Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (29 page)

But the climate of opinion was changing: a Christian woman who first embraced and then abandoned Islam was protected by the pasha from her vengeful Muslim husband who was wandering the city threatening to shoot her. Two young Jews—one a child of ten, the other sixteen—were also allowed to return to their original faith. Even Papa Isaiah, a would-be Christian Orthodox neo-martyr, turned out to be too late for martyrdom and despite his deliberate insults to the ruling faith was sentenced only to hard labour cutting stones.
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Since their primary purpose was to preserve the peace and ensure that the customary proprieties were observed, Salonica’s pashas tried to ascertain that the half a dozen or so converts who came before them annually had good reasons for their decision. Those whose conversion to Islam was suspected to have been coerced—forced conversions in the villages at the hands of local Muslim land-owners were still a source of bitter feeling in the countryside—were sometimes sent to Constantinople to be examined at the Porte. Complainants also took cases there themselves. In June 1844, an Armenian couple officially lodged a complaint that their daughter, whom they had allowed to go to the local bath-house in Salonica with a Muslim woman, had not been returned to them on the grounds—which they angrily disputed—that she had converted of her own free will. The Porte dealt with the case and emphasized in its instructions to the authorities in Salonica that “if the illegal use of force has occurred, this is very damaging for the confidence of the population and can cause disruption of the order of the state.”
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Other cases were scrutinized carefully on the spot. After a poor Jewish girl left her parents’ house and took shelter in the home of Muslim friends, the pasha ordered her to discuss the matter with her parents in the
konak.
She told him that she had fled to escape the beatings her father gave her, but Rifaat Pasha responded that this was not a good enough reason to disown her parents and her religion, and ordered her to return. At the same time, however, he summoned the girl’s father and told him to treat her kindly, pledging to protect her should he ill-treat her again. It was a model of how to defuse a potentially explosive situation.
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A few years earlier, things had not been handled so well, and the result had been catastrophe. On the morning of 7 May 1876, a brief but alarming telegram from the British consul reached the embassy in Constantinople: “Both the Consuls killed, the Europeans much alarmed—struck with horror. The Greeks are arming, fearing
general massacre.” This was the first indication to reach the outside world of one of the most notorious—and misunderstood—episodes in the city’s history, a conversion crisis which escalated rapidly into a double killing that made the headlines around the world.

What had happened was this. The previous afternoon a Christian girl called Stefana, from a village outside the city, had travelled into Salonica by train, already veiled, to register her conversion on entering the household of a Muslim land-owner. It was not an uncommon step, and as always, it left a trail of unhappy relatives in its wake. Her mother had followed her to the city to try to stop her—her father was dead—and at the train station she shouted out to some passing Christians for help. One of them seized the girl and tore off her veil—a most serious breach of Ottoman custom—before commandeering a carriage which belonged to the American vice-consul, the member of a well-known local Greek family, and spiriting the girl, and her mother, off into hiding. Police ran after the carriage as far as the town gate and then lost it.

The next morning, some Muslims called on the pasha to tell him the girl must be brought to his palace so that she could be properly examined, as convention demanded. But the American consul happened to be away, and his brother said the girl had left the consulate and he did not know her whereabouts; in fact she had been sent secretly to the house of another Greek notable. An angry crowd began to gather opposite the pasha’s palace and warned him that if he did not act, they would attack the consulate themselves. “I went out of the pasha’s room and told the chiefs or leaders they were wrong in collecting such a crowd, and asked them what they wanted,” recalled Selim Bey, the chief of police, afterwards. “They said, ‘The Girl.’ I told them to wait a few hours and the girl would be surrendered, but they would not listen.” Asked why he did not disperse the crowd, Selim Bey replied: “I had not sufficient force—only 20 men—and the crowd was composed of 100 men at least.”
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News of the affair spread to the bazaar and armed Albanians joined the other protestors at the nearby Saatli mosque. Tempers soon began to fray and when told to disperse, the mob threatened members of the pasha’s advisory council. Then the French and German consuls happened by ill luck to walk past the mosque on their way to try to see the governor. They were seized by the crowd and held in a small room. As they talked the matter over with the
mufti
and other members of the advisory council, it became clear that they were being detained as hostages for the girl’s surrender. The pasha arrived on the scene
but panicked as angry demonstrators forced their way into the room, despite the efforts of several policemen, and attacked the two men with chairs and iron bars. By the time the girl was found and handed over, they were dead. After her arrival at the
konak
the crowd dispersed, shouting in triumph and firing pistols and rifles into the air.
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Blunt, the British consul, was with the pasha barely one hundred yards from the mosque. “I was horrified and could not believe that the Consuls had been murdered.” Hearing the sound of firing, he became alarmed and feared either that the police were shooting into the crowd, or that the latter had descended into the lower town and begun a general massacre. As he moved towards the window, the pasha cried after him: “Do not expose yourself. For God’s sake don’t let them see you: they are like mad wolves.” So dangerous did the situation appear that the pasha let Blunt make his escape through his
haremlik
, from where “some members of his family, screaming and shrieking, attempted to rush out.” Fearing a “great catastrophe,” he went off to telegraph Athens to send a British man-of-war from Piraeus. Shortly after, he realized the girl had been handed over, and the mob had broken up.
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T
HE MURDER OF TWO EUROPEAN CONSULS
was a tremendous blow to the prestige of the Great Powers and they quickly responded by sending warships to the city. There was talk of occupation, but in fact the ships simply trained their guns on the Upper Town and remained there in a show of force. While Europe buzzed with concern at what it regarded as another manifestation of Turkish religious fanaticism, urgent instructions came from Constantinople to punish those responsible. The pasha took his time making any arrests, since most of the troops available to him were sympathetic to the perpetrators. Nevertheless, more than thirty men were eventually held and on 17 May, six of the supposed ring-leaders were hanged in public on open ground by the quay walls.

Christians in mid-century Salonica remembered the events of 1821 and lived with the fear of massacre. Often the talk was nothing more than exaggeration, alarmist fantasy spread by those who should have known better. But at times, it was something more: in 1860, for instance, when “the fearful Syrian massacres were still thrilling men’s minds,” a traveller in the city noticed the spread of a vague sense of disquiet: “There was trouble of some sort, no one could define it—but there was alarm, and people hinted at Russian agency at work, to
excite suspicions on the one side, and fanaticism on the other.” For a few days, people slept uneasily at night and kept weapons to hand, and means of quick escape. But in the end “we all stayed quietly, nothing happened and the panic passed away.”
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But 1876, when an angry, armed rabble was already descending on the Frank quarter to burn it, before they were told of the girl’s delivery and dispersed, was the closest the city came to such a catastrophe. Aware of the need to reaffirm the values of communal harmony, notables from all sides made an effort in the days and weeks after the crime to show their solidarity. Less than a month later, in May, there was “indescribable” rejoicing for the accession of Sultan Murad and the return of the reformers to the capital. As one observer noted, the joy was not interrupted “by any act of disorder or ill-feeling; the quay, the principal streets, the Bazaars and the Coffee houses were crowded with Turks, Greeks, Jews, Levantines and Europeans all mingled together, men, women and children, as if their national and religious feelings had not been wounded and irritated by the latest horrid occurrences. Antipathy of race to race appeared to have been forgotten and forgiven.”

The coronation festivities allowed for a very public display of harmony, led by the town’s religious leaders. The Orthodox Metropolitan Ioacheim, a man greatly respected in the town, was seen to embrace the
defterdar
, the provincial treasurer, while the
mufti
“wept like a child.” The metropolitan hailed “this glorious event,” and when the chief rabbi offered prayers for the new sultan in the main synagogue, the ceremony was attended by four pashas, Turkish officers, the metropolitan himself and Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant priests. A few days later, they all assembled again for public prayers in the Mevlevi
tekke
outside the city walls: English, Greek and Austrian naval officers, as well as the consular corps added to the throng. The fears and rumours of massacre did not vanish—they emerged briefly again and led to what the British consul termed a “sort of panic” in October—by which time poor, mad Sultan Murad had already been deposed and replaced by his brother Abdul Hamid—but calmer heads knew that rumours did as much damage as the real thing, and needed to be dampened down for the good of the town. When Bairam came round, it was celebrated in an orderly manner after leading figures in the Muslim community urged the importance of taking account of the feelings of Christians and of “disproving all the rumours which are current here of a fanatical rising against the Christians.” Christian notables reciprocated and
the local Greek newspaper congratulated the authorities and “Muslim co-citizens” on the “great tranquillity” which prevailed and urged the Orthodox to follow their example at Easter. The proclamation of the first-ever Ottoman constitution that autumn was greeted in the city with prayers for a new era of common brotherhood and communal harmony.
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E
ASTERN
Q
UESTIONS

I
F THE GOVERNOR’S INEPTITUDE
and the irresponsible behaviour of a few prominent Greeks had helped turn a minor dispute into an international incident whose reverberations rippled across the Levant, the real causes of the consuls’ deaths lay elsewhere and had been building up for some time. Resistance had been evident among the city’s Muslims to the Porte’s insistence on measures that contravened the natural order of things. This opposition had not been confined to the landed beys. The poor of the city, who were—in Fanny Blunt’s words—“an Allah-fearing people, eating a small quantity of yaghourt, smoking a few cigarettes, hard-working toilers,” also found it difficult to stomach the notion that Christians should be placed on an equal footing with Muslims. The background of the thirty-five men convicted of involvement in the murders show how widespread such views were: they included servants, slaves, a butcher and a barber, several Albanian gunmakers, a Bosnian (described as a “card-player of no profession”), a coffee-house owner, food wholesalers, a carpenter, several masons and several young men who happened to be visiting from the provinces.
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Behind the Christians of the city, of course, lay the European Powers. The symbolic power of the 1876 murders lay precisely in the fact that the victims were consuls, members of perhaps the most privileged political class in Salonica. As the balance of power between the empire and the Great Powers tilted in the latter’s favour, so the importance and confidence of the consular corps had grown. They began to receive return visits from the pasha—something unknown in the eighteenth century—and flew their national flags. Under what was known as the system of capitulations, they also acquired rights to try their own nationals and as they extended their protection and passports to more and more of the city’s non-Muslim inhabitants, anxious to enjoy the immunities conferred by foreign citizenship, so they circumscribed the extent of Ottoman jurisdiction.

By the nineteenth century, the capitulations were clearly being abused. Neither the American nor the German consul in Salonica in 1876 was a national of the country he represented; the former was a Greek notable named Hadzilazaros, the latter was one of the Abbotts. Jews and Christians often declared their immunity before the authorities as Spanish, Tuscan, Neapolitan or Austrian subjects. Moses Allatini, the most influential Jewish businessman and philanthropist in Salonica, was an Italian. One local Christian escaped prosecution by claiming he was an “Ionian” (and therefore under British protection) despite never having been to the Ionian islands nor even knowing where they were. The system had become so corrupt that people changed nationality as it served their interests. James Roggotti was born in Macedonia as an Ottoman subject but acquired first a Greek and then, by the time of his return to the city as an adult, a British passport. “Signor Tavoulari” began life as a Bulgarian Christian, made his fortune under Russian and Swedish protection, importing counterfeit Turkish coin from Greece, and left the city with an “Ionian” passport (at that time the Ionian Islands were administered by the British) for Syra before finally returning as a “Hellene.”
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