremlik. Some noticed the strange calmness that fell over people once their homes were burnt: “up to that point they wept, blasphemed, prayed and ran hither and thither wringing their hands; once the house was burnt, however, they made their way in silence out of the district.”1

  “It was an amazing and sad scene,” wrote Collinson Owen, “the wailing families, the crash of falling houses as the flames tore along, swept by the wind; and in the narrow streets, a slow-moving mass of pack-donkeys, loaded carts, hamals carrying enormous loads; Greek boy scouts (doing excellent work); soldiers of all nations as yet unorganized to do anything definite; ancient wooden fire-engines that creaked pathetically as they spat out ineffectual trickles of water; and people carrying beds (hundreds of flock and feather beds), wardrobes, mirrors, pots and pans, sewing machines (every family made a desperate endeavour to save its sewing machine) and a general collection of ponderous rubbish.”2

  Area destroyed by the 1917 fire

  The refugees, as they made their way down to the sea and sat on the quay, would not be parted from their belongings. Soldiers, working continuously to transfer people to the British lighters, found that the only way they could be shifted was to throw their possessions onto the lighter first—the owner then followed. By nightfall the blaze had spread into the lower town and buildings were being blown up in a futile attempt to stem the course of the fire. Streams of red wine flowed into the gutters from bursting barrels of French army claret; at Floca’s café, directly in the line of the inferno, perspiring officers were invited by the owner to help themselves to whatever they found. Returning to his roof for one last look, Collinson Owen saw a sea of vivid red, out of which were thrust the long, white needles of the minarets. Clouds of smoke, streaked with enormous tongues of flame, hung over the city. Towards midnight, the buildings fronting the sea caught fire and within minutes the entire three-quarters of a mile of the front was one vast cliff of orange and white flame raining incandescent ash down onto the quay, setting ablaze cars, carts and several caiques, which had to be hurriedly pushed off from the sea-wall where they had been moored.

  Thereafter the fire, albeit slowly, passed its peak. Some buildings were still burning two days later when soldiers re-entered the town to inspect the devastation. The damage was almost incomprehensible. No less than three-quarters of the old city had been destroyed, according to an official report—“all the banks, all the business premises, all the hotels and practically all the shops, theatres and cinemas were reduced to ashes. Most of the churches fortunately escaped, but of the beautiful Byzantine church of Demetrios, only the bare walls remain.” The strong wind, the shortage of water, the difficulty posed to fire-fighters by the narrow roads had all contributed to the scale of the devastation. Ninety-five hundred buildings were destroyed and over seventy thousand people had lost their homes. The Jewish community was worst affected for the fire had consumed its historic quarters: most of its thirty-seven synagogues were gone, its libraries, schools, club buildings and offices. Many mosques were also burned, as were most of the great khans—Ismail Pasha, Eski Youmbrouk, the Pasha Oriental—which had housed travellers through the centuries.

  In the immediate aftermath, Allied military personnel helped the Greek authorities find shelter for the homeless. Many were settled provisionally in tents, huts and sheds around the city; those who could stay with relatives elsewhere were encouraged to leave. Five thousand Greeks moved to Athens, Volos and Larissa, and several hundred Jews—mostly very poor—emigrated to France, Italy, Spain, the USA and Old Greece. Soup kitchens were set up and fed thirty thousand daily. By September, there were only seventy-five hundred still in tents. Yet rebuilding would take very much longer. Two months after the fire, wrote a British soldier, “Salonica was a city of the dead. Its streets were deserted, its cafés and restaurants were no more, and at night the gibbous moon cast its silvery light over a waste land of ghostly ruins, projecting hanging girders and the blackened shells of houses … The slender but solidly built minarets had in most cases survived … and as one carefully picked his way through that stricken town, wailing on the still night air sounded the muezzin’s calls: ‘Alla-hu-akbar!’ ”3

  In 1917, the brick frontier advancing slowly southeastwards over centuries from the seaboard of northern Europe had not yet reached the Balkans, where wood still remained the chief means of construction. In Salonica, fires were such a regular occurrence that prayers against them formed part of the local Yom Kippur service. With the increase in the town’s population in the nineteenth century, and the growing shortage of water, they seem to have got worse. “The French consul,” reported Ami Boué in 1854, “told us that he was always obliged to safeguard his most precious papers before going to the countryside for fear of fire.” Forty years and three major fires later, an American scholar, hoping to add to his collection of Judaica, was repeatedly told in his book-hunting expedition round the town: “We had books, but they were burned.” The great fire of 1890 had done huge damage to the centre of the Hamidian city, especially near the Christian quarter round the Hippodrome. But this was dwarfed by the impact of the 1917
fire which destroyed the essence of the Ottoman town, and its Jewish core. Out of the ashes, an entirely new town began to emerge, one moulded in the image of the Greek state and its society.4

  REBUILDING THE CITY

  “THE FIRE HAS CREATED THE CHANCE to build a new Salonica, a showpiece of business and commerce, commanding the foreigners’ respect,” wrote a British journalist in The Comitadji on 2 September. But officialdom was ahead of the journalists and moving with astonishing speed. Within five days of the fire, a meeting had been convened in Athens to discuss the government’s response, and the important decision was taken to expropriate the whole of the fire-affected city centre, and to rebuild the area on a new basis. General Sarrail offered his assistance, and recommended the architects and engineers on his own staff to the Greek authorities. As a result, a committee of Greek, French and British experts was quickly established. Prime Minister Venizelos had previously felt frustrated at his inability to force through what he considered badly needed aesthetic and hygienic improvements to Salonica during the previous four years. The fire, as he put it later, came “almost as a gift of divine providence” and he told the committee’s chairman, the distinguished British landscape architect Thomas Mawson, to regard the city as a blank slate. The results were far-reaching, and have been described by a recent historian as “the first great work of European urban planning of the twentieth century.” They eradicated the last downtown traces of the old Ottoman town and substituted the modernizers’ vision of a city conceived as an integrated whole.5