Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (20 page)

When expelled Jews reached Thessalonika they found no Jewish inhabitants because the Jewish community, which had been there since Byzantine times, had been moved to repopulate Constantinople after 1453. But in a few decades the new arrivals had become dominant: the census of 1530 shows a Jewish population of some 16,000, over half the total population and so greater than the roughly equal Muslim and Christian numbers combined. The Jews felt warmly welcome. ‘Come and join us in Turkey,’ wrote one from Constantinople, ‘and you will live, as we do, in peace and liberty,’ and another from Thessalonika wrote that ‘The Jews of Europe and other countries, persecuted and banished, have come here to find a refuge and this city has received them with love and affection, as if she were Jerusalem, that old and pious mother of ours.’ The French commercial agent in Thessalonika described their contribution to the city: ‘The Jews have among them workmen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent, and specially those of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries.’
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One skill that the Jews brought to Thessalonika was metallurgy. This was put to work in the mines at Sidhirokávsia, which produced mainly silver but also some gold. The site has now disappeared but was in hilly country about 40 miles east of Thessalonika and a few miles from the sea. Streams supplied water, and the surrounding woods provided timber for the smelting kilns, of which there were reputedly 5,000 or 6,000. Under Jewish instruction many Greeks worked there, but the miners were mainly Bulgarians. At its peak around 1600 the mines produced eight and a half tons of silver a year, but by the end of the seventeenth century the silver deposits had been exhausted and Sidhirokávsia, once so bustling, had fallen into decay.

The main occupation of the Jews of Thessalonika was in the production of woollen cloth. Their trade was given stimulus and stability when soon after their arrival they were given the contract to supply all janissary uniforms. Wealthy Jews bought local wool and imported dyes, and poorer Jews provided the labour. Thessalonika became one of the main exporters of cloth in the eastern Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. But by the end of the century the Thessalonika wool trade was facing two pressures: one was rising wool prices because Venetian and French merchants were buying up Balkan wool for their own industries, and by 1600 the price of wool had peaked at over ten times its 1530 level. The other pressure was a squeeze on the price of finished goods. This price was controlled by the Ottoman authorities, but more serious was competition from cheaper English goods: ships of the English Levant Company, in the Mediterranean on the way to buy raw silk in Persia, were carrying on the outward voyage any goods that could be sold at even a small profit. The cloth industry of the Thessalonika Jews never again achieved its sixteenth-century prominence. Nevertheless the Jews remained a flourishing element of Thessalonika life until the atrocious events of 1943, when some 45,000 Jews, virtually all of those in the town, were deported by the Germans, most to their deaths in the gas chambers.

One might ask why the Greeks had not taken the opportunity to prosper, especially through the cloth trade that the Jews had so quickly exploited. There were perhaps two main reasons. The Greeks were traders rather than manufacturers; and the Jews brought with them from their original homelands skills and techniques that the Greeks had had no opportunity to learn.

Whereas Thessalonika was important as a commercial centre, Athens was of interest for its antiquities. It was hardly ever visited in the sixteenth century, so travellers’ accounts of it appeared regularly only in
the seventeenth. In the 1670s there was a sudden burgeoning of accounts of contemporary Athens: from the Jesuit priest Jacques-Paul Babin, from the Marquis de Nointel, ambassador to Constantinople, from Jean Giraud, the long-serving French consul in Athens who played host to many visitors, and from both Jacob Spon (French) and George Wheler (English), who travelled together to study antiquities.

There was another curious work of that time,
Athénes ancienne et nouvelle
by André Georges Guillet, published in 1675. It was very popular, both in French and in English translation and until challenged, especially by Spon, was accepted as genuine. It purported to be based on a firsthand account by Guillet’s brother, the Seigneur de la Guilletière, who had visited Greece after being captured by the Turks, sold to a Tunisian pirate and eventually released – a suitably dramatic provenance for the book. But almost certainly this brother did not exist, and Guillet got some of his information from Capuchin monks in Navplion and invented the rest. Some of his observations were scurrilous, for example about the French consul Giraud, and he frequently mocked the Greeks. In the end we cannot trust a word he said, and he is worth quoting only to show how the Greeks were presented in one of the most widely disseminated accounts of them.

The population of Athens in the 1530s had been less than half that of Thessalonika, about 12,500 against 30,000, and its composition was very different. Whereas at that time Thessalonika’s inhabitants were roughly half Jews and a quarter each Greeks and Muslims, the Athenians were almost exclusively Greek, with only some dozens of Muslim residents apart from the transient Turkish garrison of a few hundred soldiers. The total population barely changed in the following centuries, though by the 1670s the proportion of Muslims had increased to about a quarter, and some Albanians, generally considered troublemakers, had settled in the town and the surrounding villages.

Apart from the Akropolis there was nothing remarkable about the town of Athens. The Jesuit priest Jacques-Paul Babin, visiting in 1672, was surprised to find that the town had no defensive walls. The streets were narrow and unpaved, like those of a village. The houses, he said, lacked magnificence, and were haphazardly built from ancient ruins, ornamented only with bits of marble column or stones marked with a cross from ruined churches. But at least the houses were built of stone, unlike the wooden houses that Babin had seen in Constantinople. The most attractive part of Athens was the surrounding plain, planted with vines, corn and the olive trees that, standing ‘so thick to the west of the city that they seem to be a wood’, provided the main export from
Athens. The vines, however, produced wine that de la Guilletière typically described as disgusting – ‘blackish and not fine’.
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The Turkish government in Athens was represented, as elsewhere, by the voyvoda or governor living in the Akropolis, the kadi or judge, and the Akropolis garrison commander and his few hundred troops with their families. The garrison’s main task was to raise the alarm when sea raiders approached. Athens, wrote Wheler, ‘hath no Walls to defend it self, in so much that they have been frequently surpriz’d by the Pirates from Sea, and sustained great Losses from them: until some Years since, they secured all the Avenues into the Town by Gates, which they built anew, and made the outmost Houses, lying close together, to serve instead of Walls. These they shut up every night: and are by them reasonably well secured from these Corsairs.’
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The garrison soldiers were referred to as janissaries, but according to de la Guilletière they were in fact the dregs of the Turkish militia, with small local businesses that they operated when off duty.

The visitors’ impressions of the Athenians were widely variable. De la Guilletière, dismissive as usual, remarked on ‘the dullness and muddiness of the Genius of the Modern Greeks’, and the Marquis de Nointel scorned them as ‘surrounded in ruins and ignorance’. But a more usual view, as expressed by George Wheler, was that ‘their bad Fortune hath not been able to take from them what they have by Nature; that is, much Subtlety, or Wit.’
¹¹
Athens had one of only three public schools – as opposed to church seminaries – in the Ottoman domains, the other two being at Sinop on the Black Sea and at Constantinople. The Athenians had a representative committee of eight, like those in Thessalonika and elsewhere, and the committee successfully pursued Greek grievances at Constantinople.

Athenian subtlety and wit could become ridiculous, according to de la Guilletière. He claimed to have listened to a long harangue by an educated monk declaring that all the world’s achievements were in fact Greek. According to this monk Turkish successes were due to the Greeks because the janissaries recruited through the devshirme were Greek (well, some of them). Even the Sultans were Greeks because the father of Osman, the first of the line, was a Byzantine prince. Somewhat paradoxically, the monk also blamed western Europe for not uniting to defeat those same Greek-descended Turks.

The visitors discovered a sharp intellect in the Athenians partly because that was what they expected to find. St Paul had said that the Athenians ‘spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing’, and surely, the visitors thought, the descendants
of Plato and Aristotle must be clever. But it was the monuments and remains of antiquity that dominated the travellers’ perceptions, above all the Akropolis, which to this day remains both an architectural wonder and a powerful icon. When in 1834 Athens became the capital of independent Greece the Akropolis became the symbol both of the city and of the new state, a role for which it was uniquely appropriate. It was a Greek building as opposed to the Italian architecture of the previous capital, Navplion. It was visible for miles around. Most importantly, it was a summary in stone of Greek history, built by the genius of ancient Greece, converted from a pagan temple to an Orthodox church by the Byzantines, to a Catholic cathedral by the Franks and to a mosque by the Turks. It had been wrecked in 1687 by a Venetian cannon shot, and later despoiled by Elgin and others. In short, the Parthenon was a continuing memorial to both the achievements and the vicissitudes of Greece throughout the centuries.

10

The Greek Church

F
or anyone brought up in the Anglican tradition of the Church of England, the Greek Orthodox Church is at first sight quite familiar. There is a similar hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, senior clergy and parish priests. As in England, great churches are found in Greek towns, and village churches dot the Greek countryside, though the architecture and decorations of the churches of the two faiths are interestingly different. Both Anglicans and Orthodox attach great importance to their services for baptism, marriage and funerals, and both celebrate Christmas and Easter in splendid and often colourful ceremonies. Both Churches have originally separated from the Roman Catholic Church, which they continue to view with wariness if not antipathy, although the immediate causes of the original split – the
filioque
phrase for the Greeks, Anne Boleyn for the English – could hardly have been more dissimilar.

Beneath the similarities, however, there are major differences. In Greek Orthodox services the congregation plays little active part, aside from a few responses such as to the priest’s ‘Chrístos anésti’ (‘Christ is risen’) at Easter. There is no recitation or chanting of psalms, no cheerful or even boisterous singing of hymns as in an Anglican service. The priest alone conducts the Greek service, and for the members of the congregation the important thing is their presence, pious for some and perhaps social for others, rather than their overt participation. Moreover the sermon, such a central part of many Anglican services, is less important in a Greek church, and this points to another difference: the Greek Church puts relatively less emphasis on moral guidance and instruction, on sin, guilt and redemption, or on good works and social justice.

This derives from the Orthodox tradition, dating from Byzantine times, of the true purpose of religion: communion with God. The tradition stems from the monks, clerics and mystics of the early Church, and is based on prayer. One of the earliest of the Church fathers, Evagrius of Pontus, laid down in the late fourth century what not to do when praying: do not try to visualise God, either within you or outside you. ‘Do not think’, he wrote, ‘of the divinity in you when you pray nor let your intellect have the impression of any form. You must go as immaterial into the immaterial, and you will understand.’
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The most common metaphor for true communion with God was through the experience of Light, not earthly light but Divine Light. Another fourth-century monk and later bishop, St Gregory of Nazianzus, wrote of being carried by heavenly contemplation into the secret darkness of the heavenly tabernacle to be blinded by the Light of the Trinity. The metaphor was challenged in the fourteenth century by the theologian Barlaam of Calabria, who wrote: ‘I must confess that I do not know what this Light is. I only know that it does not exist.’ He was answered by his contemporary Gregory Palamas, who saw God’s grace as necessary for experiencing this Light. ‘He who participates in this grace’, he wrote, ‘becomes himself to some extent the Light. He is united to the Light and by that Light he is made fully aware of all that remains invisible to those who have not this grace. The pure in heart see God Who, being Light, dwells in them and reveals Himself to those that love Him.’
²
If prayer is to lead to this experience it must be one that is as simple and undistracting as possible, exemplified by the prayer dating from the earliest church and known as the Jesus Prayer. This consisted simply of the words ‘Kyrie eleison’ (‘Lord have mercy on us’), or the single words ‘God’, ‘Lord’ or ‘Jesus’ constantly repeated.