by Mark Mazower
In Greece, there was speculation that Merten’s real motive for returning had been to recover his loot. Even today divers scour the rocky sea-bed off the south of the Peloponnese for the treasure Merten supposedly sank there. So far they have not found anything. In any event, to focus exclusively on Merten is something of a distraction. He was a career bureaucrat, whose real responsibility had been to allow the city to run smoothly in the interest of the German war effort throughout the 1943 deportations. To the extent that he had done this, it had been with the help of other bureaucrats among the local and regional Greek authorities, and the network of other interest groups they had brought into play. Their priority had been to keep out the Bulgarians, and to ensure that Greek control over Salonica was unimpaired. They had not sought the deportation of the Jews, but they had not obstructed it either since it enabled them to complete the process which had started twenty years earlier—the Hellenization of the city.
VANISHED PASTS, NEW PROBLEMS
THE DRAWN-OUT POST-WAR QUARREL over the restitution of Jewish property can only be understood against the backdrop of the infinitely more urgent political problems Greece as a whole faced in the late 1940s. After months of tension, fighting broke out again between leftist guerrillas and the government in 1946, and the country was plunged into a bitter civil war which turned it into the first international battle-ground of the Cold War. The resulting damage was in some ways even greater than had been caused by the Germans. Thousands died and hundreds of thousands of villagers were forcibly relocated as government troops with British and American advisers battled against a highly effective guerrilla insurgency organized by the communist Democratic Army of Greece. Only in August 1949 did the government regain control; by then, it had rounded up tens of thousands of suspected leftists, executed several thousand by firing squad, and built up a new network of shady anti-communist paramilitary units on whom it relied for several decades afterwards. Never before or since had the authority of the Greek state looked so fragile. Compared with this, the issue of Jewish property was a side-show.
In what novelist Nikos Bakolas called “the season of fear,” Salonica itself was deeply traumatized. Thousands more refugees fled there for shelter, and the city was rocked by assassinations, round-ups, mortar fire and occasional gun-fights between left and right. The insurgents were in the hills and in January 1949, they kidnapped a group of schoolboys from the nearby American Farm School. With a strong left-wing presence in the worker suburbs, the authorities felt nervous and hundreds of people were incarcerated. Fear of the communists blended with memories of the long-running struggle with the Bulgarians; the rebels were written off as a Slav fifth column, fighting once again to tear Greek Macedonia away for incorporation in a Balkan communist federation.
Anti-communists who had worked alongside the Germans in the early 1940s now gave their services to the British and Americans: in no country in Europe were the trials of collaborators wound down so soon. As Cold War fever reached its height, UFOs were spotted over the city and there were rumours of Russian planes on their way from the north. The church was drawn into the fray, and Christian youth groups warned the city’s residents not to be tempted by the godless left. Saints—one was “well dressed, freshly shaved, wearing blue clothes and a white shirt”—were reported politely getting into taxis at the station and being driven to local churches before vanishing: once again, they seemed to have taken the city under their protection. Ghostly images of the Virgin Mary appeared in the windows of department stores and apartment blocks. In 1951, barely a year after the fighting ended, the funeral of Metropolitan Gennadios, the religious leader who had shepherded his flock ever since 1910, provided a show of strength for the church and the right. His corpse was dressed in the regalia of office, and after lying in state for several days in Ayios Dimitrios, it was paraded through the crowded streets on a throne draped in the national flag. Through the celebration of Gennadios’s remarkable life, the defeat of the left was linked to Hellenism’s other triumphs over Turks, Bulgarians and Germans alike.26
The 1940s left the city polarized politically and economically destitute. Even in 1951 its population was not much larger than before the war. But in the decades which followed, the country’s economy took off and Salonica grew faster than ever. The refugees who had landed in 1922 now became the old guard as thousands of new migrants arrived from the countryside looking for work, part of the drift out of the rural economy which was transforming post-war Greece, and Europe. They packed into the old buildings and land densities soared. Salonica’s population increased faster than Athens’s, and by 1971 it had risen to over half a million. Most of the newcomers had no knowledge of the city as it had existed before the war, and did not remember its now-vanished mosques and synagogues.
The little that did survive from those days was quickly being sacrificed to the bulldozers. As land became more valuable, the old low houses were torn down and replaced with multiple-storeyed apartment blocks. Constructors and developers were the city’s new rich. Within not much more than a decade in an unregulated orgy of construction, what remained of the Ottoman urban fabric was largely demolished and gardens and greenery gave way to concrete. The tramlines were torn up overnight and replaced by buses, a cheaper form of public transport which allowed the suburbs to spread in all directions and killed off the ferry-boats that used to carry passengers across the bay. Bara and the Beshchinar gardens disappeared under new warehouses and factories. As the roads leading into town were widened, Vardar Square was modelled and remodelled, and the last of the faded Ottoman cafés was torn down. Workers’ apartments spread over the hills and pushed up against the old walls. In-fill created a new seafront promenade. The elegant Royal Theatre by the White Tower disappeared under the bulldozers, as did the neo-classical mansions along the old Hamidié, and the Alliance Israélite headquarters in the centre of town which was replaced by a tourist hotel. New faculty buildings, a swimming pool and observatory went up on the site of the Jewish cemetery, where tens of thousands of students now studied. Kalamaria, remembered one local author, was transformed from a muddy village into a “luxury suburb which justified … the effort and the tears of the refugee element.” Only in the Upper Town, still inhabited by the poorest, did lack of money protect the old gable-fronted Ottoman homes.27
When a British foot-soldier who had slogged through the Macedonian mud in 1915 returned nearly half a century later he was struck by the change. The seafront villas that survived were mostly empty and had a “sinister air”; the minarets (bar one) had vanished and the Muslims with them, and all around he saw “blocks of offices and flats … indistinguishable from their counterparts in Lisbon, Stockholm and London.” A Turkish woman, who had grown up on endless stories of the Hamidian city told her by her mother, found it impossible to reconcile these with the reality: “The great houses had been torn down and the gardens destroyed … It was all gone.”28
For returning Jews the experience was a haunting one. Jacques Stroumsa was a young engineer who had helped construct the Hirsch camp, and had survived Auschwitz, where his parents and his pregnant wife had been killed. After the war, unwilling to return home, he had left for good. When eventually he came back for a brief visit, he spent hours sitting on his hotel balcony and looking out over the sea: “I was smoking cigarette after cigarette for fear the tears would come. A Greek Orthodox friend found me alone around midnight and said: ‘I understand you, Jacques, you don’t really know any more where to go in Salonica, the city where you once knew every stone.’ And that’s how it was.”29
Conclusion
The Memory of the Dead
We are turned to hollow bones, shall we be restored to life? A fruitless transformation!1
—QUR’AN
BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR, the dead were to be found, not only in the weed-strewn cemeteries which lined the approaches to the walls, but also within the city itself, crammed into the small railed enclosure by the Saatli Djami, under the trees of the Vla
tadon monastery, in dervish turbes and roofed family mausoleums on street corners. A tiny graveyard of richly carved turbaned tombs stood near the Hamza Bey mosque, surrounded by pastry-shops, watch-menders, bakeries and general stores in the busy commercial quarter where the Kapali Çarsi—the main shopping arcade—met the old Bezesten. When they drew water at the fountain, or entered their church, mosque or hamam, the living saw inscriptions which reminded them of how much they owed to those who had gone before them. But they remembered them too in public pilgrimages to the cemetery like the Jewish Ziyara grande which took place thirteen days before Yom Kippur. Women paid visits to their relatives’ graves to pray for domestic advice and tied small pieces of paper or ribbons to tomb railings.
The dead, with their powers and demands, thus formed part of the world of the living. When a rabbi died, a note was often placed in his hand prior to burial asking for some important favour from God: this was done when Rabbi Levi Gattegno passed away in the middle of a dry spell, and the rains came within hours. Bodies which had not decomposed indicated the presence of a restless spirit; bodies laid the wrong way or face down would rest uneasily in the ground. Sometimes tombs were re-opened to check that all was well. But people also visited cemeteries for picnics and conversation. The dead watched the living enjoying themselves as well as lamenting their passing. Above the graves the city’s inhabitants worked, begged, grazed their animals and indulged in a variety of activities which Ottoman legislators vainly tried to curb.2
In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the dead and the living began to move apart. Following the 1866 International Sanitary Conference in Istanbul, Ottoman regulations proscribed burial within the capital. Graveyards had to be moved to a sufficient distance from the walls to avoid their “putrid emanations” endangering public health. Similar measures were introduced in Salonica, and the occupants of some of the small neighbourhood graveyards within the city were incorporated in the larger ones outside. City burial became an exclusive matter: only spiritual leaders could still be buried in their places of worship, a privilege which was sometimes extended to religious benefactors as well. Was this a mark of honour for these men of distinction, or a sign that their remains radiated a special power that helped those living among them?3
After the 1917 fire, Hébrard’s plan for the modern city envisaged radical changes in the use of urban space, and relegated the dead definitively to the margins. Where the Jewish cemetery was concerned, German occupation in the Second World War simply provided an opportunity for the municipality to carry out its own modification of Hébrard’s ideas. Today the area is dominated by the massive Corbusier-style faculty blocks, concrete plazas and landscaped avenues of the Aristoteleion University; but the ground had been prepared in the winter of 1942 when council workers turned the old cemetery into a rubble-strewn waste-land of vandalized graves, with shattered fragments of marble, brick and human bones everywhere. “Desecration of the graves is forbidden,” wrote the Salonica novelist Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis in his stream-of-consciousness Mother Thessaloniki. But whose graves?4
MADAME SARA, one of the last exponents of a powerful Ottoman tradition, was born in Edirne in 1926 and now lives in Istanbul. She is Jewish and is much in demand as a spirit medium, communicating with the dead at the request of the living. She first realized the gift God had given her when she was a child, and used to collect water from a fountain near a Muslim cemetery. There she saw others praying to a wise man, and soon heard him calling her over. Sadik, a Muslim holy man who had died more than a century earlier, became her spiritual guide, and has helped her ever since, in her own life and in her work.5
Not so long ago this kind of story was less exceptional than it is today. For over many centuries the power of the dead remained an ecumenical one. The Ottoman authorities acknowledged the potent sanctity of the blood of Christian martyrs. Saint Dimitrios’s tomb was guarded by a Mevlevi dervish who advised Christian pilgrims how its holy earth should be used. But as the empire fell apart and nation-states came into being, something changed in people’s minds. The age of mass migrations began, waves of refugees came and went, and the dead who stayed behind suddenly became just another target for the living whose political passions and enmities brought them humiliation, desecration and eviction.
In Salonica, it was not only the Jewish dead who were treated as though they were less valuable than the land they occupied and the slabs that covered them. The city’s Muslim and Ma’min graveyards had already vanished under new roads and buildings. With the exception of the mausoleum of Mousa Baba, a couple of tombs in the precinct of the Rotonda, a sarcophagus stored on the west side of Ayia Sofia, and another grander one in the garden of the Yeni Djami, there is virtually no resting-place for the Muslim dead in the city today. General Taksin Pasha, the Greek-speaking Ottoman general who surrendered Salonica to Prince Constantine in 1912, is said to have been buried on the city’s outskirts on his death a few years later, but no trace of his tomb has survived. The Bulgarian cemetery was expropriated after the Bulgarians were expelled in 1913, and graves with inscriptions in Slavic lettering are hard to find, though one or two remain in the grounds of the old Catholic seminary in Zeitenlik.6
The compulsory population exchange of 1922 was the turning-point. For like the departing Muslims, the Greek immigrants had been forced by the catastrophe that befell them to leave their own forebears behind. Since the dead who counted to them lay far away, often in unknown graves, why should they have attached importance to those who happened to be buried in their new places of settlement? Some refugee women—having chatted with the Turkish women of the neighbourhood before the latter left—continued to pray at the graves of Muslim holy men in the upper town. But these practices became rare. Feeling at home in Salonica meant turning it into an entirely new city, building settlements on the outskirts that had not even existed in Ottoman times. It meant re-baptizing it, with names that created ties to their own homelands (much as the Jewish refugees from Spain had done four centuries before them), and finding new homes for the precious icons they had managed to bring with them. Nostalgia for the lost lands of Christian Orthodoxy thus meshed with the city’s expansion and modernization.
The rising death toll and mass violence of the twentieth century also played their part in this devaluation of the dead. The era of political assassination had come to the city as the century began, but politically motivated killings soon multiplied. At its murderous apogee, the 1940s brought not only the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of their graves, but also the loss of hundreds of civilians shot by the Germans in mass executions, and hundreds more in the civil war that followed. “Our city is full of dead people whom nobody escorted to their final resting-place,” wrote Pentzikis, who lived through it all. “The lovely dawn, which best shows off the flowers, often brings corpses to light on the roads. Mutilated faces. With no nose or ears. Blood on the steps of the garden gate. On the pavement.”7
TO MANY GREEK WRITERS after 1912, the generation of the new arrivals, Salonica seemed suspended in the present, cut off from any recognizable past. Brought up on Pound, Eliot and Joyce, they inhabited a melancholic wasteland of alienation and anomie. But in the meantime, the archaeologists were helping to restore a past they could connect with, creating new forms of historical memory to bolster local Hellenic pride. Digging deep into the earth, they exhumed long-forgotten paleochristian tombs, and brought to light old gods, temples and shrines. Some decades earlier they had turned the Athens Acropolis into a contemporary icon of antiquity by ridding it of its medieval and Ottoman buildings. Salonica did not have the Acropolis, but it had its churches. In 1914, a Greek scholar declared it the “Byzantine city par excellence,” and described it as the symbol of “the new great historical horizon” that the victories of the Greek army had made possible. “Athens represents, embodies better, antiquity in our history and in our consciousness,” writes the novelist Ioannou. “Salonica Byzantium.” An inspectorate of Byzantine monuments was
established in 1920, and the restoration of the city’s churches, with islands of space carved out around them to allow them greater prominence, indicated how much importance was being attached locally to this historical legacy. After the Second World War, an old Byzantine festival in honour of Saint Dimitrios was revived, and eventually the city even acquired its long-promised Byzantine museum.8
Byzantium’s material re-emergence helped Greeks to feel confident the city was theirs, a place of resurrection and of miraculous Orthodox renewal. But much as in Athens earlier, recovering the memory of one past meant forgetting or even destroying another. The centuries of Ottoman rule were written off as a long historical parenthesis, a nightmare of oppression and stagnation. Any surviving remains associated with them not only lacked historical value but potentially threatened the new image the city was creating for itself. This was the primary explanation for the demolition of the minarets and the total destruction of the Jewish cemetery, and why Greek archaeologists published learned articles on the ancient inscriptions that came to light on the reverse side of many uprooted Jewish tombstones, whilst ignoring their Hebrew, Portuguese or Judeo-Spanish epigraphs. Anything post-Byzantine in the city was at risk, except for the White Tower which had quickly achieved such symbolic status that most people refused to believe it was an Ottoman construction. It took the 1978 earthquake to get surveys made of the remaining fin-de-siècle villas on Queen Olga Street, and only in the 1980s did state funds begin to be assigned to Ottoman monuments.