Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (26 page)

Even before the first reform decrees were proclaimed in 1839, the villagers—both Christian and Muslim—had begun speaking out with a new freedom about the beys’ ill-treatment of them. “We know it to be the will of the sultan,” they now declared, “that we should enjoy our rights … As subjects of the sultan, we demand justice.” The beys reacted to these developments with undisguised hostility. When the pasha instructed them to treat the local Christians with courtesy they did not disguise their irritation. They also criticized Namik Pasha for having returned the visits of European consuls, another mark of humiliation, so far as they were concerned. A later pasha, Yusuf Mehmed, arrived with a show of firmness, imprisoning one bey for debt and shouting down a deputation which came to plead for his release: “Our laws are for the rich as well as the poor,” he told them. “They who incur debts must sell their property and satisfy their creditors.” But he too was soon having to backtrack, his position undermined by his corrupt subordinates.
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For the beys themselves had powerful weapons at their disposal. They had their own supporters at court, whose favours they secured by regular supplies of honey, oil and flour. “Up to the present moment,” noted an observer in 1837, “Any Pasha of Salonica who possessed sufficient nerve to remonstrate with the beys did not remain in power. For being united, the beys by their joint means were enabled to offer such bribes to some of the parties in power at the Sublime Porte.” And if bribes failed, defamation and intrigues usually did the trick. Control of local grain supplies made them—not the pasha—the crucial figures in ensuring an affordable local supply of flour through the year. Their henchmen could be sent off on plundering raids by land or sea which exposed the pasha to accusations that he was failing to act against brigands and pirates. The reforming Namik Pasha regretfully came to the conclusion that “there is no one to second me.”
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Yet already by the mid-1840s, some of the more far-sighted and politically adroit land-owners had come to appreciate the advantages of participating in the new reforms. At first this was an obstructive strategy, a way to monopolize positions of influence and control the flow of information to Constantinople. Shortly after the Gulhané decree,
it was reported that the most influential beys “being members of the [local] Council, have become more powerful.” They also packed a provincial deputation sent to the capital in 1845 to advise the Porte. As a result, forced labour dues continued to burden the peasantry, money-lending remained a curse on the local economy and the beys effectively ran their own affairs: peasants both Christian and Muslim quickly became gloomy at the prospect of any real improvements in their lives. It was only from the 1860s onwards—and in particular following new laws on provincial administration in 1864—that the reform movement gathered momentum. As the city prospered, and Greeks and Jews began to make substantial fortunes, the new capitalist economy swept away the old closed Ottoman system and non-Muslims started to invest in estates around the city, especially after foreigners were allowed to own property. Gradually the beys—like landed classes across Europe—realized that land itself was no longer necessarily the best repository of their fortunes. More and more made their way into the rapidly expanding imperial bureaucracy whose rapid growth from roughly 1,000 to nearly 100,000 over the century was an important means of reconciling them with the regime. They entered municipal and national politics, became mayors and ministers, and in 1908 when the first parliamentary elections were held for a constitutional assembly, three out of the eight deputies elected locally were drawn from the landed class. In this way they safeguarded their power and their estates whilst contributing to the modernization of their city and country.
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The most distinguished landed family in the Balkans—the descendants of Ghazi Evrenos Bey, the conqueror of Macedonia—had little difficulty making this transition. Their staying power and flexibility was impressive. In the eighteenth century they had been tax-farmers on a huge scale. Yet Evrenoszade Pasha was among the deputies sent to the first-ever parliament in 1877 and his descendants were prominent members of the imperial bureaucracy. Even after the Greek army marched into Macedonia in 1912, they managed to collect their rents. Would not the first Evrenos Bey, to whose tomb Muslim and Christian pilgrims still flocked, have admired the foresight of his descendant Mustafa Rahmi, an influential and early member of the Committee of Union and Progress in Salonica when it was still in its coffee-house and beer-garden phase, deputy in the Ottoman parliament in 1908 and 1912, and governor of Izmir in 1914–15, where he resisted pressure from his former co-conspirators to drive the Armenians of the city out to certain death in the interior? True to his familial tradition, this
scion of the great dynasty preferred, despite the events of the war, to maintain good relations with the Greeks and Armenians, a humane policy which may not have been unconnected with his efforts to exchange the hereditary estates around Salonica with those owned by a Greek land-owner outside Izmir. For even Rahmi Bey could see that his family’s long connection with the Salonica region was inevitably coming to an end. Later, between the two world wars, he was pushed to the margins of Turkish political life, forced into exile, and sentenced
in absentia
on trumped-up grounds of attempting to plot against Mustafa Kemal.
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Meanwhile the Evrenos estates were taken over by the Greek state in the aftermath of the vast migration of peoples which followed the collapse of the empire. The great land-owners had been able to survive both the weakening and the subsequent regeneration of the Ottoman state, but as in every empire, their wealth was ultimately bound up with the fate of the imperial system itself, and could not survive long into the era of nation-states, mass movements of populations and land reform.
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T
HE
M
ONEY-LENDERS

I
T WOULD BE A COMPLETE MISREADING
of the realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century Salonica to assume that the only people to wield power there were Muslims. In September 1840 extraordinary fly-bills were pasted to the walls of the main churches and other buildings in town. Curious passers-by found a satire, written in Greek, which directed the pasha’s attention to the misdeeds of both the archbishop of the city and his Muslim colleagues on the local advisory council, and stated that their acts were not in accordance with the imperial instructions contained in the Gulhané proclamation of the previous year. The anonymous writer called on God to witness that he would expose their unjust doings if there was not immediate reform.
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The accusations referred specifically to machinations to thwart the Porte’s anti-corruption drive. As everyone in Salonica knew, the culprits were doing this because they themselves had been bribed by the local bankers and usurers whose business depended on supplying vast sums to everyone from peasants to high-ranking office-holders and tax-farmers. In the old Ottoman economy, control of the supply of credit was at least as important as ownership of land—more important perhaps, since it was scarcer. The first Western-style bank, the Ottoman Bank, was founded by imperial decree only in 1863: before that
date, money-lenders and private bankers wielded huge power. In complete contrast to the land-owning class, they tended not to be Muslims at all, but Jews, Armenians and Christians. In 1738, as we saw in the last chapter, the Jewish
sarraf
(private banker), Jacob Kapon, the pasha’s money-lender and chief treasurer, was a man powerful enough to get the rabbis to issue excommunications against his rivals and bring their business affairs to a halt. A century later, Izzet Pasha’s
sarraf
, also Jewish, was said to have interests in two-thirds of the monopolies of the city. According to the British consul, the pasha “entertains too high an opinion of his Jew Bankers. They are the cause of much evil,” and had the pasha’s entire entourage in their power. Firmans outlawing excessive bribes to
mollahs
and
kadis
were ignored because the officials demanding the bribes needed money to pay off their debts to such men.

It was because money-lending and corruption were closely connected that this class of men formed one of the principal targets of the reforms. In 1851 the government sent a commissioner, Sami Pasha, to investigate. “I hardly ever witnessed in this Town so great a concourse of people collected for the arrival of any Ottoman authority,” noted a foreign eye-witness. Money-lending, the extortionate rate of interest, the mortgaging of estates and the damaging impact on cultivation were pressing issues. Everyone knew the fate of the bishop of Kassandra who tried to make credit available to his parishioners at a mere 8½ per cent interest annually. Powerful local money-lenders had managed to get him recalled so that they could continue lending at their usual 20–25 per cent. During his stay in the city, Sami Pasha—who like many Ottoman civil servants spoke Greek as well as Ottoman Turkish—received numerous petitions calling for regulation. A little later it was announced by the governor, Yacoub Pasha, that lending money to villages was no longer legal without the permission of the regional advisory council.
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But then Yacub Pasha himself fell into disgrace and was replaced by someone far worse. Sadik Pasha, a sixty-year-old Salonican bey with a bloody past, had borrowed £25–30,000 to secure his appointment to the
pashalik
and as a result owed a huge sum to his bankers. The relevant calculations were easily made: his total income, one observer noted, “does not amount to half of the interest due at the end of the year”; as a result, “plunder and corruption may be anticipated.” Within a short space of time, the city was enduring an “unprecedented” level of extortion, by the police, government officials, and by the pasha himself. Guilds were having to hand over a monthly allowance and men
were being cast into prison solely in order to force them to pay large fines: the pasha’s private secretary was reputed to have raised “about £24,000” in this way.
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An official enquiry later established that as many as 250 had been unlawfully killed during Yusuf Sadik Pasha’s tenure as governor: but his grip over the town, and the fact that most of the advisory council were related to him, meant that no one had been able to prevent his crimes.
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Memories of this “unprecedented plunder” must have still been alive six years later when Sultan Abdul Mecid made his visit to the city. For it was during the few days he remained there that an episode occurred which through its sheer emblematic power gripped Salonica’s imagination for generations. Told and re-told many times, this was the story of how the sultan met with Sadik Pasha’s chief local banker, a man called Jackie Abbott, a Levantine businessman and money-lender, the man in other words whose money had been responsible for so much suffering. The embodiment of Ottoman authority and the architect of reform thus came face to face with the figure who represented as well as anyone the old system and its defenders.

John “Jackie” Abbott was “Greek by religion, British by nationality.” His family had been settled in the city for over fifty years but he had been the real architect of its rise. A mid-century photograph shows a plump man in a morning coat, his large necktie carelessly knotted, staring aggressively at the camera as though keen to get back to work. His fortune came originally from cultivating and trading in leeches, an indispensable commodity for local healers. But the leeches signified something else as well, for Abbott had used his wealth to turn himself into one of the region’s chief money-lenders by “corrupting the authorities and thereby committing all kinds of acts of injustice.” In addition to Sadik Pasha, Abbott also had the city’s Greek metropolitan in his debt, and several of the leading beys—a majority, in fact, of the advisory council. He was a good example of what Urquhart called “the hidden mechanism which sets the administrative machine of Turkey in motion.” His lavish bribes to successive pashas and their secretaries included money, snuff boxes and diamond-studded pipes, sufficient to get his rivals thrown into jail and making him a dangerous man to cross (according to one apocryphal version of the tale he had started out in life by murdering a competitor, the Jewish owner of the finest local leech-farm). By the time of Abdul Mecid’s visit, his interests extended to more than twenty-five landed estates and numerous villages whose peasants laboured to repay the extortionate interest rates he charged.
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On the slopes of Mount Hortiatis above the town, Salonica’s consuls had been building themselves country retreats for several decades to flee the fevers, plague, mud and dust of urban life. From the little hamlet of Urendjik the panorama across the Gulf to Mount Olympos was superb, the soil fertile. Over six years, with the help of hundreds of workers, and at a cost of one million Turkish pounds (according to the legend), Abbott built himself the grandest villa of all. In its private chapel, a mass was celebrated every Sunday. A fountain cast a jet twenty metres high in the courtyard. Extensive gardens, tended by foreign specialists, were planted with dozens of species—including cedars, cypresses, elms, oaks, persimmons from America, mulberries, figs, apples, pears, plums, almonds, chestnuts and pines.
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During Abdul Mecid’s visit, Abbott took the liberty of inviting the sultan to his country estate. He could not have been accused of stinting for the occasion. He had the road widened and new bridges built. Carpets were bought up from local dealers to cover the entire stretch—six or seven miles—along which the imperial carriage would have to travel. Within the house itself, a Turkish bath was added for the sultan’s use. Abdul Mecid was delayed by the many petitions presented to him, but eventually his carriage drew up outside the gates to Abbott’s property. He was just about to place his foot on the carpeted ground when the skies clouded over, and there was a clap of thunder: a superstitious man, he immediately refused to descend. Abbott begged the padishah to accept a coffee, and when the gold stove was brought up, the flames were fed by banknotes (the sultan is supposed to have asked whether coffee thus heated tasted better). Abbott then again proffered the keys to his property, but Abdul Mecid, after turning them over for some time, handed them back, telling the disappointed owner merely that “your fine property will be exempt from taxes so long as you own it.”