Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (30 page)

The presence of a Greek consul in the city since 1835 particularly affronted Ottoman sensibilities, as did the deliberately assertive and hostile behaviour of the “Hellenes” who came there from Athens. In 1846 the Greek corvette
Ludovick
docked during joint Ottoman-Greek operations against pirates, and the British consul noted that “many of the Greek officers indulged openly in remarks in the Coffee Houses respecting the Turks which did them little credit.” One man boasted openly that “in two years the Greek flag would fly upon the Castle of Salonica.” In 1851 old Greek passports were supposedly circulating in the coffee-houses of the town, as part of a scheme—or so the Ottoman authorities suspected—of encouraging Christians to emigrate to the Kingdom. In 1863 the local authorities forbade any public demonstration or celebration after Prince George of Denmark was elected as King of Greece. Seamen were a predictable source of trouble. When a pasha of the old school ordered a Greek flag painted on the signboard of a wine shop by the port to be taken down, Greek sailors came on shore with their arms, and immediately replaced it.
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The 1876 crisis brought all these factors to the fore. For the Christians, there was the fear—later shown to be unfounded—that the woman was under-age and had not converted of her own free will: abductions, it should be noted, were commonplace in the
countryside among both Christians and Muslims; nor, sadly, was it unknown for Muslim beys to carry off Christian women with impunity. For Muslims, on the other hand, there was anger at the thought that Christians now believed themselves so powerful that they could flout custom and the wishes of the pasha and prevent a potential convert from presenting herself at the
konak.
Both sides saw the woman as embodying the honour of the community, needing to be protected against their enemies. Above all, there was the presence of the consuls throughout: a consular carriage had been used to spirit the girl into hiding; it was rumoured—falsely as it turned out—that she had been hidden in the American consulate itself; and crucially, there was the presence of the French and German consuls on the scene, presenting themselves before the mob as intermediaries and bearing out popular Muslim suspicions of their role in the whole affair.

And one final factor played a decisive role: these events unfolded against the background of the most serious diplomatic and military crisis of the entire century—the Near Eastern crisis of 1875–78. Beginning with a peasant uprising in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the troubles spread in 1876 to Bulgaria and the Danubian provinces and ended with an invasion by the Russian army the following year. The Treaty of San Stefano, which Russia imposed on the empire early in 1878, created a vast new Bulgarian state which passed just to the north of Salonica itself and cut it off from its hinterland. Even after the other Great Powers forced Russia to back down and tore up the San Stefano agreement, there was no disguising the humiliation suffered by the Porte: at the Congress of Berlin, Serbia was declared independent, an autonomous (if smaller) Bulgaria was established under Russian control, Cyprus was occupied by British troops (as the price for supporting the Turks) and the Great Powers forced the Ottoman authorities to pledge a further programme of administrative reforms.

These events deeply affected Salonica. As always in time of war, the city was in a febrile state—filled with soldiers, requisitioning agents, tax-collectors and rumours. Muslim notables criticized the diplomacy of the Porte and feared for the first time “being driven out of Europe.” The Bulgarian insurrection actually broke out just three days before the killing of the consuls in Salonica; rumours of the rising had reached the city, together with reports of outrages on Muslim villagers and of plans to drive them from their homes. At one point the authorities feared that Salonica’s Christians too would rise to prompt a Russian advance on the city itself, and the Vali warned he would quell any
insurrection in the harshest manner. “I know him to be of the party in Turkey,” wrote the British consul, “who believe the Eastern Question can only be solved by the destruction, or at least the expatriation of all Christians from the European provinces of Turkey, and replacing them by Circassians and colonists from Asia.”
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The spectacle of vast forced movements of populations crisscrossing the region was no fantasy. While the eyes of Europe were fixed—thanks to Gladstone’s loud condemnation of the “Bulgarian horrors”—on the Christian victims of the war, thousands of Muslim refugees from Bosnia, Bulgaria and the Russian army were headed south. Added to those who had earlier fled the Russians in the Caucasus—somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 Circassians and Nogai Tatars had arrived in the empire between 1856 and 1864—the refugee influx which accompanied the waning of Ottoman power was well and truly under way. A Commission for the Settlement of Refugees was created, and the figures provided by this organization show that more than half a million refugees crossed into the empire between 1876 and 1879 alone.
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In January 1878, the Porte ordered the governor of Salonica to find lodging for fifty thousand throughout the province. The following month it was reported that “the whole country is full of Circassian families, fleeing from the Russian army and the Servians, in long lines of carts … panic-stricken, they strive to embark for Asia Minor and Syria.” While Albanian Ghegs and uprooted Nogai Tatars settled around the town, thousands more left weekly on steamers bound for Smyrna and Beirut. Many of these refugees had been settled in the Bulgarian lands only a decade earlier; now for a second time they were being uprooted because of Russian military action. Destitute, exploited by local land-owners, many—especially Circassian—men formed robber bands, and became a byword for crime in the region. Two years after the end of hostilities, there were still more than three thousand refugees, many suffering from typhus or smallpox, receiving relief in the city, and another ten thousand in the vicinity. The
Mufti
of Skopje estimated that a total of seventy thousand were still in need of subsistence in the Sandjak of Pristina. By 1887, so many immigrants from the lost provinces had moved to Salonica that house rents there had risen appreciably.
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The political outlook for Ottoman rule in European Turkey was grim. Only Western intervention had saved the empire from defeat at the hands of the Russian army; the consequent losses in Europe were great. The powers openly discussed the future carve-up of further
territories, and Austrians, Bulgarians and Greeks fixed their eyes on Salonica. As discussions began at the Congress of Berlin on the territorial settlement, one observer underlined the need for a further sweeping reform of Ottoman institutions and the creation of an “impartial authority” to govern what was left. In view of the patchy record of the past forty years’ reform efforts, few would have given the imperial system long to live. Indeed many expected its imminent collapse, especially after the youthful Sultan Abdul Hamid suspended the new constitution barely two years after it had been unveiled. But they had to wait longer than they thought. The empire had another few decades of life left, and in that time Salonica itself prospered, grew and changed its appearance more radically than ever before.
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P
ART
II
In the Shadow of Europe

A
T THE ZENITH
of Ottoman power, no Christian state could match it. In the sixteenth century, the French came to the Porte as supplicants and Elizabeth I was so desperate for an alliance that she told Sultan Murad III that Islam and Protestantism were kindred faiths. In 1623 a French political theorist placed the “great Turke” above all the rulers of Christendom, second in power only to the pope. Defeat at the gates of Vienna in 1683 is often taken as the moment when the rot set in, but in fact the empire performed respectably against its enemies for much of the eighteenth century as well.
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Only during and after the Napoleonic wars did the balance of power shift unambiguously against it, which was why successive sultans devoted so much energy to centralizing the state and modernizing its institutions. The main challenge they faced came from Christendom’s successor, Europe. Initially the empire lay outside the so-called Concert of Great Powers. But in the Treaty of Paris which concluded the Crimean War in 1856 it was recognized for the first time as forming part of the “Public Law and System of Europe,” a curious phrase that implied its entry into a broader civilization. Europe stood for a set of values and the Ottoman empire was being asked to sign up to these much as the European Union has recently required its successor to do. Another article of the 1856 treaty spelled out the price of membership, the sultan declaring his intention to improve the condition of his subjects “without distinction of Religion or of Race”
and
to make manifest his “generous intentions towards the Christian population of his Empire.”
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As this odd combination of commitments suggests, “Europe” stood for a complex mixture of ideas—freedom of worship and equal treatment for all, on the one hand, and special solicitude for Christians on the other; respect for state sovereignty, and at the same time, concern for the rights of the individual. With time, other ideas bubbled out of Europe as well—the rights of nations to independence, as manifested in the rise of Italy, France and Germany; the expansion of free trade and the notion of an autonomous market; the redefinition of religion as a matter of private individual conscience. Into the Ottoman lands poured Europeans of all nationalities—businessmen and investors, soldiers and relief workers, reporters and government advisers. Salonica changed faster and more dramatically than ever before: as the nineteenth century progressed, it became simultaneously more European, and more “Oriental,” more closely integrated in the empire, and more threatened by nationalist rivalries, more conscious of itself as a city and yet more bitterly divided. But all these paradoxes and apparent contradictions were nothing more than the manifestation of forces evident in the empire as a whole, an empire transforming itself in the shadow of Europe.

9
Travellers and the European Imagination

S
EARCHING FOR THE
P
ICTURESQUE

T
OURISM CAME TO
S
ALONICA
in the middle of the nineteenth century and thereby created a new city—a city of the Western imagination. There had of course been the occasional visitor before that—monks, a curious diplomat or two and a few enterprising young gentlemen deviating from the usual Italian circuit. In 1751 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett were commissioned by the Society of Dilettanti to survey the ruins of classical Greece, and they made the first drawings of Salonica to survive. But the main land and sea routes between western Europe and Constantinople passed north or south of the city, and it figures in barely a dozen eighteenth-century travel accounts. Within fifty years all that changed, and a new image of it arose in books and articles which was eventually to exert a profound influence upon its own evolution.

The catalyst was steam. The first steam cruise in the Levant took place in 1833; a steam boat descended the Danube the following year. By the 1840s British, French and Austrian lines connected the city with the main ports of the Mediterranean. Steam changed time and space, imposing schedules and a degree of standardization unknown in an era when people simply relied on the weather and a friendly captain for a berth one day or the next. It also ushered in some familiar reactions to travel itself: on the one hand, sheer wonder that, for instance, the trip between the Austrian and Ottoman capitals had been cut from three weeks to one; on the other, fears that this acceleration would destroy travelling’s very pleasure and purpose. When one German scholar
spent a winter in Salonica in 1841, he boasted that he was “much more fortunate than other travellers, who are always in a hurry.” The regrettable shortening of journey times was not be avoided “in our hurried century,” warned one early guidebook. “Three days saved in the time for navigation, the railways and roads substituting for sail, these are the attractions against which the immense majority of travellers lack any defence.”
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Inside the Ottoman City

Yet even after the growth of tourism to Greece, Egypt and the lands of the Bible, the city and its Balkan hinterland remained off the beaten track. “I am the first American woman that has ever visited Salonica,” one Southern belle wrote proudly to her sister in 1839. More than
three decades later, travellers were still oddities. On a steamer from Constantinople, a German passenger fell into conversation with a French salesman. Why was he going to Salonica? he was asked. “For amusement? To Salonica? To this boring and most disconsolate of all Eastern one-horse towns? Can it be?” The pasha there complimented him on his enterprising spirit in venturing where few Europeans dared go, but recommended next time he try Crete instead “for a long stay in winter or spring.”
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