Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (25 page)

If he was conscientious or prudent, the governor did not remain in the seclusion of his
konak.
Hadji Ahmed Pasha perambulated incognito, chatting with shopkeepers, and acquiring local knowledge which he put to use establishing a short-lived police force to patrol the streets. Sali Pasha personally inspected the state of the prisons, while his successor, a keen reformer, “visits every corner of the town … instead of passing his leisure in the corner of his divan,” and as a result ordered prisoners to sweep the streets and organized monthly inspections of the fire brigades. Another pasha wandered the streets disguised as a farmer, and mingled with the peasants outside the town walls, encouraging them to submit petitions to himself!
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This was still a personalized system of rule in which
temperament counted for much. Husni Pasha headed off a riot by promptly announcing lower prices for flour, while Akif Pasha won praise for his “timely and vigorous measures” to check an outbreak of cholera. During a fire in 1840, Omer Pasha “was immediately on the spot” to check the flames by ordering all the shops near the fire to be pulled down. By contrast, Yusuf Pasha was “not respected owing to his indolence” and the former vizier Riza Pasha made it obvious that he felt he was parked there in exile.
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Only a year or so before him, in 1846, Yacoub Pasha had sat and watched as more than fifteen hundred houses were burned. As the British consul reported:

His Excellency Yacoub Pasha evinced the most extraordinary, if not cruel, apathy, smoking his pipe and quietly looking at the fire without giving one single para to urge the people to exert themselves. Most of the fire engines were taken away from the fire to be ready to protect the Konak of the Pasha and the Greek Archbishop’s palace, the consequence was that the fire made dreadful ravages till it reached these two extremities.

In one instance, when an Engine was required which had been taken by some Greeks to protect the church of St. Theodoro (when all danger for the safety of the edifice was passed) I urged His Excellency Yacoub Pasha to send and take the Engine to save the upper part of the Town, his reply was “What can I do, it is a Frank engine.” Astonished at such a reply, I said: “The engine may be a Frank engine but Your Excellency must not forget that you are a Governor, and that as it is necessary for the safety of the Town, you should send and seize it.” Yacoub Pasha then sent some of his people to take it, but they returned saying that it was a Frank engine and that they will not give it up.
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The mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman state, as this example may suggest, was still suffering more from chronic weakness than from excessive despotism. The pasha had no greater resources at his direct disposal than his eighteenth-century predecessors had commanded—usually only small detachments of
zaptiehs
, or gendarmes, who were quartered at his palace, or companies of artillerymen manning the batteries in the fort. In 1843, the departure of troops to the capital left only five hundred artillerymen to police the town and keep order throughout the
pashalik.
There was no regular municipal police force till late
in the century, and the streets were patrolled infrequently. Night patrols and nightwatchmen were often armed with nothing more than the large stick they used to beat on the cobbles, and frequently stood aside rather than get involved in brawls which they had not been ordered to stop; many neighbourhoods effectively policed themselves, with the local headman organizing bands of young men, especially in the Jewish quarters of the lower town. As a result, the market attracted thieves and pickpockets, and there were even gangs of child-prostitutes, armed with pistols and rifles, who roamed the streets near the port, clustering around the
hamams
, and soliciting sailors from visiting naval vessels. The public baths themselves were, according to the experienced British consul, “full of children who act as Fellachs, or washers … the resort of all the most depraved, and where the crime is openly tolerated.” But as with abortion—another technically illegal but widely tolerated social practice—little was done to end the scandal. On one occasion, a sweep was made of the baths, and all workers there under thirty years old were dismissed; but as soon as the pasha responsible was disgraced and sent on elsewhere, they came back.
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Lack of police hampered the monitoring of known trouble spots—casinos, cabarets and cafés “where all the wicked subjects gather together to drink, play cards and gamble, and then prowl the streets.” It also made it harder to disperse the kinds of mobs that still formed when grain prices rose and rumours of scarcity spread through the lower quarters—as when one thousand poor Jews stormed grain warehouses in February 1847. Until late in the century, criminal investigation continued to be based upon the principle of collective neighbourhood punishment: thus after two women and their children were brutally killed not far from the pasha’s residence in 1839, the entire street was jailed in an effort to find the culprits. The prison itself was squalid and over-crowded, its Jewish jailers notorious for their use of the heavy three-inch collar which they fixed around an inmate’s neck. Occasionally, public executions took place without ceremony, sometimes outside the Vardar Gate, at others in the midst of the city, the rope hung from a convenient signpost, a stool borrowed from a nearby café, the dead man left hanging with a placard around his neck. Lack of statistics makes it impossible to know how often the Ottomans resorted to capital punishment, though it was almost certainly far less than the Christian states of north and western Europe. The real difficulty for the Ottoman authorities was asserting their power, not limiting it.
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The destruction of the janissary corps in 1826 eliminated the pasha’
s chief challengers. But disorderly soldiers were still a problem. In 1855 troops en route to the Crimean War were abducting people for ransom, throwing stones at houses in the Greek quarter and frequenting the bath-houses in search of young boys. During the great fire of the following year, eight hundred Albanian irregulars en route to the Arab provinces plundered the bazaar freely, knowing that no one—least of all the pasha—would dare to arrest them. The year before Abdul Mecid’s visit, more irregulars swaggered around with their arms; having refused to stay in the barracks outside the walls they had to be lodged in the khans. The pasha, who did not have “more than a few artillerymen,” was powerless. Salonica’s inhabitants were always surprised when there were “no robberies, no insults”; or when troops did nothing more than wander in great numbers through the bazaar “expressing surprise at what they see.” Badly paid and lodged in flea-ridden caravanserais or, later, in the vast, insanitary warehouse-like barracks built thoughtlessly above a former graveyard on the city’s outskirts, the under-age conscripts and irregulars were so poorly looked after that it is extraordinary they did not cause more trouble than they did.
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With few forces at his disposal, the governor remained constantly attentive to the prestige of his office. When the French consul accidentally struck Namik Pasha on the arm—the latter had intervened in a quarrel between him and a Jewish neighbour—the governor immediately withdrew from the scene as a mark of his displeasure: in the face of the growing assertiveness of European powers, upholding the authority of the Ottoman state was more important than ever. Husni Pasha imprisoned two elderly men for “the trifling offence” of failing to salute him as his carriage passed by. But maintaining the dignity of the office was one thing, arbitrary violence another, and if a pasha’s behaviour slipped over into needless cruelty, it was openly criticized. After Salik Pasha, “whose equal in anti-Christian feeling it would be difficult to find in any country,” ordered the harsh treatment of some Albanian Catholic families suspected of having abandoned Islam and had them embarked for Constantinople with such brutality that several died, “all classes Christians, Turks and Jews cried ‘Shame’ ” and the Turkish captain of the port confided to the British consul that “such acts are contrary to the Law of God and our Prophet.” Eventually Salik Pasha was recalled by the Porte.
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Underlying the Ottoman state was a fundamental paradox. As the chief government official, the pasha was the single most powerful influence on the success or failure of the whole reform effort. Yet the
temporary and unstable character of his position militated against effective long-term governance. How does the sultan ensure the obedience of his governors? asked David Urquhart, a sympathetic observer of the empire. His answer: by “the perpetual possibility of losing their fiefs, their life, their fortune, possibilities to which no other Muslim, no other subject of the Porte is exposed to the same degree … Their services are neither assured nor recompensed; their fall must come and is usually more rapid than their rise.” Political appointees who owed their posting to court connections, largesse and vizierial favour as much as to their own abilities, pashas rarely stayed more than a year in the city before their next posting came. This speedy rotation ensured they would not turn into powerful challengers to their master; but equally it made it hard for them to carry out his policies effectively.
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In order to prevent them treating their assignment as a fiefdom to be ransacked, the new reforms had supposedly created a caste of salaried officials; in reality, their pay was so low that into the 1860s little changed. “I have no inducement to be honest,” one pasha confessed. “If I attempt to rule justly all the other pashas will combine against me and I shall soon be turned out of my place, and unless I take bribes I shall be too poor to purchase another.” Each year Salonica’s inhabitants hoped they would be assigned a man rich enough to ignore the many opportunities for personal gain, a man “whose eye is full” as the saying went. Ibrahim Pasha’s sole redeeming feature was that he was “sufficiently rich to pay for the situation he holds.” Omer Pasha’s first term as pasha in the city had been marked by his rapacity; seven years later, he had become “a man of great wealth which may help him withstand bribery.”
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Unfortunately, money was no guarantee of restraint. It was a good sign that Bekir Pasha, for example, who arrived in August 1813, was “very rich”—he owned huge estates in the Peloponnese—but it turned out within the year that his avarice had not been satisfied and that though “master of a considerable fortune, he was none the less passionate about money and all means for extorting it are legitimate in his eyes.” In the hands of men such as these, it became clear that the creation of new bureaucracies, laws and taxes would not suffice to transform Ottoman life. First the Porte would have to work out whether or not it trusted its own officials. So long as the pasha himself was a deliberately weakened force, little prevented others from challenging and subverting his authority.
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T
HE
B
EYS

T
HE POLICY OF REFORM
was driven from the centre, and forced on the provinces. As an imperial emissary, almost always brought in from outside, without prior knowledge of the city, and bound to leave before long, the pasha had to measure himself against, and work alongside, those men who by their position, wealth and long residence in Salonica wielded real power locally. With the sultan deliberately keeping his pashas on a tight rein for his own reasons, it was the landed Muslim elite who benefited. Leake noted in 1807 that “a few great proprietors” in the city “usurp such an influence that the pasha is a mere cypher, unless he comes accompanied by a sufficient body of attendants to enforce his authority.” Urquhart, a little later, saw him as a “marionette,” a puppet whose strings were pulled by others. Compared with the Bey of Serres, an independent landowner, whose “authority in the districts he commands is unlimited” and who could draw if necessary upon as many as fifteen or twenty thousand troops, the pasha of Salonica was hamstrung by his dependence on orders from the capital, his unfamiliarity with the local scene, and his lack of men or money. Salonica might have been the largest city in the area, but neighbouring Serres and Yennidje, home of the illustrious Evrenos family, were power-bases whose leading families possessed dozens of villages. There, away from the pasha’s gaze, they had grown accustomed to total mastery. They regarded their villagers—Muslim and Christian alike—as their possessions, and unlike their equivalents in Anatolia, they were never dispossessed of their hereditary estates by the Porte.
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For much of the nineteenth century, this was the city’s real ruling class, and no reform effort could succeed without their cooperation. A local council of six leading land-owners had existed since the early eighteenth century to advise the governor. When a new advisory council was set up as a result of the Tanzimat reforms they dominated that too, and more often than not they ensured that members of their families held the crucial lower-level judicial, administrative and economic posts through which real power was deployed. In such circumstances even the toughest-minded pasha found it difficult to make headway against them. This would not have mattered if the interests of the pasha and the beys had converged. But in fact the opposite was the case. After the great crisis of the 1820s and 1830s—the loss of Greece, the Russian invasion and Mehmed Ali’s insubordination in Egypt—the declaration
of equality for Christians and Jews, the attempted abolition of peasant forced labour and the establishment of a standing army with regular troops all implied a challenge to the power of the Muslim landed elite. As Christian confidence grew and peasant expectations of reform rose, the beys fought back to defend their place in the old order.