Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (33 page)

The brows were brown, lightly frowning, pushed together so that they nearly joined. The expression in that look was a mixture of energy and naivety. One would have said the glance of a child, it had so much freshness and youth.

The young woman whose eyes they were stood, and displayed to the waist a figure enveloped in a Turkish cape (
feredje
) with long, stiff folds. The cloak was of green silk, embroidered with silver thread. A white veil was carefully wrapped around her head, letting one see nothing but her forehead and her large eyes. Her pupils were green, that sea-green tint of which the poets of the East once sung. That young woman was Aziyadé.
²⁵

Pierre Loti—the “lotus”—was the pen-name of a young writer called Julien Viaud, acrobat, officer and adventurer, who was to become one of the most successful of Europe’s Orientalists with his novels of decadent sensibility and exotic seduction. Many others, of course, had mined the same vein: the literature of Oriental fantasy erotica stretched back well before Loti’s day. But if the earlier versions of the genre figured the lustful Turkish male able to exert his power over the helpless captives of his harem, the sexual balance of power was shifting. The once all-powerful Turk was reduced to impotence—his city was “dead”—and now it was the West that was penetrating the East. Of this moment Loti was the master storyteller, and it was in Salonica that his literary career took off with a tale of forbidden love, between a Frenchman, himself, and Aziyadé, a young woman in the harem of a Turkish bey.

Viaud was not making it
all
up. Writing from first-hand experience, he had actually spent some time in Salonica in 1876 as a naval cadet on a ship sent there after the killing of the two consuls. The novel opens with a scene showing the hanging of the supposed ringleaders of the mob—an event which did take place. What followed, however, showed how far the city had escaped even the loose moorings of picturesque romanticism to become nothing more than a foil for human subjectivity itself, a stage-set of imaginative possibilities in the mind of a talented writer.

Taking the form of a fictitious epistolary exchange between Loti and two young British naval friends in London, Brown and Plumkett, the story describes Loti’s passionate but secretive affair with Aziyadé. They are assisted by a third person, a bearded man with “a very handsome head, a great sweetness in his eyes and resplendent with honesty and intelligence,” the Jewish boatman Samuel. Of course this book is “about” Salonica only in the sense in which, say, D’Annunzio’s writings are about Venice or Rome. The city serves as the stimulus for Loti’s exploration of mood, sensibility, subjectivity and emotion. It is in its way a highly modern approach.

Everything, even the city itself, has become insubstantial and nothing is what it seems. Loti describes himself as “plaything of illusions … an illusion in Salonica, an illusion elsewhere.” He escapes from the foreigner’s trademark—visibility—by being dressed in Turkish costume by three elderly Jewish women, and this allows him to
wander unremarked through “an absurd city, the Eastern bazaars, the mosques, the multi-coloured crowds.” Embracing Aziyadé on a boat, draped in carpets, floating in the bay at night, is “drunkenness.” “You will say that this wants a terrible egoism; I would not disagree,” writes Loti. “But then I came to think that everything that pleases me is worth doing and that one should always spice up life’s insipid stew.” When he came to after the night’s delirium, Salonica “presented a paltry picture. Its minarets had the air of a collection of old candles, set on a dirty, black city where the vices of Sodom flourished.” The city’s appearance mirrors the artist’s mood: the world has shrunk to feeling and sensibility. All that matters is to keep away “the disheartening void and the immense
ennui
of life.”

“It was at first nothing more than an inebriation of the imagination and the senses,” Loti writes to his friend Brown in London. But gradually, the city’s charms impress themselves on the lover. “It was happiness to take a stroll at sunrise. The air was so light, the freshness so delicious, that one had no trouble living. One was, as it were, penetrated by well-being. Some Turks began to circulate, dressed in red gowns, green or orange, in the vaulted lanes of the bazaar, hardly visible in the transparent half-glimmer … The evening was an enchantment of a different order for the eyes. All was pink or gold. Olympus was tinted as though smouldering or molten, and was reflected in the still sea like a mirror. No smoke in the air. It seemed as though there was no more atmosphere and that the mountains were floating in the void, so clearly delineated were the farthest ridges.”

Curiously, Loti’s novel was published at the same time as Gladstone—the liberal campaigner against Ottoman tyranny—was insisting on the importance (and the possibility) of Europeans acquiring real knowledge of the peoples of the Balkans in order to prepare them for civilization. Loti belonged to a younger, more mystical generation which embraced what could not be known: the Orient was not the origin of civilization, but its opposite, the mysterious spiritual alternative to Western rationalism. Knowledge was possible, but only of oneself. At bottom there was only
ennui
and excess. Loti simply carried the romantic style of travel writing—the voyage as internal exploration into the world of feeling, the escape from the conventions of sedentary, bourgeois Europe—to an unprecedented extreme.

By the outbreak of the First World War, he and Salonica had come to be equated in the minds of anyone with a knowledge of French literature and an interest in the Levant. He was increasingly popular in
the city among the new middle classes and as for the French themselves, the memoirs and belles-lettres they produced when they visited during the war showed him to be inescapable. One wartime satirical squib—
A Salonique sous l’oeil des Dieux
—shows Loti’s melancholic fascination with the Orient turning into contempt: Aziyadé has become a prostitute, Ayché, with “a chosen clientele of officers many of whom had read Loti” and are keen to meet a Turkish woman. “For the European man,” the author continues ironically, “the Turkish woman is Mystery, Forbidden Love peppered with danger, the anticipation of variation in the unchanging melody of desire.”
²⁶
Another disillusioned new arrival wrote: “The Oriental woman! Well then, so [Loti] showed us one of these beautiful odalisques. Have you seen one yourself? In more than a year that we are at Salonica, behind the Villa of the Red Sultan, have you seen the sultanas? No, you have only been able to see those ugly women of the disgusting brothels in the Vardar, the three dancers of the Odeon.” “But what of the Muslim women,” wrote another, “the mysterious veiled women who sing in such a soft voice, behind their moucharabiehs? The voluptuous Aziyadé …”
²⁷

Sex-starved pilgrims searching for the scenes of Loti’s infatuations retraced his steps much as others followed the Apostle: “I am at Salonica barely a week and since then I have been looking for the shadow of Aziyadé,” wrote an infantry officer. “I know I shall never find her, but how not to be obsessed by that simple and marvellous story of love and death?”
²⁸
The author was impressed by the affinities between himself and its hero—“the same way of feeling and of thinking, the same mix of scepticism and naivety, an identical need to love and be loved, a similar disgust of certain conventions, certain obligations, certain habits, the same desire for the infinite.” And like Loti he found “all the charm of the Orient” working on his senses. “Behind those hermetically sealed blinds,”—he was strolling idly in the Upper Town—“no doubt pretty eyes shone and crimson lips smiled. Ah, mirage of the East! Aziyadé! Loveable fantasies of Loti!”
²⁹

Thanks to Loti, what had previously been regarded by travellers as the least knowable and inaccessible aspect of the city’s life now became the centre of the Western erotic imagination; what was formerly regarded as worthy of description was reduced to the mundane and the banal. The European obsession with the city’s Oriental nature had not died away; but now, it was concentrated in the fantasy of a Western conquest of the feminine East. And why not? Had not the West by this point conquered everything else?

10
The Possibilities of a Past

A
LONE WITH
A
NTIQUITY

I
N
1916
A WRITER
for the
National Geographic
was struck by Salonica’s seeming indifference to the needs of the tourists who came on the trail of its past. “So little indeed has she yet taken in, as the remainder of Europe has so profitably done, the possibilities of a past that I was unable to find there a map of the city … And as I went from shop to shop in search of photos of the churches, I was followed by an officer looking vainly for a Baedeker.”
¹
It was history, after all, which attracted the majority of visitors. What was the present for them but a backdrop to antiquity? Greece “has no modern history of such a character as to obscure the vividness of her classical features,” asserted Murray’s
Handbook.
“A modern history she does indeed possess, various and eventful, but it has been of a destructive not a constructive character. It has left little behind it which can hide the immortal memorials of the greatness of Hellenic genius … In all parts of the country, the traveller is, as it were, left alone with antiquity.”
²

The travellers’ very guides were often the classics. “We passed from the gulf Syngiticus to that of Thermaicus, and anchored in the bay of Thermes, Thessalonica or Salonica, in the country of the Myrmidons,” wrote Bisani. What the eighteenth century knew as “ancient geography” thus served a practical as well as a scholarly need. Crossing the Vardar on his way to the city, Edward Clarke noted that “it is the AXIUS of
Herodotus:
separating the
Mygdonian
from the
Bottioean
territory [“epi tin Axion potamon hos ourizei chorin tin Mygdonin te kai Bottiaiida,
Herodoti Hist.lib.vii.cap.123.p.418
, ed.
J. Gronov. L. Bat. 1715
,” a footnote helpfully confirmed], where Pella stood: and it is now called
Vardar.
The same river is also mentioned, under the name of AXIUS, by the venerable
Scylax.
” The learned reverend could scarcely have guessed the enormous cultural and political power such scholarship would turn out to possess: entire landscapes would end up being re-named, and in the twentieth century an official government committee would celebrate the transfer of the region to Greek control by scrapping local Slavic, Albanian and Turkish place-names—the Vardar among them—and replacing them with classical alternatives.
³

From the Upper Town, looking over the domes, minarets and rooftops across the bay to Olympos, one foreigner after another sought access to the spirit of the ancients. “From the mountain on which today the old citadel of Salonica stands, Xerxes saw some two thousand three hundred years ago what today any knowledge-thirsty tourist can see if he doesn’t mind the effort of traipsing between debris and boulders, rocks and burned grass, thistles and especially weeds,” wrote one, trying to recapture the thoughts of the Persian king, as he planned his invasion of Greece. For the high-minded Mary Adelaide Walker, “the sight which inspired Xerxes with the hope of other lands to conquer, may well elevate the mind of the Christian spectator to the world beyond the grave” to that “wondrous future when even the ‘mountains shall pass away.’ ” “It is the same Olympus, empty now of its gods, but still full of its eternal loveliness, on which St. Paul must often have gazed,” mused the Reverend Davies, “deep blue in the noonday, purple in the evening—seeing in it the work and beauty of Him who in His strength setteth fast the mountains, and is girded about with power.”
⁴

Primed by education, expectation and preparatory reading, the traveller thus came face to face with history itself—classical, biblical, or in the case of Macedonia, the two together. “It is history, which for him had till that point been no more than an ideal, an exercise of memory, or for some only a subject for meditation, the history of the first ages of mankind, which suddenly reveals itself in its proper theatre,” wrote Isambert. “The East is the cradle of our civilisation … In the East, everything takes body, assumes its real proportions … not only in the sight of the ancient buildings which the hand of time has spared, but also by frequenting those peoples, those races conserved through the centuries which are still the most living monument, the most effective demonstration of what their ancestors bequeathed to us!” The task of civilization might have been passed to the West, but the East still offered its own unwitting enlightenment.
⁵

Thus not only the landscape but also those who dwelled there—their
customs, their dress, sometimes their faces—helped conjure up the past. David Urquhart recommended experiencing the East for “what I would call the novelty of antiquity.” Lost to “our times and in our portion of the globe,” the “habits of ancient days still live and breathe” there, he asserted. Layard’s recent excavations in Mesopotamia inspired the excited discovery that “the Assyrian type was widespread” in Salonica. “Certain lanes in the bazaar resemble a bas-relief from Nineveh and Babylon,” readers were assured, “where magnificent Assurbanipals sell melons or watermelons.” Choisy, who liked the Greeks and admired their fortitude and collective spirit, found that they had preserved “a physiognomy up till now which takes us back before the Turkish invasion, as far as the times of classical antiquity.” Such attitudes turned Salonica into a kind of museum, its inhabitant into living fossils. “We set out through the streets of the sleeping town,” recalled Demetra Vaka. “How teeming with history it was. Everything spoke of the past, not the present.” The Jews in particular cast her mind back centuries. “But it is the same with all the other nationalities one sees in Saloniki: they represent the past not the present … The history of ages enveloped us.” By 1905, as the lower town became ever more prosperous, noisy and Western in outlook, even the Muslim quarters on the slopes above could be enlisted, offering one American correspondent “truly a Biblical scene though the characters were Mohammedan.”
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