by Mark Mazower
This was not so much a question of politics—although there were feminist groups in the interwar city calling for an extension of the suffrage, to little avail—as economics. Among the refugees, in particular, there were far more women than men, forcing the former into the workplace. Women had always been wet-nurses and domestic servants. They now also served in tavernas and cafés, as shop-assistants, singers and dancers in variety shows; the Beau Rivage promised “extraordinary hospitality at the hands of Russian ladies.” In Salonica, sang Tsitsanis, “I was loved by refugee girls/Blue-eyed, brown-haired and refined modistroules.”
The modistra—or dressmaker—was the icon of new femininity in the interwar city. Called into being by female spending power, she was also herself a symbol of economic independence. Together with the hat-maker, she passed into the city’s consciousness and the “little dressmaker’s apprentice” became the heroine of a popular song of the period:
Oh, my modistroula, mincing and flirtatious,
With your needle how you pierce my heart
When you pass before me with such a posture
Bir boza bir boza—clicking your heels with such elegance.
Working alongside men, freed from parental supervision, female tobacco-handlers were a tougher breed, with a reputation for free-minded behaviour. The tobacco industry had traditionally offered employment to girls for a few years in order to earn their dowry, and between the wars, nearly half of all tobacco workers in the city were women. “Our suffragettes,” as their defenders called them, were prominent from the 1914 strike wave onwards. Not only did they often take a leading role in industrial action, to the consternation of the authorities, but they also lived by their own rules. “Regina”—a well-known Jewish worker—lived openly with a Christian man, something highly unusual at that time. The police, who were less comfortable beating up women than men, were often perplexed, then shocked. Outraged by the behaviour of one female worker, a police officer warned her that her conduct was suspicious and she would be sent for medical examination, “and if this shows anything she will be sent to the brothels.”10
HANOUMAKIA
AN UNUSUAL THREAT, no doubt, and one which testified not only to the authorities’ repressive instincts where women were concerned, but also to the important place occupied by prostitution in the interwar economy of the city: there were no less than forty-eight licensed establishments in 1928 and street-walkers outnumbered civil servants. The traffic in sexual pleasures had existed in the city since Ottoman times, when more than one visitor had been invited by an apparently respectable Jewish youth to visit his “sister.” With the Russian revolution and the Asia Minor catastrophe came a new supply of impoverished White Russian aristocrats and abandoned Greek refugees. Some (male) writers might talk glibly about the “charm” and the “traditional erotic sensibility of the East” that the newcomers brought with them, but what spurred on many of these “unprotected and orphaned girls” was economic need or vulnerability. Chrysoula T., for instance, had “erotic relations” with Panayiotis Peiridis after he promised to marry her, but then found herself being led, not to their new home but to the brothel of an old friend and partner of his, Angela Machaira (“the Knife”). She went to the police but this was surely not the first time the device had been used, and many in her situation were too ashamed to do this.11
In 1915 the arrival of the Army of the Orient had turned the backstreets of Bara into the largest red-light district in the Balkans. It “was drab, dirty, the women nearly 30 years old, and sitting on the steps of their shops with no drawers on, legs wide open, showing everything they had,” recalled a young Cockney soldier. “This sight put me off. Saying in their broken [English] ‘Very good for the jig a wig,’ they pulled out their tits, shaking them. I was disgusted, they were all sizes and shapes, some hanging down, all were flabby. My mates tried to entice me to go into a house. The tarts looked younger, and had smaller and firmer tits. Not this time mates.” Others were less squeamish. Even after the war there were over one thousand prostitutes working in one-room wooden shacks, and the district attracted droves of soldiers, farmers and merchants. It was so busy by night that in the adjacent quarter of Regie—where six thousand Jews had been re-housed after the fire—irate householders, fed up with being disturbed, patrolled the streets and hung signs outside their door: “Attention: this is a family home,” or simply “Family House.”12
Never far from the girls, as they sat outside their huts waiting for customers, were the quarter’s pimps, card-sharps, hashish-dealers, narghilé-smoking “dervishes” and horse-traders. The all-night Ottoman-era café of Malik Bey, who owned several Bara brothels, survived until 1930 with its old-fashioned large mirrors, its narghilés and torn leather armchairs. The flashily dressed Alkis Petas, the “king of Bara,” and leader of the Constantinople gangs in their perennial feud with rivals from Smyrna and Crete, had two pictures in his more modest establishment—one of “beautiful Constantinople,” where he had grown up, and the other an icon of Venizelos, flanked by two angels, accompanied by the legend “Saviour of the Race.” It was there, in Afroditi Street, opposite the brothel of Madame Erasmia, that he was shot dead by Smyrniot rivals in 1932 and succeeded as neighbourhood boss by a thuggish former henchman, Christos Papadopoulos, better known as Kerkyras—the Corfiot. The latter opened a bouzouki joint round the corner in Irini Street, and eventually, during the German occupation, joined the collaborationist Security Battalions before he too was shot dead outside his café in 1944.
The putanes—pornes in more proper Greek, “little ladies” or hanoumakia in the slang (from the Turkish)—lived amid the violence of their pimps and customers. In some high-class establishments the patrona—“mama” to her girls—might preside over a cosily domestic arrangement. Jean-Jose Frappa described the “simple, almost familial” atmosphere of a larger wartime brothel, its prostitutes drawn from Corinth and Cyprus as well as Greek, Jewish and Muslim women from the city itself, the clients Scottish, French and Senegalese soldiers. But even in such establishments women were vulnerable. “The day before yesterday,” wrote one journalist, one of those women found herself in the street because she’d been kicked out of the house after a customer got angry. She was blind drunk, half-naked and unkempt with black bruises from being beaten. She was covered in make-up and her eyes were blackened. Blood ran from her nose and teeth.” As for the grubby maisons de tolérance round Vardar Square, these were nothing more than a short step literally and figuratively from the degradation of Bara itself. Young women who had started out consorting with “aristocrats” and those of “other fine classes” were liable to find themselves quickly reduced to the level of street-walkers, or kalderimidzoudes—those who walked the cobbled kalderimia and turned a trick amid the rubble of the Great Fire.13
After the Second World War, the church, the ministry of public order and the UN all demanded a clamp-down. The new postwar seafront was supposed to give “another lung” to “this asphyxiating city,” except that so many prostitutes gravitated there that tourists and respectable families kept away. Outside Bara, most brothels were closed by 1949, but those allowed to stay open—“to cure the needs of the Army and the visiting population”—profited from their new monopoly. In 1951 most of the dives in Bara itself were shut down for the opening of the new main railway terminus nearby. But as local police warned, this drove prostitution underground and when an American warship docked in the winter of 1952, “the central areas of the city and especially the seafront were filled with women of all kinds of suspect morals.” By the mid-1950s, more than one hundred “dishonourable women” were still in the business. It was a far cry from the one thousand sex workers of the First World War; but now all the women involved were Greek. Even prostitution had been Hellenized.14
As the seedy western quarters slowly disappeared after the war, so they inspired Salonica’s poets and writers. Bars and cafés, the deserted cemeteries and burned and bombed-out ruins in the city centre all featured in th
eir accounts of “the erotic city.” “To enter the city coming from the station,” wrote Georgios Ioannou, for example, “it is a virtual necessity that you cross the erotic Vardari Square.” The grimy backstreets which led into it, the ruins of the old Ottoman fortifications behind the Law Courts, the shabby remains of the old Frankish quarter round Ladadika, became part of this nocturnal literary vista of solitary and melancholy pleasures.15
These were the postwar hymns to vanished neighbourhoods which had been transformed as Ioannou put it into “places of archaeological tranquillity.” But between the wars, when prostitution was ubiquitous—an eloquent testimony to the deep social crisis and impoverishment provoked by the Asia Minor catastrophe—there had been little time for romanticism. Anxiety about society’s moral crisis, and in particular the fragile and vulnerable honour of its young women, raised issues of regulation and control. Some called for charitable work among the girls on the street; but most people were more concerned with protecting the public. “The secret dwellings of debauchery number in the hundreds,” wrote Makedonia in 1934. “So many that they make it difficult for honest families to remain and the evil gets worse.” “Other cities have managed to clean themselves up,” complained another columnist. “Only here must the unfortunate inhabitants of one of the larger neighbourhoods, Vardari, continue to suffer this curse.” In the First World War, the military authorities of the Army of the Orient had kept a close watch on the brothels. Prostitutes had to undergo weekly medical inspections, and were prevented from circulating freely in the town. After the war, the Greek authorities tried, less successfully, to keep the same checks. Medical inspections remained routine, but it was no longer possible to confine the women and girls to specific areas. In June 1921 “common women” were barred from entering the King George Gardens before midnight; it had become notorious for the Russian “countesses” who frequented it at all hours. A few years later a new police Section of Morals busted housewives for entertaining men when their husbands were away, and mounted so-called “virtue operations” in the city’s parks, woods and cemeteries—all favoured trysting places. Even hotels were raided to catch couples who could not provide proof of marriage.16
Journalists poured scorn on the absurdity of the police harassment, “these moralologists [ethikologoi] interfering everywhere, in the suburban places of entertainment, roads, cinemas—anywhere a romantic couple flees to be alone.” For as everyone knew, the police and the madames—“Cleopatra,” “Giselle” and their Greek, Jewish, French and Armenian competitors—were closely linked. Madame Dede, who ran a brothel staffed with refugee girls in Angelaki Street, was even godmother to the child of the police chief Nikos Mouschountis. He and his colleagues protected the brothels in return for information; word from the street travelled to them quickly and any new faces were soon reported to the authorities.17
In his memoirs, the musician Markos Vamvakaris gives a vivid picture of the close relations between Salonica’s head of police and the underworld. He had come north to play because his haunts in Piraeus and Athens were being closed down. His first night in town was spent with a prostitute, but early the next morning a policeman was hammering at the door, ordering the newcomer to the station to meet the chief. Mouschountis’s attitude took him aback:
I sat there quite a while … Markos, you get around, he says, I know. Of course I get around, I say, I wouldn’t tell you lies. You go to this joint, then that. Sure, I go, Mr. Nikos, I say, I wouldn’t lie to you. Then he tells me: For your sake, I won’t disturb them so long as you are around. You go where you want, he says, it is fine, O.K.18
And in fact for all the frequent knife-fights in the tavernas where he played, Vamvakaris had fond memories of his trips to the “beautiful city”—where everyone was “well-dressed,” the women “very chic … as if you were in Europe.” Mouschountis loved rembetika; he followed Vamvakaris and he became so close to Greece’s most famous bouzouki player, Tsitsanis, that he was best man at the latter’s wedding. Athens, with its puritanical obsessions, was a different world: Salonica was small enough, and far enough away from the capital, for the police to make their own rules and set their priorities: Bara and the underworld served their purposes and never really escaped their control.
MUSICIANS
In the hamam in the City, a harem is swimming
Guarded by Arabs, who take them to Ali Pasha.
He orders his guards to bring them before him
To set them dancing and play bouzouki.
To smoke narghilés with Turkish hashish
And the little ladies dancing the gypsy tsefteteli,
That’s how all the pashas of the world enjoy themselves,
With bouzoukia and baglama, embraces and kisses.
In songs like Tsitsanis’s 1935 In the Baths of Constantinople, the Ottoman past was evoked and transformed. Rembetika—the swaggering, plangent music of the underworld of the Eastern Mediterranean—flourished in Salonica’s bars and tavernas, despite the efforts of the state to clamp down on it. Using melancholic modes with Arabic and Turkish origins—the hijaz, the wailing ouzak—these songs were certainly not for those overly concerned with respectability, and were condemned by officialdom as decadent remnants of an Oriental age contaminated by non-Greek influences, unlike the supposedly purer folksongs of the mountains. In the smoke-filled cafés, a stern line-up of mustachioed bouzouki and baglama players, their faces impassive, laid down the harsh, strict, metallic rhythms against which their female leads sang tales of broken love, easy morals and above all drugs:
Like an Orthodox Christian, in this society
I get ready, old chum, to take the service.
I shop around for cigarette butts and a piece of hash
And get ready, old chum, to head to St. Mama.
In the church I go, into the rounded rooms
And start to puff away as if I was lighting candles.
And the archangel rushes down in front of me
The smoke has made him high.
He says, “Listen, man, it’s no sin
That you came to church for your devotions.”
But lo, a monk starts telling me: Get out!
It’s my turn to be smoking now.19
With lyrics like these—written by Tsitsanis during his time in Salonica—rembetika spread rapidly through the country. Its popularity is often attributed to the influence of the Asia Minor refugees, and it had probably grown out of the improvised café singing sessions—in the so-called Café Amans—which were beloved by Turks and Greeks alike. But in fact it had been very popular in Greece itself before the Smyrna refugees in particular brought a far more emotional, highly ornamented style with them and turned Piraeus into the recording centre for the genre. In Salonica, one of the finest of all interwar rembetika singers, Rosa Eskenazi, had been active since before the First World War when she made a spectacular appearance at the age of twelve—unknown to her parents—at the Grand Hotel. Eskenazi was from a central European Jewish family, who had emigrated first to Constantinople and then to Salonica. By the time she left for the recording studios of Athens, others—like Vamvakaris and Tsitsanis—were heading north to the welcoming tavernas of the city’s refugee quarters.
They could not be missed—for tavernas, in addition to orchestras and live bands, were now relying on amplification too. “Woman is like a gramophone,” ran a song of this time. “And the man is the dynamo/which makes her sing.” In an era when few people yet owned cars, when the most familiar sounds in the streets were still the braying of donkeys, cock-crows at dawn, the trumpet reveille in the barracks and the sing-song cries of passing traders, the “murderous instrument” introduced the city for perhaps the first time to the eminently modern problem of noise. The silence of the Ottoman city was becoming a thing of the past. As one journalist wrote sadly:
Once, when the gramophone was not so widespread probably it was a means of enjoyment and musical delight. But now, alas! … It is a monster which tears apart your ears, beats
the nerves, turns your intestines upside down, unscrews your brain, kills relaxation, sleep, beauty, our very humanity … Just when you are dying of heat and stop at a café to cool off with a lemonade and relax, the moment when you need quiet and flee to the suburbs, where you think that all is asleep, unmoving, suddenly you leap up terrified, as if from a nightmare … What is it? The hoarse, asthmatic, apoplectic, crippled loudspeaker hangs from some tree or from the entrance … and without excuse or by your leave, attacks you and crushes you with the lament from Traviata or informs you that the young lady is asking her mother for “a young man/sweet and tasty,” who with everything else will be “handsome and an Athenian” and she can’t restrain herself.20
One of the reasons why the tavernas flourished was Salonica’s insatiable appetite for music of all kinds. Before 1912, musical contacts with Istanbul had been very close, and musicians in the sultan’s service used to give concerts at the Café Mazlum on the waterfront. “Spring in Salonica,” ran one popular Judezmo song, “at Mazlum’s café/a black-eyed girl sings the amané and plays the oud.” Music united all tongues and faiths. “There was not a Salonican who did not run to hear the voice of Karakas Effendi which set the great old Mazlum Café in a tremble,” remembered an enthusiast. Backed by violin, clarinet, oud and kanun, Karakas Effendi—“an elderly man, tall as a pine, his 75 years hidden in a black frock-coat”—was an Istanbul Jew who moved easily, like many musicians, between the café and the synagogue, challenging the cantors to see who could chant the blessings more beautifully. Ottoman Salonica itself boasted the gifted Ma’min vocalist “Kyor Ahmet”—a member of the aristocratic Kapandji clan—described later as “master of the pashas, beys and Ottoman colonels of high society; and the Caruso of the common folk.” Dimitrios Semsis—sometimes known as “the Salonican” or “the Serb”—had been a youthful violinist in Abdul Hamid’s entourage before he settled in the city. Later he became an important record producer for both Columbia and His Master’s Voice.21