Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (38 page)

Within the Greek community similar shifts were taking place. In the old days, children learned reading and writing from the occasional literate priest or from the so-called
didaskaloi
who gave lessons as they passed through the city. But in 1828 the junior high school was re-established, and a girls’ school was set up in 1845. The primary school population climbed from 1500 in 1874 to nearly 2000 in 1900 and 3900 by the time the Greek army arrived in 1912. An Educational Society was set up in 1872 with its own private library and a commitment to “useful knowledge,” and in 1876 a teacher-training college followed. Salonica’s Greek high school was recognized by the University
of Athens, a development of huge significance for the rise of Greek nationalism, and the control of school standards and appointments was also handled by representatives of the Greek state. Through education, in other words, the Greeks of Salonica gradually reoriented themselves towards the new national centre in Athens. The Patriarchate in Istanbul, which had once enjoyed unchallenged authority over the empire’s Orthodox believers, found itself losing ground.
¹⁴

Within the city’s Muslim community, pedagogical arguments were also raging. Ali Riza, a minor customs official, quarrelled with his wife, Zübeyde, over how to educate their son, Mustafa. Zübeyde, a devout woman who was nicknamed the
mollah
, followed the older conception of education and wanted him to attend the neighbourhood Qur’anic school. His father, on the other hand, favoured the new style of schooling pioneered by a renowned local teacher, Shemsi Effendi, who ran the first private primary school in the empire. In the end, the young Mustafa started at the first and finished at the second, before moving to the military preparatory college. Helped by his education and by Salonica’s new beer-gardens and nightlife, he became a pronounced secularist, thereby foreshadowing in his own upbringing the trajectory through which—by then better known to the world as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—he would later lead post-Ottoman Turkey.

Mustafa Kemal’s experiences were not unusual, for the spirit of Western education was transforming local Muslim cultures of learning. The
Ma’min
were setting up private schools like Shemsi’s, and state officials like Mustafa Kemal’s father shared their vision of a modernizing Islam. Investment in education had been a priority of the reformers in Istanbul, and in 1869 a new imperial Ordinance of General Education outlined a school system, based partly on the French lycée model, that would promote knowledge of science, technology and commerce among both boys and girls. Reaction from the long-established
medreses
was fierce but under Sultan Abdul Hamid this was overcome, in part by emphasizing the Islamic character of the new schools. A state schooling sector emerged in Salonica and the city’s first vocational college, the
Ecole des Arts et Métiers
, trained orphans in typography, lithography, tailoring and music. Later came a teacher-training college, a junior high school, a commercial school and a preparatory school for civil servants—the
Idadié
—housed in an imposing neo-classical building standing just beyond the eastern walls. (Today it contains the chief administrative offices of the University of Thessaloniki.) In 1908 it was joined by a law school and by specialist colleges for farmers,
gendarmes and army officers. By the century’s end, there were at least nine public and private schools, teaching more than five thousand boys and girls, including a scattering of Christians and Jews as well as Muslims.
¹⁵

Even the Great Powers were piling in to stamp their cultural predominance upon the city’s schools. In addition to the
Alliance Israélite
, local Francophiles had the choice of the
Mission Laïque
, the
Lycée
and the Brothers and Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul; for Italophiles, there was the
Scuola Nazionale Italiana
, the
Principessa Iolanda
and the commercial college
Umberto I.
Romanians, Serbs, Germans and Armenians could all attend schools in their preferred tongue; there was even an International English School for Girls. A typical class at the Petit Lycée Français in 1904 had three French pupils, one Greek, four Jews, a Serb, a
Ma’min
, an Armenian, a Turk and a Montenegrin. This was the city’s new cross-national cosmopolitan elite in embryo, for whom the ways of European bourgeois life were slowly erasing the old markers of religious and communal difference.

E
UROPEAN FASHIONS WERE ALSO STEADILY INFILTRATING
Salonica’s middle-class homes. Around 1840 most people still lived in modestly furnished, almost Spartan surroundings. Perhaps poverty explained why a certain Abu Bakr, for instance, on his death in 1847 left only a wardrobe, two pistols, a bandolier, an amber pipe, a coffee grinder and a grey horse. But at that time even the well-off rarely handed on more than a few kilims and prayer carpets, some chests, a stove against Salonica’s bitter winters, a mattress and a chair or two. By 1900 however, the carpets were often “European,” and the furniture frequently included high marble-topped tables, sideboards, large clocks, mirrors and other signs of
alafranga
taste.

Having become commonplace in prosperous Greek and Jewish households, such items were now found also in Muslim homes. Emine, the well-off daughter of Osman Effendi, possessed two wardrobes, half a dozen salon chairs, mirrors and lamps; Iskender Pasha left a huge fortune to his children, as well as a mansion which contained sofas and settees, antique clocks and valuable “European” carpets. Huseyin Husni Effendi, a member of the provincial assembly, must have been among the wealthiest men in the city when he died in 1887; his home contained numerous sofas, glass-fronted
armoires
, pictures and photographs, two marble-topped side tables, nine large mirrors, eleven armchairs and no less than forty-two chairs. The transformation in
attitudes and taste was rapid, and when a Jewish boy at the Petite Lycée was invited home by a Muslim class-mate, he was struck by what he found: “I was not a little surprised at first to find that the women in Shakri’s household, his mother and two older sisters, admitted me to their apartment. But I was still more amazed to find myself in their midst without their making a pretence of covering their faces. They acted as if there was nothing untoward in their behaviour, greeting me in excellent French, and making me feel at home by resuming their sewing and embroidery work.”
¹⁶

Typical Salonican bourgeois homes preserved a mixture of European and Ottoman furnishings. The opulence of the Allatini household was certainly not typical—its palatial dimensions left one guest breathless when he stayed in 1888—but it too blended East and West: a “crowd” of magnificently tall servants dressed in the traditional Albanian
fustanella
, pistols and daggers tucked into their wide belts, offered newcomers the usual sugared fruits, coffee and cigars in a lavishly decorated and brightly lit reception room, before leading them to private apartments decked out with valuable old carpets, cushions and bedside tables equipped with drinks, sweetmeats and writing materials. The furnishings of the “grand old palace” of the British consul were slightly more modest: strewn with Turkish carpets, and adorned with old Spanish chests and what was described as “Chinese porcelain from Bulgaria,” the house suited both Salonica’s governor, Dervish Pasha, who felt comfortable enough to lay out his prayer mat and make his afternoon prayers in the presence of Mrs. Blunt, and the young British naval officers who danced the polka and played tug-of-war in the garden. Soon the European trademarks of success even invaded places of worship. The
sheykh
of the Mevlevi order had his own visiting cards. And in the synagogue attended by the Modianos, one of the wealthiest merchant families, the festival candles were “Europeanized by having donors’ visiting cards neatly attached with silk ribbons.”
¹⁷

It was, above all, in matters of dress that the growing enthusiasm for European fashions hit the eye. When Stefana, the peasant girl whose conversion caused so much trouble, arrived at Salonica that fateful May noon in 1876 and was seized by Christian passers-by to prevent her abjuring her faith, their common religion was not the first thing she noticed; interrogated by the police shortly after, she described the men who had carried her off as
Franks
—frock-coated and with short beards. In her mind, the gulf in station between peasant and urban bourgeoisie was far greater than anything religion could bridge. Before long the
francos
were widely imitated. “Soft-hatted, his waist-coat unbuttoned beneath his garish cravat, trousers impeccably pressed, turned up at the bottom to reveal gaudy socks inside his polished shoes,” wrote Nehama, the doyen of the historians of Salonica, satirizing the European style spreading through the new middle-class dandy. “He affects a knowing exoticism, getting himself up with exquisite care, he strains laboriously to set himself above the vulgar herd, to appear at all costs chic, smart, the last word in fashion.” A decade later, an English visitor noticed “the young women copying Athens and Paris in short skirts and high-heeled yellow boots.” Thus adorned, the city’s young frequented the cafés, beer-gardens, clubs and theatres which were springing up to cater for them. They could watch a French balloonist ascend from the garden of the Hotel Colombo, catch the performing troupe of Ambrosio Botini, shop in the city’s new department stores—Stein and Orosdi Back—or merely enjoy its carefully tended public parks and promenades.
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T
HE
E
UROPEANIZATION OF
S
PACE

I
N
1868, I
STANBUL BECAME THE EMPIRE’S FIRST CITY
to be granted a municipal council. Based upon the French model and equipped with powers to expropriate property for the public good, it demolished walls, widened and straightened roads and improved lighting, paving and sanitation. The next year the experiment was extended to Salonica, whose newly prosperous bourgeoisie—led mostly by Jews,
Ma’min
and Greeks—found a willing partner in the Muslim-led local government. The municipality directed the attention of the Muslim elite away from their landed estates in the hinterland and back to the city itself; hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence, it became the promoter and regulator of urban life.

In the old days, cities had chiefly been run by the pasha and the
kadi
—both of whom also had regional responsibilities—aided by guild chiefs, neighbourhood headmen and communal leaders. But pashas came and went almost annually, and lack of proper revenue-raising powers made investing in urban improvement impossible. Just how difficult this was, even when there was strong local pressure for change, had been demonstrated in the sporadic and largely ineffectual attempts to ward off plague and cholera. To fight fires, Salonica traditionally relied on levies of youths drawn from the twelve main trade guilds.
Individual householders were assigned the responsibility for keeping roads, gutters and pavements outside their homes clean and in good repair, and could be reported by their
imam
or neighbourhood head if they neglected their duties. Now these tasks began to be seen as the responsibility of the state.
¹⁹

In 1869 Sabri Pasha came as governor from Izmir, where he had carried out an ambitious modernization of the port. His strategy for Salonica was very similar—to open it up by demolishing stretches of the walls and extending its commercial and harbour facilities. Up to then, the old sea-wall had stood as a barrier to the outside world. “I never remember before to have seen a town so closely walled along the seafront,” noted a traveller, shortly before work began. Throughout late-nineteenth-century Europe, urban growth was bringing down the medieval walls—1860 in Antwerp and Barcelona, 1870 in Amsterdam and 1878 in Vienna. Sabri Pasha was thus scarcely behind the times when he took his silver hammer to the sea-wall and cast the first stone into the water. His timid taps marked the start of the most ambitious building programme in Salonica’s history.
²⁰

In order to enlarge the port, Sabri Pasha proposed to use the rubble from the old walls as landfill to build out into the bay. The new frontage would then be sold off to developers to finance badly needed improvements, as well as providing space for new public buildings, and even a public park. He also envisaged a waterfront avenue with tramways to allow traffic to traverse the city without snarling up the main road through the town. It was a brilliantly imaginative scheme which permitted expansion into the flatter land on either side of the walls. With the demolition of the old Vardar gateway, and the stretch of the eastern walls running up from the White Tower, the city for the first time in its history lay open to the outside world and began the process of suburban growth which has continued with virtually no interruption up to the present.

Although the Porte approved the scheme, it had to be self-financing and thus its success depended on the willingness of the city’s new mercantile elite to participate. Following an advertising campaign, individual entrepreneurs and state organizations such as the new Imperial Ottoman Bank and the Imperial Post bought up many plots; European investors acquired nearly half. Bounded by the port at one end, and the White Tower at the other, Salonica’s new face to the world included “hotels and modern houses, warehouses and magazines, in the uninteresting style of European civilization.” The Splendid Palace Hotel,
the Olympos and the d’Angleterre hosted visitors, and their balconies offered future orators and politicians a new setting: crowds gathered, for instance, to hear the speeches made from the first floor of the Olympos Hotel in July 1908, at the start of the Young Turk revolution. Along the quay were the cafés, cabarets, beer-gardens and music-halls that carried noise deep into the night—“red frocks and shrill music, Turkish guitars, gypsy violins, Greek melodies and dirty French songs,” noted Berard on arriving in 1896. Caiques moored along the front next to the new marble embarkation point, and from 1894 horse-drawn trams carried passengers from the railway station to the garden and restaurant which had been established next to the White Tower.