Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (16 page)

First among the temptations that afflicted its Christians, of course, was Islam itself. During the prosperous sixteenth century, in particular, many poor young villagers flocked into the city from the mountains, and these newcomers soon formed a very large part of the local Christian population. Some of them, finding themselves adrift and vulnerable to the dangers facing those far from home, converted for the sake of greater security. Other converts were Christian boys apprenticed to Muslim craftsmen, or girls who had entered Muslim households as domestic servants: in both cases the economic power of the employers paved the way to conversion. But this was a dramatic step at the best of times and one which laid the individual open to unrestrained criticism from his relatives and community. Relatively few Christians (or Jews) with families in Salonica appear to have abandoned their faith. To judge from the mid-eighteenth century, which is when the first data became available, the overall numbers of converts were not great—perhaps ten cases a year in the city and its hinterland.
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Even so, Orthodox clerics were always deeply anxious about this. A monk called Nikanor (1491–1549) travelled in the villages to the west of the city, urging the inhabitants to stay true to Christ: “by his sweet precepts and the shining example of his virtuous conduct,” we are told by his hagiographer, “he was able to hold many in Christ’s faith” before retiring to the solitude of an inaccessible cave high above the Aliakmon River. Nikanor also built a monastery nearby, and in his will urged the monks to refrain from begging for alms without permission, not to mix with those of “another faith” and to avoid seeking justice in Turkish courts, stipulations which suggest the extent to which monks and other pious Christians were usually interacting with the Ottoman authorities in one way or another.
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In fact, the very manner in which the Church’s ecclesiastical hierarchy was brought within the Ottoman administrative system added to Christian woes. Patriarchs paid an annual tribute to the Porte and acted as tax-collectors from the Christians. When one sixteenth-century Patriarch toured the Balkans, Suleyman the Magnificent ordered officials to summon the metropolitans, bishops and other clerics to help him collect “in full the back payments from the past years and the present year in the amounts which will be established by your examination.” In the early eighteenth century, the city’s
kadi
was told to help when it turned out that “Ignatius, the metropolitan of Salonica,
owes two years’ taxes and resists fulfilling his obligations towards the Patriarchate.” Fiscal and religious power were separated in both the Muslim and the Jewish communities (where rabbis were salaried employees of their congregations); for the Orthodox they overlapped, damaging the clergy’s relations with their flock.
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The buying and selling of ecclesiastical favours and offices did not help either: in the seventeenth century alone, there were sixty-one changes of Patriarch. Most Metropolitans of Salonica had run up debts to get into office, and one of the earliest records to survive in the city’s archives is a 1695 Ottoman decree from the Porte on behalf of a Christian money-lender ordering Archbishop Methodios to pay what he owed him. The problem travelled down the hierarchy. One priest demanded to be paid before he would read the sacrament to a dying man; others were accused of taking payment to hear confession. The more their seniors took from them, the more the priests required.
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Money also explained the endless tussles between Salonica’s religious leaders and the lay council of Christian notables, the
archons
, which supposedly ran the non-religious side of community affairs. When the
archons
demanded control over management of the city’s charitable Christian foundations, the Patriarchate angrily told them “not to involve themselves in priestly affairs.” “There is order in everything,” they were rebuked, “and all things in the world, heavenly and mundane, royal and ecclesiastical and civil, right down to the smallest and least important, have their order before God and before men, according to which they are governed and stand in their place.” The message was simple: there was no way that “lay people,” whatever their motivations, would be allowed to “become rebels and controllers of church affairs.” Ironically, the main defence against the rapacity of the clergy were the Ottoman authorities themselves. In 1697 Salonica’s Christians complained directly to the Porte about the demands of their bishops, and the
kadi
was instructed to look into the matter. Twenty years later, their anger was so great that they even got the local Ottoman officials to throw one archbishop in jail until he could be removed.
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Three hundred years after the conquest, the city was still suffering from a dearth of priests, and lay figures regularly performed ecclesiastical duties. “Not many years ago,” reports the Jesuit Father Souciet in 1734, “a lay figure married with children not only had charge of the revenues of the archbishop but acted even as a kind of vicar, giving the priests permission to celebrate and confess, and preventing them as
and when he saw fit. I am not even sure he did not claim to be able to carry out excommunications.” The underlying problem was economic, for until the commercial boom of the mid-eighteenth century, the Christians of the city were, on the whole, of modest means. Only a few descendants of the great Byzantine families still lived there; most were artisans, shopkeepers, sailors or traders.
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For them, faith was not really a matter of theology. Poorly educated, few could bridge the gap between the complex formal Greek of the church and the language of daily life, which for many Orthodox Christians was often not Greek at all, but Slavic or Vlach. “The priests and even the pastors—the metropolitans, archbishops and bishops—are extremely simple and unlearned men, who do not know the Hellenic language and have no explanations in the vulgar tongue, so that they don’t know and don’t understand anything they read,” noted a visiting Ukrainian notable. “The people don’t know anything at all except the sign of the cross (and this not everyone). When we asked them about the Our Father, they would answer that ‘this is the priest’s business, not ours.’ ”
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Sometimes this uncertainty could be taken surprisingly far, as when a young Greek village priest asked whether Jesus was really God (though perhaps the questioner had been influenced by the scorn with which both Muslims and Jews treated such a claim).
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On the other hand, Salonica’s Christians were deeply attached to their traditional customs—especially fasting, about which they were extremely conscientious—and to the observance of local festivals, which were celebrated vigorously in the city and the neighbouring countryside, combining spiritual and commercial satisfaction. On Saint Dimitrios’s Day a majestic service was attended by all the suffragan bishops. There was also a rapidly developing cult of Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century archbishop of the city, whose mystical and political views had made him a highly controversial figure in his lifetime. To the surprise of visiting Christians, who knew him for his much-disputed theology, his memory was revered as that of a saint and his mummified body, laid out on a bier, attracted increasing numbers of worshippers.
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Orthodox Christians were constantly reminded that theirs was a second-class faith: they were not allowed to ring church bells or even beat wooden clappers to bring the faithful to prayer. Yet so far as the Ottomans were concerned, they were a people of the Book and one distinctly superior to the Catholic Franks. During the long wars with both Venice and Austria, Catholic missionaries were accused of leading
the local Orthodox astray, and introducing them to “polytheism, cunning and craftiness.” When an early-eighteenth-century visitor discussed Christianity with one of Salonica’s
mollahs
, the latter told him “that the three faiths, the Papist, the Lutheran, and the Calvinist are the worst, while the Greek is better than all.” According to him, many of the town’s Muslim scholars studied the Gospels in Arabic and valued the Greek Church above the rest because “the Greeks don’t depart from evangelical teachings and from church traditions and … they don’t introduce anything new into their religion or remove anything.” The very conservatism denounced by visiting Jesuits was thus understood and appreciated by Muslims.
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This sympathy, however, had its limits. The primacy of the ruling faith was axiomatic, and any public assertion of the superiority of Christianity over Islam was punished with severity. But even here Ottoman and Orthodox interests fitted strangely together, since the church, itself founded through an act of martyrdom, regarded the public suffering of new martyrs as a way of demonstrating the tenacity of Christian belief. Priests or monks instructed would-be candidates who then presented themselves to the authorities, or carried out acts designed to lead to their arrest, dragging crosses through the streets, or loudly insulting Mohammed. Seeing apostates—in particular—return to the fold was, wrote one priest, “as if one were to see spring flowers and roses bloom in the heart of winter.”
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Those who died for their faith were the popular voice of spiritual protest—the senior church hierarchy, by contrast, were servants of the sultan—and their deeds were carefully recorded by monks at the time. Even today modern editions of these “witnesses for Christ” circulate within the Orthodox world, with stories which are well worth reading for their unexpected insights into Ottoman religious culture. Like most Christians in Salonica, the city’s “neo-martyrs” were humble men (and a few women)—a painter, a coppersmith, a fisherman, gardener, tailor, baker and a servant to take just a few of them. Michael, for instance, who was executed in 1547, was one of the many Christian immigrants from the mountains; a baker, he had got into trouble after chatting about religion with a Muslim boy who came to buy bread. Kyrill’s father died young and he was brought up by his uncle, who had converted to Islam. Alexandros, who also converted, had wandered the Arab world as a dervish, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca, before returning to his ancestral faith, and testifying—in the words that distinguished Christians from Muslims—that “one is three and three
are one.” Although many of these martyrs had converted to Islam before seeing the error of their ways, what had induced their initial apostasy did not matter to the church—it might have been nothing more noble than the desire to pay lower taxes or to escape punishment for earlier crimes. All their sins were wiped out by their intention to repent and to testify to the superiority of the true faith.

Nor were all martyrs apostates. Some sought to emulate the martyrs of the early Church, or wanted to blot out the stain on the family name caused by the conversion of relatives. Aquilina’s mother had remained a Christian when her father had converted to Islam and brought shame on them. Nicetas was outraged when relatives became Muslims and he decided on martyrdom as a way of upholding the family honour. Pilgrimage to the Holy Land inspired one or two to follow in the footsteps of the Lord. In 1527 the noble Macarios, a monk on Mount Athos, became “completely consumed with the heartfelt desire to finish his life with a martyric death.” He went into the streets of Salonica and began to tell a large crowd of Muslims about the teachings of Christ. Brought before the
kadi
, Macarios prayed that the judge might come “to know the true and irreproachable Faith of the Christians” and “be extricated from the erroneous religion of your fathers by the Holy and Consubstantial Trinity.” His martyrdom followed.
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The path to death could be very dramatic indeed. An eighteen-year-old French convert to Islam repented of his apostasy, confessed to a Greek priest and then—this appears to have been exceptional even among the neo-martyrs—put a crown of thorns on his head, a small cross round his neck, thrust small spikes into his limbs and paraded in public, whipping himself and shouting, “I was an apostate but I am a Christian.” He was arrested, rejected various attempts to get him to return to Islam and was put to death. Christodoulos, a tanner, was so disturbed to hear of a fellow-Christian planning to convert that he took a small cross, entered the tavern where the convert’s circumcision was about to take place and tried to stop the ceremony. He was arrested, beaten and hanged outside the door of the church of Ayios Minas.
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Executions were as public as the celebrations which marked conversion itself. In fact vast crowds gathered to witness the last moments of the dying and to pick up relics of martyrdom. Following the Frenchman’s death, “the Christians took away his corpse and buried it with honour in a church.” Many people carefully collected drops of his blood and pieces of his clothing, just as they did with the holy remains of other martyrs: the Ottoman authorities respected this practice
and made no attempt to stop it. When a young Bulgarian girl who had spurned the advances of a Turk died after being thrown into prison falsely accused of having pledged to convert to Islam, the guards noticed a great light emanating from the room, and were so struck by the miracle that they spread the news around the city. Once again, the clothes of the martyr were carefully parcelled out as relics.

Ottoman reactions generally ranged from bewilderment to anger. Officials considered would-be martyrs insane, and hence not responsible for their actions. Romanos was regarded as mad and consigned to the galleys the first time round. Cyprian was dismissed as a lunatic by the pasha of Salonica and having “reasoned that he would not receive the martyric end he desired at the hands of the Turks in that unbelieving city” took himself off to the capital, where by writing an anti-Muslim epistle to the grand vizier and having it specially translated into Turkish, he achieved the desired goal. The biographer of Nicetas recounts an extraordinary conversation that took place in 1808 between that would-be martyr and the
mufti
of Serres. After offering him coffee, the latter asked Nicetas if he had gone mad, coming into the town and preaching to Muslims that they should abandon their faith. Nicetas explained that it was only zeal for the true faith that motivated him, and he began to debate the merits of the two religions. Other Turks asked him if he had been forced to do this, and this too he denied. But the
mufti
only became truly angry when Nicetas described Mohammed as “a charlatan and a sensual devil.” “Monk!” said the
mufti.
“It is obvious you are an ill-mannered person. I try to set you free, but by your own brutal words you cause your own death.” To which Nicetas replied: “This is what I desire, and for this have I come freely to offer myself as a sacrifice for the love of my Master and God, Jesus Christ.”
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