by Mark Mazower
THE CITY WITHOUT MUSLIMS
UNDER THE TERMS OF THE POPULATION EXCHANGE, the properties they left behind—they had been forbidden to sell their homes privately since late 1922—were due to be taken over by the state for the benefit of the incoming Christian refugees. In the old city, this amounted to a very considerable collection of real estate since Muslims, despite their depleted numbers, possessed much more property than Greeks or Jews. At least one-third of the burned zone, for instance, had been owned by them. In the Upper Town, the proportion was much higher, and entire streets and neighbourhoods were emptied of the former owners. It is not surprising that for years after the Greek refugees had settled there, the ghosts of local dervishes and Muslim saints were reported around their old haunts, clustering in particular by old fountains, shrines and former mosques: exorcists were much in demand as new house-buyers moved in. From January 1925, the first formerly Muslim commercial properties were auctioned off in a kafeneion by the Syntrivani fountain: Rifaat Efendi’s shop on Markos Botsaris Street, and Ahmed Hussein’s on Army Avenue were the first to go under the hammer; by April, the new tenants of these properties had already formed an association to protect their interests.30
As if to erase any indication that there had ever been Muslims in the city, the municipality decided almost immediately to demolish the city’s minarets, which had been the defining feature of Salonica’s skyline, and invited building companies to bid for the work. “One after the other, the symbols of a barbarous religion fall crashing to the ground,” wrote one journalist. “The forest of white minarets is thinning out … The red fezzes are leaving, the yashmaks vanish. What else remains? Nothing. Nothing after some months will remind us that the occupier swaggered through here, shamelessly raising emblems of his faith, sullying magnificent temples of Orthodoxy! … Their threatening height will no longer intimidate us, nor remind us of the former misfortunes of our race, the frightful slavery and the sufferings of their subjects. The voice of the muezzin will no longer bother our ears, and he and his voice will disappear in the depths of their new country … Nothing, nothing at all must remind us again of the epoch of slavery.”31
The demolitions followed the pattern set over the past century in Old Greece and elsewhere in the Balkans where the departure of Muslims was often followed swiftly by the destruction of their places of worship. But not everyone agreed: “I accept as correct and logical the demolition of the minarets of former Christian churches which had been turned into mosques,” declared the former prime minister, Alexander Papanastasiou, in a press interview. “But the demolition of the minarets of other mosques is a coarse act stemming from mindless chauvinism. Those issuing the decree imagined that they could thus make the traces of Turkish occupation disappear. But history is not written with the destruction of innocent monuments which beautified the city.” For Papanastasiou, the minarets too were a “national resource.” Typically, he argued that “the disappearance of the traces of the occupation should come about only through the elevation of our own civilization.” But his opinion came too late to affect the outcome, and anyway in the circumstances it was unlikely he would have been heard with sympathy.32
Even the few religious buildings that survived aroused angry attacks in the press. Leading the charge was Nikolaos Fardis, a journalist whose ardent nationalism would lead him down the path of collaboration in the Second World War:
Who can tell me why that disgusting Hamza mosque remains on the key corner of Venizelos and Egnatia streets? Architectural value? None! Historic value? Less than none! The square building is simply ugly … And the state uses part of this miserable mass of stones as … cabins of the telephone exchange where everyone goes when they want to call Athens! And yet around the mosque huge blocks have gone up, and the road, prepared for the double set of tram lines, with its luxurious lamps, looks almost European. As soon as we can we must tear down the Hamza mosque which someone paid two or more millions for.33
Fardis’s spite was turned equally against other such remnants—the “miserable baths” by the White Tower (which were eventually demolished), another old bath-house by the Stoa Modiano, and even the covered market, the bezesten, whose survival he attributed to a mania among the urban planners for “local colour.” Thanks to such attitudes, almost all the city’s medreses, mosques and tekkes disappeared and today only the hundred-foot-high minaret of the Rotonda survives out of the dozens which once punctuated the skyline.34
Outside the heart of the city, the story was slightly different. The old Turkish cemetery, beyond the city walls, was soon occupied as “exchangeable property” and gave birth to the shanty-town of Ayia Foteini. In the Upper Town, however, where most of the 4700 vacant private properties were to be found, less was destroyed. Its villas were large and often possessed spacious courtyards and grounds: refugee families built over the gardens and moved into the existing homes, many of which survived for decades with their characteristic overhanging storeyed sachnisia, wooden frames and shuttered windows. Tall Ottoman town houses, their façades faded in washes of pink, pale blue and ochre, preserved by their inhabitants’ poverty, still commanded the curving lanes of the Upper Town in the late 1970s. Today few are left; most have been torn down and replaced with modern versions in concrete and glass.
Ironically it was more or less as soon as the fire-affected centre was rebuilt in the new modern vein that the back-streets of the Upper Town came to seem repositories of a kind of authenticity. There one could find an urban landscape which by its popular and anonymous traditionalism, its simple charm, challenged the pretensions of modernist architects, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs. Stripped of their unwelcome political overtones, the “old days” acquired a new appeal. “[The Upper Town] shows us whatever remained standing from former times,” wrote a journalist in 1931. “There is rhythm and order there … Its streets are more poetic and the trees which flower among the square houses give a romantic tone to the spot.” In May 1935, the city’s new tourism office organized the first walking tour of the city which consisted almost entirely of the sights of the Upper Town. Even the names of its neighbourhoods—Chinar, Tsaous Monastir, Yedi Kulé, the Islachané—preserved the charm of bygone times. Yet the romanticism offered by the Upper Town could not be separated from the fact that its creators and former occupants were no longer there. This was a romanticism of ruins, or at least of absence.35
IN RECENT YEARS, books, monuments, museums and conferences have contributed to a new interest in the deportation and extermination of the city’s Jews during the Second World War. After a lengthy silence, the subject emerged from the shadows to become a legitimate topic of discussion. As yet, however, no such debate has opened concerning the departure of Salonica’s Muslims. Their experiences are still overshadowed in the public mind by the simultaneous suffering of the Greek refugees who took their place. Yet their exodus was an event of the first importance for the city and its subsequent history for it marked the real break with the Ottoman past, the moment in which the twentieth century imposed its values and practices upon an older world.
In this process of nation-making through force there were two deadly novelties in operation. The first—visible during the Balkan Wars—was what a much later generation termed ethnic cleansing, that is to say, the use of war to alter the ethnographic balance of particular regions. Greeks, Turks, Serbs and Bulgarians had all—to one degree or another—seen the wars of 1912–18 in such terms. Yet ethnic cleansing was usually hesitant, partial, and incomplete, and the hatreds and bullying of soldiers, gendarmes and peasants were often counter-balanced by the very different priorities of political elites. In Salonica—and in the surrounding countryside—the majority of the Muslim inhabitants had not moved: they had withstood the threat of violence just as they had proved deaf to the calls of Turkish politicians and agents to uproot themselves for the good of the homeland.
To get them to leave in their totality required a diplomatic agreement drawn up between states in the aftermath of
war, which forcibly uprooted these people for the sake of geopolitical stability and nationbuilding. This time—in 1923–24—they had to depart whether they wished to or not. Their nationality was of no relevance; their religion alone marked them out for removal. And it was just here that the awesome power and ambition of the twentieth-century state left its nineteenth-century Ottoman precursor in the shade. Populations could now be moved on an unprecedented scale, and every aspect of the operation—from the evaluation of properties to transportation and resettlement—was, at least on paper, the responsibility of the state. Under such pressure, the Muslims of Salonica had no choice, and within a year and a half, Muslim life in the city came to an end. For the Greek authorities, keen to Hellenize the city and the northern new lands as a whole, their departure was a vital step forward in shifting the ethnographic balance and making properties available for the Christians flooding in from the East. The Muslims from Salonica settled in places like Izmir and Manisa and helped those towns become Turkish, while their old home-town for the first time in five centuries became predominantly Greek.
*Dear Papa. Here is another of Salonica’s curiosities, one of the rare Turkish cemeteries. In the background is the mosque of the whirling dervishes, of whom only one is left. On the other hand, Muslim refugee families are camped out there …
18
City of Refugees
WITH JUSTICE the writer Giorgos Ioannou once called Salonica “the capital of refugees.” In the late nineteenth century alone, it had welcomed Russian Jews, Tatars, Circassians and Muslims from the lost Ottoman provinces of Thessaly, Bosnia and Crete. Armenians found shelter from both Bolsheviks and Turks, and remnants of General Wrangel’s White Russian army squatted in abandoned First World War barracks until the 1960s. Today a new generation of Greeks from the former Soviet Union have also made their home there, as well as Georgians and Kurds. No group of refugees, however, has had an impact—either on the city, or on the country itself—remotely comparable to the huge, panic-stricken immigration of over one million Orthodox Christians who arrived during the final death-throes of the Ottoman empire. In Greece this event is still known simply as the Catastrophe. At its height, in 1922 and 1923, boats docked daily, unloading thousands of starving homeless passengers. It was, by any standards, an overwhelming humanitarian disaster. But in the longer run, it was also the means by which the New Lands and their capital, Salonica, finally became Greek. The refugees fled an empire, and helped build a nation-state.1
CATASTROPHE
EVEN IN 1912–13, Muslims (and Bulgarians) leaving Greek territory were outnumbered by the Greeks coming in. Every army, and every state, was driving out civilians. At least forty thousand Greeks fled the Bulgarians, while the Turks expelled about one hundred thousand from eastern Thrace, and by 1916 the demographic balance in Salonica had been fundamentally changed.
The Balkans after 1918
Soon there were many more. In 1920–21, another 20,000 fled fierce fighting in the Caucasus. In their tented encampment on Cape Karaburnu, typhus was rife, and there was little water, fuel or shelter from the harsh winter winds and rain. Amid the stench of human waste and dying children, American Red Cross workers battled to avert a “natural disaster.”2 Yet almost immediately they were engulfed in the human tidal wave which followed the Greek defeat in Asia Minor as nearly one million refugees, at least half of them in need of urgent assistance, clogged the roads and ports heading west. “In a never-ending, staggering march, the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, reporting for the Toronto Star in October 1922. “The main column crossing the Maritza river at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water-buffalo, with exhausted staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.” The height of the panic followed the final evacuation of the Greek army from Smyrna, when the city was burned to the ground and Kemalist forces massacred 30,000 Greek and Armenian civilians in cold blood, while an estimated quarter of a million terrified refugees crowded the waterfront. By May 1923, the date when the Greco-Turkish exchange agreement was supposed to come into force, another 200,000 had fled as well and only 150,000 were left, in effect hostages for the proper treatment of Greece’s Muslims.3
The Greeks had at least escaped the fate of the Armenians—hundreds of thousands of whom had been killed since 1915. But they had their own grim stories of forced marches, starvation, imprisonment and massacre; women and children had faced the threat of forced conversion and rape. The refugee camps outside Istanbul—if they succeeded in reaching them—were death-traps of typhus and cholera; the rains poured down, there was little to eat. They packed themselves into the ships carrying them across the Aegean to safety, but many did not make it alive. When one ten-year-old boy, whose father had already died, crossed from Prince’s Island (outside Istanbul), his journey to Salonica took eleven days: “We starved. The boat stopped in Cavala for water only. Older people and younger ones, about four or five of them, died. Their bodies were thrown into the sea.”4
An American diplomat despairingly watched a steamer carrying seven thousand dock at Salonica—“a squirming writhing mass of human misery.” It was November, and the refugees had spent four days at sea, many on the open deck, without space to lie down, or food, or toilet facilities. “They came ashore in rags,” he noted in shock, “hungry, sick, covered with vermin, hollow-eyed, exhaling the horrible odor of human filth.” Interviewed many years later, another woman was so overcome by her memories of that journey she could not describe how she had got to Greece; before leaving Turkey she had buried two of her children in the camp near Istanbul, and the journey itself was too distressing to recall. “We landed at Salonica. Some people were lucky to get homes to stay in. We didn’t. We stayed in a yard. We put down some handmade carpets and sat down on them. For three or four weeks we stayed there. Some people would give us food to eat. Then we registered for the villages we wanted to settle down … We were sent to a village where we really didn’t want to go. However we had no choice.”5
Refugees ended up in every part of the country. But the departing Muslims had left properties in northern Greece, and this was where their demographic impact was greatest. More than a quarter of a million people passed through the quarantines and tented encampments of Salonica before being transported into the countryside to be settled in agricultural colonies. The demographic dominance of Greeks in Greek Macedonia was thus finally achieved through what one observer at the time called a process of “contemporary colonization”—something close to what the Young Turks had envisaged in 1910, only now with Christians not Muslims.6 Neat new village settlements with orderly straight streets and whitewashed red-tiled single-storey homes stamped the impress of Hellenism on Macedonia’s erstwhile ethnographic kaleidoscope. “What a miracle!” wrote a French scholar, “The country round Salonica, which was formerly pasture for sheep … is now transformed into orchards and vineyards.” Salonica itself was affected deeply too, for as many as 92,000 refugees eventually made it their home.7
The refugees themselves were not a homogeneous group, however, and only their suffering united them. They had originated from all over the Greek world—from the Asia Minor seaboard, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and eastern Thrace—places where their communities had existed, in many cases, since antiquity: the “Greece” that now called itself their homeland was generally unknown to them. Some were from prosperous urban backgrounds, merchants from Izmir who looked on in astonishment at the primitive ways of the Macedonian villager; others were Anatolian peasants themselves, who found it hard to adjust to the life of the city. They brought strange clothes and unfamiliar customs, harsh dialects and even, ironically, the Turkish language, which many of them spoke much more fluently than Greek. In fact, many still only understood Turkish, and thought of themselves as “Anatolian Christians,” or “Christians from the East”
rather than “Greeks.” Political appeals to the refugees often had to be printed in Turkish as well as Greek. Salonica’s Muslims were astonished. “They didn’t know Greek and spoke Turkish,” recalled the young Reshad Tesal in surprise. “[They] sang in Turkish in our makams [musical scales].” With their arrival, the market for Turkish records quickly expanded and Greek cinemas screened Turkish melodramas well into the 1950s. They had insults hurled at them by Greeks from the Peloponnese or the islands—they were “Turkish-seed” and “the yoghurt-baptized”—for to the existing population of Old Greece they scarcely seemed Greek at all. In fact the population exchange was not about bringing a nation together so much as assembling the component parts from which one would emerge. Two or three generations passed before their descendants stopped referring to themselves as refugees, and felt more at ease in their new homeland.8
At the height of the influx—in the weeks and months which followed the fall of Smyrna—Salonica was stretched to breaking point. Relatives were separated, and the shortage of adult men was noticeable for many had been killed or were still in Turkish captivity. The city’s wealthier residents were invited to sponsor newcomers, or to adopt orphans, and notices requesting news of family members appeared frequently in the press. From 12 September 1922: “The husband of Anastasia Iliadakis from Niflis is sought, and their children, Constantinos, Ilias, Evangelos and Minas Iliadakis.” “Emmanuel Xydopoulos from Yiayiakoi seeks his father, Efstratios Xydopoulos, his mother and three brothers, Constantinos, Sotirios and Dimosthenes.” Pelagia Konstantinou, dwelling at 74 King George St., “seeks her sister Partheni Konstantinou, from the village of Atslaga near Samsun. Anyone in possession of information please contact her.” For years people wandered the country, still hoping to trace their loved ones.9