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

by Mark Mazower

  After the fire: the 1918 plan

  Both Venizelos and his minister of communications, Alexandros Papanastasiou, were capable and decisive men who believed—in the prime minister’s words—in “thinking big,” and regarded the Ottoman city they had inherited as unworthy of the progressive and modern nation they wished Greece to become. Over the previous century, the ending of Ottoman rule had led to new towns being built throughout much of Greece, but nowhere—not even mid-nineteenth-century Athens—had these settlements come close to the size and importance of Salonica. For Papanastasiou, the problem was not only the unhygienic and uneconomic character of the old town; it was also the way that individual property owners had previously been able to block any attempt at improvements for the general good. Wholesale expropriation would allow the government to plan on the basis of new, larger and more regularly shaped building plots, allowing broader, straighter streets, larger squares and, in all, an urban design that was both more functional and more pleasing to the eye. Before August was out, a law had been passed providing for the immediate demolition of the affected area and prohibiting rebuilding without government permission. Engineers carried out the demolitions, and the huts, tents and benches of street-traders who had begun to drift into the centre were shifted to new areas on its outskirts, by the White Tower, and along the Langada road. The only living beings left amid the ruins were several hundred destitute Jewish refugees, who passed the winter in dark, damp cellars and half-rotten burned-out synagogues in danger of collapse.6

  Mawson was a landscape gardener, best known for his work in colonial estates from Hampstead to Vancouver. But before the war he had also been advising the Greeks on urban improvements in Athens, and all concerned seem to have seen Salonica as an extension of this. Barely three months after the planning committee first met, a preliminary study had already been exhibited to the public and an exhausted Mawson had been sent back to England to recuperate. Filling his place was a Frenchman, Ernst Hébrard, a younger man, who had been excavating Roman and Byzantine sites in the city for the army’s archaeological service. Hébrard was an architect too. Some years earlier he had published a study of the “world city” of the future; later he would go on to design towns in French Indochina. Like Mawson, he was a creature of the colonial era, only in his case, Salonica was an important stepping-stone near the start of his career and the plan that emerged bore his imprint.7

  Putting theory into practice, the Hébrard Plan fundamentally changed the character of the historic heart of the city for it envisaged a chiefly administrative and business quarter, with residential space relegated to the outskirts and the new suburbs. A new industrial zone was to be established behind the port, condemning the old Ottoman pleasure gardens to a slow demise. The open slopes beyond the eastern walls were to be turned into parkland and the campus of a new university, displacing the vast cemeteries there. Space in general was identified on the basis of its use and function, something quite alien to the city that had preceded it. Streets were to be widened and straightened and the rectangular plot became the norm; the winding narrow alleys which had obstructed Emmanuel Miller’s efforts to carry off Las Incantadas in 1864 were banished for ever. Long vistas down regular thoroughfares would carry traffic, views, light and air into the very heart of what had been the most insanitary, crowded and unregulated part of the Ottoman town. Even architectural forms themselves were to be regulated, and the plan, with a typical mixture of authoritarianism and naivety, proposed a uniformity of building styles (functional for the workers and lower-middle classes, neo-Byzantine for the downtown municipal buildings), height and colours (“unaesthetic” shades were to be prohibited). A wide avenue was to be cut running down the hill from a large central square on the Via Egnatia to the sea, flanked by grand public buildings, with traffic carried through the city on intersecting roads which ran parallel with the shoreline.

  There remained, however, the question of what was to be done with the former inhabitants of the fire-affected zone themselves. Where were they to live and what claim should they have, if any, on the expropriated land? Here was perhaps the most controversial aspect of the entire scheme. Desiring to preserve for itself as much room to manoeuvre as possible, the government stuck fast to its original intention of compensating the owners with certificates which they could use to bid for building land under the plan when it was made available. Most refugees were housed temporarily in shelters and army barracks around the outskirts of the city. Gradually it became clear to them that they would not be returning home.

  As the overwhelming majority of these were Jews, there was little doubt in the minds of the leaders of the Jewish community that one of the goals of the plan was to drive Jews from the city’s centre. Protests were sent almost immediately to international Jewish organizations to solicit their support. The government denied that “it sought to displace the [existing] population of Salonica and settle another in its stead.” Its goal was modernity and civilization, not ethnic engineering. Yet the two were not incompatible and it is striking that most of those entrusted with the plan itself appear to have assumed that its impact on the ethnic balance of the city was not a secondary consideration. “Mawson did state,” reported Hetty Goldman to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, “that the fundamental purpose of the plan was to deprive the Jews of complete control of the city.” But, she went on, he added “that there was no desire to oust them completely. On the contrary, the Greeks wished to retain the Jewish element of the population and … those who could afford to buy back the larger ground plots would doubtless be able to do so. The man with the small property would be the one to suffer.”8

  This was an accurate assessment. The Jews were not an accidental target for they were, at any rate in their traditional pattern of settlement, an integral part of the fabric of the Ottoman city: one could not Westernize Salonica without uprooting the Jews. On the other hand, Jews were not barred from the new plots in the heart of the city, nor prevented from buying there. On the contrary, the Jewish community invested heavily in land in the central zone, and a number of Jewish businessmen did likewise, alongside their Christian counterparts and competitors. The Stoa Modiano was built to house the fruit and vegetable market and a new central synagogue provided the public face of the new, highly centralized religious community. What happened was as much a socio-economic change as an ethnic one. With the government relying on private investors to bear the costs of rebuilding, the wealthiest former inhabitants of the centre benefited most and returned, while those who sold their certificates early or lacked funds were pushed to the shanty-towns on the outskirts. Jewish workers settled on the slopes to the east and west of the city, while the Jewish middle classes enjoyed sea frontage from their villas on the way to Kalamaria. In fact, some of the poorest Jews in the city may well have been better off as a result of the forced relocation. Noting that 2700 poor Jewish families had been rehoused by February 1920, a report from a committee representing their interests concluded that “on the whole the Jewish families have now been provided with better housing than those they had before the fire. As a matter of fact, in the old city, thousands of persons formerly lived in basements and cellars, where light entered in most instances, through very small shafts only, in narrow, humid and filthy alleys. In nearly all of the new quarters, the rooms are well aired. Nothing has been neglected to assure good hygienic conditions.”9

  Continuing the trend evident since the 1890s, the city was separating on class rather than ethnic lines; workers were to be kept apart from the bourgeoisie, and their places of entertainment were separated too. But there was in fact a deeper truth to the complaints of Jewish leaders: the plan’s primary purpose—and here it surely succeeded—was to assert the control of the Greek authorities over the very heart of the city, and that goal was incompatible with the old spatial organization of Ottoman Salonica where the densely packed Jewish quarters had dominated its core. Today not even the lay-out of the streets betrays where exactly
among the downtown boutiques the numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century synagogues were once situated.

  FROM A LOCAL PAPER at the end of December 1918 came the following comment, entitled “Papa’s Sketches”:

  “You see Thessaloniki, how beautifully she has been rebuilt?”

  “Where?”

  “On paper, for now.”

  “Let’s see.”

  “Look! A first-class city, with everything. With areas for the rich and separate ones for the workers.”

  “And have they really built somewhere specially for us workers?”

  “Have they built it? It’s paradise.”

  “And where are our neighbourhoods, then?”

  “You can’t see them. They are behind the page.”10

  The pretensions and ambitions of the planners quickly attracted comment from satirists and journalists even before Mawson’s preliminary plan was published. One “proposal” at the end of November 1917 suggested helpfully that

  The piers should be turned into a hill where a téléférique transports people into the air.

  The trams should be turned into boats, and canals built everywhere.

  The harbour should become a square, the forum of Thessaloniki.

  The Arch of Triumph, which is not pretty, should be demolished and the bits used to build an Eiffel Tower.

  Eleftheria Square should be removed from the new plan and turned into a cemetery.

  We should preserve some ruined houses from the fire and declare them historic monuments.11

  And indeed, reality—as is its way with town planners and architects—soon modified and whittled down the initial proposals. How could it not have done when there were no less than ten changes of government between 1920 and 1924, the most turbulent period in Greece’s history? Within the city centre, Mawson’s original plan to unify the railway termini into one grand new station was quickly abandoned: the various lines and stations continued to confuse visitors for several more decades. And after 1920 a new government made more changes, reducing the size of secondary squares, narrowing roads, doubling the number and cutting the size of the plots in order to appease the discontented owners.

  Money—or the Greek state’s lack of it—was the key obstacle. Even the socialist Papanastasiou soon realized that without private investors, the centre would never get rebuilt. Thus most of the actual construction was left to individual property-owners and well-connected private developers, who did their best to thwart Hébrard’s visions of a regulated and uniform aesthetic approach. The hotels, office blocks, apartment buildings, cafés and cinemas of the interwar years ended up in a bewildering variety of styles—pseudo–Louis XV, neo-Renaissance, -Venetian and -Moorish, Art Deco, “Mauritarian-Islamic” and even the occasional glimpse of Bauhaus—alongside the rather stolid Byzantine-Italian mode that Hébrard had deemed most suitable for the city as a whole. There were also gaps and lags: the central waterfront square, Plateia Aristotelous, was finished only in the 1950s and 1960s, and Plateia Eleftherias was just one of the planned open spaces to be turned into a car-park.

  Even the city’s Byzantine character was emphasized in a slightly absent-minded fashion, as if the planners were more interested in the future than the past. Mosques were converted back into churches, and restored—or, in the case of the fire-ravaged Saint Dimitrios, rebuilt—in a way that cleansed them of the accretion of centuries and brought out what the architects regarded as their “highest value.” Sheds, shops and other unworthy elements were removed from the main sites, allowing them to be appreciated in a sanitized environment stripped of all distractions and encumbrances. Yet apart from the use of a few well-known churches as visual reference points, the planners appear to have attached little importance to the city’s monumental past. The Arch of Galerius still sits as an afterthought near the eastern end of Egnatia; had Hébrard had his way, it would have been dwarfed by an entirely new colossal Arch of Triumph—never, as it turned out, to be built. To the fury of the inspector of antiquities, no provision was made for an archaeological museum, and he had to struggle to get permission to house his collection in the Yeni Djami, the Ma’min mosque.

  Downtown, the basic layout of streets remained surprisingly close to the plan’s original conception. But outside the city centre the plan’s impact fell away sharply. Grand schemes for garden towns remained on paper, and many refugees either housed themselves in shacks made of beaten-out tin, planks and board, or were housed in the army barracks and military hospitals left by the departing French, Italians and British. A model workers’ settlement was only half-finished. Mawson’s vision of a new university campus adjacent to the eastern walls would have to wait till after the German occupation in the Second World War. And, as we shall see, with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of new refugees in 1922–23, the city expanded rapidly in all directions, too quickly and too haphazardly for the hard-pressed municipal and national authorities to do much more than monitor what was happening.

  But back in 1917 the planners could have been forgiven for failing to anticipate the new challenges the city would face. Between 1917 and 1923 the Greek-Turkish antagonism reached a new pitch, climaxing in a further war, the Greek landing and occupation of Izmir, and the invasion of Anatolia; this was followed by catastrophic defeat at the hands of Mustafa Kemal’s new Turkish army, and a forced movement of populations without any precedent in history. More than thirty thousand Muslims were obliged to leave the city. At the same time, nearly one hundred thousand Christian refugees arrived from eastern Thrace, Anatolia and the Black Sea, and turned Greeks back into a majority of Salonica’s population for the first time since the Byzantine era. In 1913, Greeks had been a minority of the city’s 157,000 inhabitants; by 1928 they were 75% of its population of 236,000. Thanks to war, the fire and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, this was now a new city, organized on new principles and populated by newcomers. By 1930, only a small proportion of Salonica’s inhabitants could remember the city as it had existed in the days of Abdul Hamid.12

  17

  The Muslim Exodus

  AN OLD COLOURED POSTCARD shows a vast Muslim cemetery stretching into the distance, shaded by cypresses and guarded by a low parapet. Hundreds of tombstones, some turbanned, others unadorned, peep through the high grass. In the background there are larger, more distinguished graves, decorated with marble columns, clusters of grapes and wreaths, and behind them a long building of some kind. The message on the back reads:

  22 Juin 1916

  Mon cher Papa. Voici encore une curiosité de Salonique, un des rares cimetières turques à peu près. Au fond se trouve la mosque des dervishes tourneurs dont il ne reste plus qu’un seul specimen, par contre des familles musulmanes refugies y sont établi leurs campements …*

  The author was probably a French soldier, and the card is one of the last images we have of the cemetery adjoining the main Salonica tekke of the Mevlevi dervish order, among the loveliest spots in the city. Perched on rising ground outside the northwest corner of the walls with a view over the gulf and the Vardar plain, it marked, according to legend, a place of conspicuous piety. In the early seventeenth century, the vizier Ahmed Pasha had been forced out of Istanbul by his enemies, and was living in disgrace in Salonica, when he went for a stroll and fell into conversation with a Mevlevi hermit inhabiting the boughs of a huge tree. The hermit prophesied his return to power and after this came to pass, Ahmed Pasha endowed a vakf to support the Mevlevis and built a monastery on the spot of their encounter. The hermit became the tekke’s first sheykh and over the centuries the monastery itself became renowned throughout the empire for its wealth.1

  A wall fortified it against intruders, and behind its large iron gate a garden of cypresses shaded the tombs of the faithful. The main building was fronted by a curving wooden façade of colonnaded porticos with a verandah and huge overhanging timbered eaves that ran its entire length. Inside there were reading rooms and cells for the monks, giving on to a richly decorat
ed central hall which greatly impressed the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Chelebi: “It has a remarkable cupola, more beautifully constructed than the Mevlevi dervish monastery in Besiktas. Even Habib-Noutzar, the patron himself of carpenters, could not make a dome like this one. The paintings are like magic.” Here was the space where adepts performed the ecstatic whirling dance which brought them closer to the divine. But the tekke was also a place of learning, where the Mesnevi of the founder Djelaladin Rumi was recited and the Qur’an discussed, a place of charity, which fed the poor and lodged pilgrims, as well as a centre for festivities at the start of each summer.2

  In Salonica itself, the Mevlevi order enjoyed great prestige. With revenues from the salteries around the gulf, and from other duties, the sheykh ran a foundation of considerable local power. In the early nineteenth century the incumbent was known locally as “Talleyrand” for his political acumen. It was a Mevlevi hodja who admitted pilgrims to Salonica’s most important shrine—the chapel of Ayios Dimitrios—in whose miraculous powers he believed no less than anyone else. Many notables, including governors of the city, belonged to the order and Sultan Mehmed Resad V attended a service in 1911, during the final imperial tour of the European provinces. The visiting card of Ali Eshref, the last sheykh, gave his traditional Mevlevi title—Head of the Sheykhs—but he was also known to have liberal and constitutionalist sympathies, and was widely respected by the population as a whole. Today, the only trace of the Mevlevis in Salonica is the name they have given to the neighbourhood where they once were based. Nothing remains of the monastery, nor of the cemetery, and a school now stands on the site. When our French visitor penned his postcard in 1916—barely five years after the Sultan’s visit—the building was crumbling through neglect, and was being used to house Muslim refugees from the hinterland.