Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (2 page)

Illustrations

COLOUR

1.1
Sixteenth-century icon of Saint Dimitrios and his city
(8th Eforate of Byzantine Antiquities, Jannina)

1.2
Seventh-century mosaic from Church of Ayios Dimitrios

1.3
Byzantine forces drive Bulgarian army away from the city in a miniature from the chronicle of Ioannis Skylitzes, eleventh–twelfth century ad

1.4
Ottoman miniature of child levy in a Balkan town
(By permission of the Topkapi Palace Museum)

1.5
Portrait of Sultan Murad II
(By permission of the Topkapi Palace Museum)

1.6
A Jewish merchant and doctor in Ottoman dress, Istanbul, 1574
(Gennadius Library, American School of Classical Studies at Athens)

1.7
Visitors arrive at the home of a Jewish merchant to examine Las Incantadas. Sketch from 1754

1.8
The Arch of Galerius at the end of the main street as drawn by Edward Lear, 1848
(Houghton Library, Harvard University)

1.9
Jewish singers and musicians, late nineteenth century

1.10
Jewish marriage contract, 1790

1.11
Watercolours of a Jewish wet-nurse and a Bulgarian peasant bride,
c.
1860

1.12
Panorama of Salonica, by Edward Lear, 1848
(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)

1.13
Prince Constantine takes the Ottoman surrender of the city in 1912

1.14
A backstreet near the Rotonda, 1913
(Musée Albert-Kahn, Département des Hauts-de-Seine)

BLACK AND WHITE

2.1
The sea approach from the south-west,
c.
1860

2.2
The sea approach from the south-east,
c.
1860

2.3
The eastern walls in the early twentieth century

2.4
A Muslim graveyard in open country outside the fortress in the early twentieth century

2.5
Mosque and minaret in the Upper Town in the early twentieth century

2.6
The Aladja Imaret

2.7
An Ottoman tribunal in session

2.8
Women collecting water from a street fountain in the Upper Town

2.9
Sabbatai Zevi, 1666

2.10
Sabbatians performing penitential exercises

2.11
Ma’min boy in the robes of a Mevlevi oblate in the late nineteenth century

2.12
The Yeni Djami

2.13
The courtyard of the Mevlevi tekke,
c.
1917

2.14
Mevlevi dervishes,
c.
1900

2.15
Young Jewish man,
c.
1900

2.16
Leading the mourners at a grave in the Jewish cemetery,
c.
1916

2.17
Ottoman café in the Upper Town

2.18
European officers witness the hanging of the alleged murderers of the two consuls following the disturbances of 1876, by Pierre Loti

2.19
Ottoman street life: hamal or porter, vendor of lemonade, and sellers of leeches

2.20
The old konaki

2.21
The new konaki

2.22
The municipal hospital, built outside the eastern walls

2.23
A classroom in one of the city’s new state schools

2.24
The staff of the Greek consulate, 1905

2.25
Greek and Albanian band members,
c.
1904

2.26
Yane Sandanski

2.27
Hilmi Pacha

2.28
Ioacheim III

2.29
Albanian Ottoman irregulars

2.30
Regular Ottoman infantry arrive in Macedonia

2.31
Cretan gendarmes
(Imperial War Museum)

2.32
Venizelos arrives by sea to lead Greece into the First World War, 9 October 1916
(Imperial War Museum)

2.33
A German biplane attracts crowds along the front

2.34
A refugee camp inside the city, 1916
(Imperial War Museum)

2.35
Devastation in the town centre following the 1917 fire
(Imperial War Museum)

2.36
First meeting of the town planners, 1917

2.37
Ernest Hebrard leads a dig in the precinct of the Rotonda
(Courtesy of Mr. H. Yiakoumis and Editions Potamos)

2.38
The new city

2.39
Huts of Asia Minor refugees beneath the old walls,
c.
1960

2.40
The Upper Town,
c.
1960

2.41
Rosa Eskenazi, Dimitrios Semsis and Tombol,
c.
1930

2.42
An interwar dandy

2.43
The Hamza Bey mosque in its postwar incarnation as the Alcazar Cinema,
c.
1960

2.44
The round-up of Jewish men by German troops, July 1942

2.45
University buildings going up on the site of the old Jewish cemetery, 1950s

2.46
Salonica 1910

2.47
Salonica, fifty years later in 1960
(Reproduced from A. Karadimou-Yerolympou
, I anoikodomisi tis Thessalonikis meta tin pyrkaia tou 1917,
by permission of University Studio Press and the author)

2.48
1962 parades to mark half a century of Greek rule

2.49
The planned city centre: Plateia Aristotelous and the seafront
(Reproduced from A. Karadimou-Yerolympou
, I anoikodomisi tis Thessalonikis meta tin pyrkaia tou 1917,
by permission of University Studio Press and the author)

2.50
All reasonable efforts have been made by the author and the publisher to trace copyright holders of the images featured in this book. In the event that the author or publisher is contacted by any of the untraceable copyright holders after the publication of this book, the author and the publisher will endeavour to rectify the position accordingly.

Maps

The topography of the Balkans

Salonica’s sacred geographies

Inside the Ottoman city

The first map of the Ottoman city, 1882, showing the new sea frontage

The late Ottoman city and its surroundings,
c.
1910

The late Ottoman Balkan peninsula

Area destroyed by the 1917 fire

After the fire: the 1918 plan

The Balkans after 1918

The 1929 municipal city plan

Introduction

Beware of saying to them that sometimes cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.

I
TALO
C
ALVINO
,
Invisible Cities
¹

T
HE FIRST TIME
I visited Salonica, one summer more than twenty years ago, I stepped off the Athens train, shouldered my rucksack, and left the station in search of the town. Down a petrol-choked road, I passed a string of seedy hotels, and arrived at a busy crossroads: beyond lay the city centre. The unremitting heat and the din of the traffic reminded me of what I had left several hours away in Athens but despite this I knew I had been transported into another world. A mere hour or so to the north lay Tito’s Yugoslavia and the checkpoints at Gevgeli or Florina; to the east were the Rhodope forests barring the way to Bulgaria, the forgotten Muslim towns and villages of Thrace and the border with Turkey. From the moment I crossed the hectic confusion of Vardar Square—“Piccadilly Circus” for British soldiers in the First World War—ignoring the signposts that urged me out of the city in the direction of the Iron Curtain, I sensed the presence of a different Greece, less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures.

The crowded alleys of the market offered shade as I pushed past carts piled high with figs, nuts, bootleg Fifth Avenue shirts and pirated cassettes. Tsitsanis’s bouzouki strained the vendors’ tinny speakers, but it was no competition for the clarino and drum with which gypsy boys were deafening diners in the packed ouzeris of the Modiano food market.
Round the tables of
Myrovolos Smyrni
(Sweet-Smelling Smyrna), its very name an evocation of the glories and disasters of Hellenism’s Anatolian past, tsipouro and
mezedes
were smoothing the passage from work to siesta. There were fewer back-packers in evidence here than in the tourist dives around the Acropolis, more housewives, porters and farmers on their weekly trip into town. Did I really see a dancing bear performing for onlookers in the meat market? I certainly did not miss the flower-stalls clustered around the
Louloudadika
hamam (known also according to the guidebooks as the Market Baths, the Women’s Baths, or the
Yahudi Hamam
, the Bath of the Jews), the decrepit spice warehouses on Odos Egyptou (Egypt Street), the dealers still installed in the old fifteenth-century multi-domed
bezesten.
This vigorous commercialism put even Athens to shame: here was a city which had remained much closer to the values of the bazaar and the souk than anything to be seen further south.

The topography of the Balkans

Athens itself had eliminated the traces of its Ottoman past without much difficulty. For centuries it had been little more than an overgrown village so that after winning independence in 1830 Greece’s rulers found there not only the rich cultural capital invested in its ancient remains by Western philhellenism, but all the attractions of something close to a blank slate so far as the intervening epochs were concerned. Salonica’s Ottoman years, on the other hand, were a matter of living memory, for the Greek army had arrived only in 1912 and those grandmothers chatting quietly in the yards outside their homes had probably been born subjects of Sultan Abdul Hamid. The still magnificent eight-mile circuit of ancient walls embraced a densely thriving human settlement whose urban character had never been in question, a city whose history reached forward from classical antiquity uninterruptedly through the intervening centuries to our own times.

Even before one left the packed streets down near the bay and headed into the Upper Town, tiny medieval churches half-hidden below ground marked the transition from classical to Byzantine. It did not take long to discover what treasures they contained—one of the most resplendent collections of early Christian mosaics and frescoes to be found anywhere in the world, rivalling the glories of Ravenna and Istanbul. A Byzantine public bath, hidden for much of its existence under the accumulated topsoil, still functioned high in the Upper Town, near the shady overgrown garden which hid tiny Ayios Nikolaos Orfanos and its fourteenth-century painted narrative of the life of Christ. The Rotonda—a strange cylindrical Roman edifice, whose
multiple re-incarnations as church, mosque, museum and art centre encapsulated the city’s endless metamorphoses—contained some of the earliest mural mosaics to be found in the eastern Mediterranean. Next to it stood an elegant pencil-thin minaret, nearly one hundred and twenty feet tall.

Like many visitors before me, I found myself particularly drawn to the Upper Town. There, hidden inside the perimeter of the old walls, was a warren of precipitous alleyways sometimes ending abruptly, at others opening onto squares shaded by plane trees and cooled by fountains. One had the sense of entering an older world whose life was conducted according to different rhythms: cars found the going tougher, indeed few of them had yet mastered the cobbled slopes. Pedestrians took the steep gradients at a leisurely pace, pausing frequently for rest: despite the heat, people came to enjoy the panoramic views across the town and over the bay. Down below were the office blocks and multi-storey apartment buildings of the postwar boom. But here there were few signs of wealth. Abutting the old walls were modest whitewashed homes in brick or wood—often no more than a single small room with a privy attached: a pot of geraniums brightened the window-ledge, a rag rug bleached by the sun served as a door mat, clotheslines were stretched from house to house. Their elderly inhabitants were neatly dressed. Later I realized most had probably lived there since the 1920s, drawn from among the tens of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor who had settled in the city after the exchange of populations with Turkey. Their simple homes contrasted with the elegantly dilapidated villas whose overhanging upper floors and high garden walls still lined many streets; the majority, once grand, had been badly neglected: their gabled roofs had caved in, their shuttered bedrooms lay open to public view, and one caught spectacular glimpses of the city below through yawning gaps in their frontage. By the time I first saw them most had been abandoned for decades, for their Muslim owners had left the city when the refugees had arrived. The cypresses, firs and rosebushes in their gardens were overgrown with ivy and creeping vines, their formerly bright colours had faded into pastel shades of yellow, ochre and cream. Here were vestiges of a past that was absent from the urban landscape of southern Greece—Turkish neighbourhoods that had outlived the departure of their inhabitants; fountains with their dedicatory inscriptions intact; a dervish tomb, now shuttered and locked.