by Mark Mazower
DAYS OF 1936
IN SALONICA’S TAVERNAS, during the cold days of early 1936, a new song made the rounds:
All those who become Prime Minister are sure to die
The people hunt them down for the good they do.
Kondylis is dead, Venizelos gone.
Demertzis died too, when he might have found the way.
I’ll put down my name for the PM’s job
So I too can sit like a bum and eat and drink.
And get up in the House and give them their instructions,
I’ll force the narghilé on them, and get them stoned.11
An unexpected sequence of deaths that spring suddenly transformed the Greek political landscape: the first to go was the strongman General George Kondylis, who had put down an attempted Venizelist coup the previous year, and brought back King George from exile; then, out of the blue, he was followed by Venizelos himself. The greatest and most controversial Greek statesman of the twentieth century had plotted that last coup to regain power, fled after it failed, and died in exile in Paris. And the month after him the macabre series continued with the death of Prime Minister Konstantinos Demertzis, a minor figure who had been appointed by the king as caretaker to guide the country into calmer waters.
New elections in January 1936—the first since the restoration of the monarchy—had shown how deeply the country was split. The antagonism between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists which had emerged during the First World War lingered on, a matter of loyalty, memory and affiliation rather than ideology or policy. Each camp polled over 40% of the votes and ended up with 47% of the seats. Holding the balance was the Communist Party, with 6% of the vote and just fifteen seats. It was the nightmare scenario for the “bourgeois world.” The Venizelists declared their acceptance of the monarchy, but even so they and their opponents were unable to agree to terms for a coalition. In March the leader of the Liberals was elected president of the Chamber thanks to communist support. The latter, obediently following the popular front strategy laid down in Moscow, were now closer to real influence if not power than ever before.
This perspective scared many conservatives, and on 13 April, after Demertzis’s death, King George appointed a faithful royalist army man, Ioannis Metaxas, as prime minister. General Metaxas had been a brilliant staff officer but an undistinguished politician: in the last elections, his Free Opinion Party had polled less than 4% of the votes. What mattered to the king, however, was first his loyalty—which was unquestioned—and second, that Metaxas could control the army, always an unpredictable factor in Greek political life. Within two weeks, Metaxas had called for and received a vote of confidence, and parliament itself broke up early for its summer recess. It was not to convene again for another ten years.
The spring of 1936 was a time of great tension in and beyond Europe: the international battle-lines between right and left were emerging in Germany, where the troops of the Third Reich marched into the Rhineland that March, and in France, where a Popular Front government was formed the following month. On 5 May, Italian troops captured Addis Ababa, dealing a death-blow to the prestige of the League of Nations. But it was on 9 May, the day that the Italian king Victor Emmanuel was declared Emperor of Ethiopia, that dramatic events took place in Salonica itself which showed the depth of unhappiness within its working classes and the scale of the crisis which faced the country.
After a bitterly cold winter, labour unrest had grown, bringing fresh intimidation in its train. At the end of April, tobacco workers struck for higher wages and union rights and the strike quickly spread elsewhere over the next few days. In Cavalla, workers called for an end to “the state of terror,” and shopkeepers closed their shops in sympathy: the local prefect responded by arresting and deporting union and guild leaders. By 8 May, the Salonica tobacco workers had grown tired of waiting for serious negotiations to begin, and the trades union federation called its members out on strike. When crowds headed for the town hall, the police fired over their heads to try to stop them, scuffles broke out, and several workers who had been arrested were freed by their comrades. Then another 3000 workers ignored police road blocks and made their way from the warehouses near the Beshchinar into the centre. Feeling they were losing control of the streets, the authorities called up reinforcements, mounted gendarmerie and army conscripts. The latter were mostly local boys and unreliable in their sympathies, in some cases siding with the workers rather than the police. That evening, more guilds came out: cab and tram drivers, workers at the electricity plant, the docks and the railways. With at least 25,000 on the streets, the city was paralysed. The response of Prime Minister Metaxas was uncompromising: he forced the rail-workers and tram drivers back to work under martial law—and gave the police “freedom of action.”
Next day, an anticipatory silence hung over the city: shutters were drawn down over the shops, there was no traffic on the streets. Groups of protesters gathered in clusters, watched by patrols of police and soldiers and ignoring orders to disperse. Strikers stopped a police car containing men who had been arrested for refusing to work and released them. Others put up barricades across Egnatia. Then, as the crowd grew and tens of thousands gathered in the heart of the city, shouting such slogans as “Long Live the Strike” and “Down with the Police,” the police themselves opened fire. On the very corner where, nearly thirty years earlier, Young Turk gunmen had marked the start of their revolution by assassinating Abdullah Bey, the local head of the Hamidian police, the gendarmerie now claimed several victims of their own. By the time the masses of protestors had dispersed, several hours later, the police had shot twelve people dead and left another thirty-two badly wounded. The victims included two chauffeurs, and four tobacco workers; three of the twelve were Jews. The verdict of the British consul was that “the police acted with unnecessary brutality as was their custom.” And he continued: “The town at that time certainly looked and sounded as if it had been invaded by an enemy.”12
Fearing the crowd’s revenge, the police were confined to quarters, control of the streets was handed over to the army and fresh units were ordered in. Thousands of workers turned out to mourn the dead, whose corpses were carried through the streets on biers, and flowers were strewn where they had fallen. There was, however, no further violence. After a few days in which the government’s authority appeared to have almost completely broken down, the demands of the tobacco workers were granted, and the general strike was called off. The American ambassador, Lincoln MacVeagh, who had been in the city throughout these events, was quite clear that their underlying cause was the government’s neglect of labour conditions in northern Greece, and of the economic plight there in general. “The region as a whole feels itself in a hopeless situation,” he wrote. “Is the Greek Government going to heed these lessons? Or is Salonica destined to become another Barcelona and spread the infection of economic revolt throughout the whole rotten body politic of this country?”13
MacVeagh was not blind to the possibility of communist agitation behind what had happened, but it was not, for him, the real reason for such widespread protest. After all, had the unrest been revolutionary in its aims, it would not have subsided so quickly. Prime Minister Metaxas, however, was of a different mind and played up the threat of subversion. When the trades union federation announced a general strike for 5 August, he was given the pretext he had sought. He told the king the country faced a communist plot to overthrow the political system, and with the latter’s approval, he declared martial law the day before the strike was due to begin and assumed dictatorial powers.
20
Dressing for the Tango
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of the Asia Minor catastrophe, the Greek state could scarcely maintain its authority beyond Athens. Brigands ruled Samos, ransacking the island treasury, and unlocking the prisons. In Salonica, the Salikourtzis gang, refugees from Asia Minor, terrorized the city for two years, robbing merchants with impunity before they were caught and shot. But perhaps most notori
ous of all was the brigand Giangoulas who roamed the slopes of Mount Olympos. Occasionally he ventured into the plains and in June 1925 he was reported to have entered the city disguised as a priest, taken a coffee at the zaharoplasteion Doré, and then strolled off towards the White Tower, with the police close behind him. Giangoulas was a worthy descendant of those robber bands that had terrorized Salonica and its hinterland for centuries. Like his forebears, he boasted in grandiose terms about making “his own justice,” and styled himself in letters in half-literate Greek as “King of the Mountains.” But like them he too depended on the protection of powerful local politicians, and as the nature of politics changed, his way of life was jeopardized. Worried about the impact of his activities on Greece’s image abroad, Athens ordered him to be hunted down. In September 1925 he was killed, and in the usual way a photograph of his severed head was published in the press to confirm his death before being sent to the University of Athens for criminological study.1
We can therefore imagine the shock felt three years later when the driver of a car crossing the hills just beyond Salonica’s walls caught sight of Giangoulas and his gang in triumphant mood. Reversing fast, he drove off to the nearest police station; half an hour later a troop of cavalry arrived and chased after their man. Only in the nick of time did the soldiers realise that the fustanella-clad band of brigands they were about to attack was in fact a bunch of film extras. An enterprising local producer had been inspired by the hero’s life and exploits: Giangoulas himself was being played by a Salonican journalist, his “wife” by a well-known actress. All was explained, a new pursuit scene was quickly added and the officers enthusiastically joined in.
CHANGING TIMES
TIMES WERE CHANGING and a previously endemic threat to public order had been turned into a concept which would make Salonica—at least in the minds of the men responsible—“the Hollywood of the North.” It might be lagging behind Athens in literature and the fine arts, but perhaps Greece’s northern metropolis could become a centre for the new art of the twentieth century. That at least was the hope. Unfortunately, brigandage was not so far in the past that the nervous authorities felt happy heroizing these public enemies, and anti-brigandage laws stopped the movie being shown. Salonica’s own film industry never really got off the ground, though an academy which claimed to train students for a career in front of the cameras did good business for a time.2
But no one ever accused Salonica’s inhabitants of not knowing how to enjoy themselves. Entertainment was a vital part of daily life, a distraction from the anxieties of exile, separation and displacement common to virtually every family there. Offering cowboïka, Charlie Chaplin and Hollywood tearjerkers, cinemas like the Dionysia, the Pallas, the Athinaion and the Royale attracted crowds of regulars. The Attikon, on the western end of Egnatia, with its White Russian pianist—briefly accused of being a Bolshevik spy—was a favourite of leftists, being situated close to the end of town where the tobacco sheds and the union offices were to be found: political meetings were frequently held in its hall. The Pantheon played mostly “erotic” films—by which were meant, according to Aimilios Dimitriades, not the sex films of a later, less innocent era, but rather melodramas, adventure films—anything with women and without cowboys. On the quay, the Modern offered more Westerns, this time mostly to appreciative Jewish families who littered the floor with the traditional pasatempo (roasted pumpkin seeds) and drank gazosa through two or three viewings.3
The cinema-owners would try any trick to keep their clientele. In the intervals, singers performed arias from operettas. Others added cabaret and circus acts and called themselves “variety cinemas.” Child prodigies were a favourite—the “Miniature Little Devil, Nini Zaharopoulou,” or five-year-old Louisa Bellini, who “dances exotic dances in imitation of Josephine Baker.” The Pathé ran a lottery in the interval, with a prize—alarm clocks were popular. And when a long-forgotten masterpiece entitled “What Giannis Suffered” came to town, the same cinema announced free entry to anyone of that name.
Of course the cinema was not the only modern form of entertainment linking the city to worldwide tastes and fashions. The craze for speed made the first motorcycles an object of neighbourly amazement. During the First World War, airmen became symbols of human daring and technological wonder, much as the electric tram—chaitan arabasi (the devil’s carriage) the city’s older inhabitants had called it—had done earlier still. The air was starting to play its part in city politics too: in April 1922 the royalist government—in its final phase—had dropped leaflets over the city announcing the imposition of a forced loan, and a few months later, another plane brought in members of the Revolutionary Committee. In 1930, fifteen years after the first Zeppelin attack on the city, an English hydroplane, named “City of Salonica” for the occasion, landed in the bay and taxied to a stop in front of the Hotel Méditerranée, where it became an instant sensation and was blessed publicly by the Metropolitan Gennadios, “in front of the city authorities and a large crowd.” The owners recouped their expenses by charging 250 drachmas for a flight above the town, and their many customers later founded a Society of Friends of the Air in order to popularize the delights of air travel.4
IN THE OLD DAYS, the best-known street sport had been wrestling, and well-known pechlivanides remained popular figures at fairs and on public holidays. One of them, Prodromos Tsaousakis, was later discovered as a singer by the great rembetika player Tsitsanis and became one of his finest interpreters. But strength was now being overshadowed by fitness. Soccer had arrived in the city even before the Balkan Wars, but exploded in popularity with the coming of the refugees, whose clubs formed its most important teams. Testifying to the interwar cult of the healthy body, new pitches were laid out on the edge of the Jewish cemetery, where they hosted professional matches and athletic competitions. Sports entered the school curricula, and the founding of the city’s YMCA, housed in a massive neo-Byzantine building, popularized basketball and baseball. The Pan-Thessalonican athletics competitions—including sections for “classical athletics”—became a fixture, and by the 1930s the government had established an inspectorate of gymnastics for northern Greece. For unlike the old-fashioned individualistic strong-man, gymnasts, athletes and football players matched the new collectivist ethos of the times. Massed healthy bodies were a national priority.
Other kinds of exercise were less obviously useful to the nation. Probably even more popular than athletics was dance, and dance halls and academies proliferated. “Luxemburg was the most popular entertainment centre of those days, and it was in full swing,” recalls Erica Counio-Amariglio in her memoirs. “Many big names were singing or bringing their orchestras there. One summer the very famous Eduardo Bianco came with his orchestra. The centre was bursting with people every evening.”5 Dancing was no longer just a cabaret act for the pleasure of the viewing male; it was a way for young men and women to meet and touch, out of sight of their parents. “One cannot imagine how clearly on the faces of the dancers shows the enchantment and an aesthetic satisfaction which comes from the pleasure of whirling around,” wrote a journalist in 1927. “Especially the coquetteish expressions of the young ladies, all red and shining from a kind of extreme pleasure.” It was, wrote another, “the instinct of necessity, the same instinct which brings the starving traveller outside the kitchen, the thirsty man to the spring, the lover beneath the window of his loved one.”6
As for the sexually charged content of the new style of dancing, what attracted the crowds was exactly what alarmed more old-fashioned souls. In the interwar period, an anonymous composer tacked on a new ending to the well-known Judeo-Spanish “Song of the Fire.” In the song’s original version the catastrophe of 1917 had been attributed to los pecados de sabat (the sins of the Sabbath); but according to the new version God had punished the city because Los mocicas de agora/todas visten de tango (The young girls of today/all dress for the tango). Angeliki Metallinou, defender of civic virtue, warned that in the dance halls “
poor young women learn to dance and proceed to worse.” Driven on by conservative commentators and churchmen, vice police raided dance halls, and harassed owners so much that one at least was driven to suicide. As a result, popular spots like the Ramona, or the Aaron in the Jewish 151 neighbourhood, tried to highlight their respectability. Katakolos’s dance hall assured parents that “inside the school of dancing the rules of order and morality are strictly observed.”7
In 1929, following suggestions in the press, the mayor inaugurated the first Miss Thessaloniki competition in the Hotel Méditerranée. The short-listed candidates danced a tango with their partners, then a waltz. (The competition struck a chord in the city, and the gay men in Koufos’s taverna organized their own “Miss of the Evening” in homage.) The second year’s winner, a twenty-one-year-old refugee from Bursa called Roxani Stergiou, was the strong favourite to go on and win the Miss Greece title, but was deprived of that title after some behind the scenes manoeuvring by the mayor of Athens. As ever, the nation’s capital knew how to sabotage the prospects of its northern rival. The eventual winner, Aliki Diplarakou, went on to win Miss Europe in Paris too, before returning to Greece and hitting the front pages a second time when she aroused the anger of the church by secretly visiting Mount Athos with the help of a celebrity-struck priest.8
MODERN WOMEN
A NEW KIND OF COMMERCIALISM was dissolving the grip of tradition, and women, especially younger women, found themselves challenging older ideas of what was proper. “If only someone would help me escape from this modernizmo de mujer [modernism of woman],” complains the elderly Uncle Bohor, in a popular satirical series in the Jewish press. In the old days, a respectable Jewish housewife—like her Muslim or Christian counterpart—stayed at home, let the man do the shopping and was not seen out unless properly attired and even veiled. In the suburbs and refugee quarters, neighbours and relatives still made sure young people did not get up to mischief. But in the city centre women were as visible—or so it seemed to some—as men, showing off like Frankish “madmwazeles,” or “devilish coquettes/with elegance, and chic” (diavlas koketas/kon la elegansa, el shik), as the composers of the fox-trot “Salonik sivilizado” complained.9