Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (39 page)

Larger public works projects were delayed by financing difficulties. Schemes to improve the harbour passed from one group of private capitalists to the next, obliging most ships to lie at anchor off-shore and transfer their merchandise by lighter. Even when the port was completed, its dues were so high that shippers were put off from using it. But on a smaller scale the combined forces of the market and the local authorities functioned much better. Sabri Pasha himself opened up the main shopping street which led from the governor’s
konak
down to the quay. Rue Sabri Pasha, as it became known, marked the boundary between two worlds. On one side, down twisting narrow lanes, lay the Talmud Torah, the centre of Jewish religious life, and the old flour market, the
Oun Kapan
, set in a large square surrounded by low rickety buildings and dilapidated stalls. In the late nineteenth century it was crowded with Vlach shepherds selling off their lambs, villagers bringing in barrows of limes, cucumbers and watermelons, “tinware and earthenware, rice and lentils, live poultry and mutton, prints and calicoes, sea urchins and squids.” Here one found the wandering Albanian
yogurtdjis
, local ice-sellers, and the aproned Muslim butchers whose mules carried chopping boards to cut joints, entrails and—a great delicacy—entire lambs’ heads. Under the huge plane trees nearby, buying and selling went on as it had done for centuries.

On the other side of Sabri Pasha, however, lay a very different world, marked with the grand monuments to capitalist power—the new headquarters of the Banque de Salonique, the Imperial Ottoman Bank and the Passage Lombardo. And whereas elsewhere shopkeepers squatted on platforms at the front of their windowless stalls, in the old style, down Sabri Pasha itself retailers displayed their merchandise behind glass windows. “Montres Omega, or, argent et metal,” advertised Mallah Frères at number 78. Further along were military
outfitters, boot-makers, confectioners, fur shops, Molho’s bookshop, stationers and money-changers. In 1907 the
Fils de Mustafa Ibrahim
opened
Au Louvre
, a large store which sold chandeliers, large brass and copper lamps and other adornments for the home. At its upper end, Rue Sabri Pasha was covered by a traditional wooden canopy but lower down this ended, the road opened out and one came to Salonica’s first department stores, and a small piazza flanked by cafés and hotels, the fashionable heart of the town, with a view of the bay and the landing-stage.

The municipal council itself was set up during Sabri Pasha’s tenure but only began really to stamp its authority on the city under the dynamic leadership of Galib Pasha, who served on and off as governor between 1882 and 1891. Helped by railway fever, the new quay and the wheat market were paved with stone, the Rue Egnatia was straightened, and a grand Haussmanian avenue, the Boulevard Hamidié, running parallel with Sabri Pasha on the east side of the city, was built along the line of the demolished walls: its elegant neo-classical villas proved immediately popular with the new elite. After the 1890 fire, which destroyed a large part of the southeastern section of the old city, more central streets were widened and straightened. Four years later, foreign investors brought horse-drawn trams—the cars themselves Belgian, the horses Hungarian, the engineers Italian—which careered hazardously around the curving streets of the old town. Other investors modernized the water supply, and introduced gas lighting into the heart of the city. The urban map was being redrawn in the interests of regularity, accessibility and predictability while the centres of governmental power—the governor’s new
konak
, the barracks, the municipal hospital and the vast customs house—were connected by new or enlarged roads. They, and the bastions of commercial success from Allatini’s giant flour mills in the east to Saias’s textile factory on the front and the railway stations in the west, now defined the city and pointed to the new coalition of forces—the autocratic central Hamidian state and the wealthy local capitalist class—which ran its affairs.

N
AMING THE
M
AHALA

W
HAT A BREAK THIS REPRESENTED
with a past, and what a radical shift in the way the city’s inhabitants understood their own surroundings, can be conveyed by looking at place-names. The old streets within the walls were tortuous, narrow and mostly unnamed. There were
no maps and navigation was difficult for strangers. “How useful the minarets are,” commented one visitor, “for guidebooks are not to be had at Salonica.” Residents were classified by Ottoman officials, and identified themselves, by their neighbourhood (
mahala
) whose nicknames made no sense to outsiders. Kaldigroç was a corruption of the Judeo-Spanish
Kal de los Gregos
, the Street of the Greeks; Bedaron, an abbreviation of the synagogue
Beth Aron.
There was the “Quarter of the Three Eggs”—named after a decorated marble slab on the façade of an old house—“At the Fire” (after an especially bad one) and “Defterdar,” because a treasurer of the province had once lived there. Other neighbourhoods were known after local places of worship and their nicknames. There was the “Red Mosque,” the “Mosque of the Clock-tower” and the “Burned Monastery” district, from the destruction caused by a Venetian bombardment two centuries earlier. The Ashkenazi synagogue was known as “Russia” or “Moscow,” Poulia as
Macarron
, from its members’ supposed fondness for pasta; the salt-farmers’ synagogue, Shalom, was called
Gamello
, after the camels who carried the salt (but also local slang for a dullard or idiot).

In such a society, directories and maps were neither known nor needed. Jewish men were called to prayer each morning by street criers, who were also paid to call out invitations to weddings and funerals and to spread news of public importance. The
muezzin
could see the entire quarter beneath him when he made the call to prayer. Nightwatchmen were supported by each neighbourhood, and kept an eye out for strangers—for if they misbehaved or got into trouble, all the residents round about could end up worse off—and street fountains acted as magnets for local women, or
mahalushas
, to exchange gossip and rumours. “People live and work with their doors open, on the streets,” noted a visitor. “It is in the streets that they cook, hammer and beat. Workshop, shop, display—all is one.”
²¹

Places thus acquired names according to an entirely locally generated logic. Many small alleys and cul-de-sacs were nameless, or known by such helpful terms as “Rocky Place,” or “Behind the Square of the Graveyard.” Larger streets changed name several times as they wound their way past mosques and shrines. What today appears on maps as Muses Street, in the Upper Town, at this time lay mostly in the quarter of Two Balconies (
Iki Serife
, named after the minaret of the local mosque which was noted for this unusual feature), and was known in successive stretches as Hizir Baba, Iki Serifeli Cami, Ali Baba Turbe, Kasimiye Binari, Zafer Baba Dergahi and Kara Tas. Other streets were named after trees—Black Mulberry Street, the School by the
Plane Trees Street, Plane Tree Mosque, the Street of the Burned Plane Tree—and springs (Elm Spring, the Place of Water, Bitter Spring, Salty Water, Fresh Water, even the Well of Malaria).

But at the very end of the nineteenth century, this localized way of naming space was challenged by new conceptions of what place-names should do. “The Sadikario house, situated in the Arnaout-Fournou (Albanian bakery) quarter, is providing unpleasant competition to the Tower of Pisa,” wrote a journalist in September 1896. “The wall of its external façade makes an acute angle with the street … But don’t enquire after the precise location of the quarter, the street or the house … A number, a street sign, a name would quickly inform you, but the municipality still refuses to give us these indispensable markers which are found in the most humble village abroad.”
²²

The municipality eventually issued the first street names in May 1898, although their usefulness for strangers was initially limited by being written only in Turkish. A more fundamental problem was that those choosing the new names had not properly understood the logic which was supposed to lie behind them. It was as well they had only been in Turkish—for what would Europeans have made of the “Street that leads to Miltiades’ Coffeeshop,” or the “Street of the Greengrocer Constantine?” Local journalists tried to explain to the authorities the error of their ways:

We know that in Europe streets are given names of celebrated men whose memory it is wished to honour or those of noble citizens who have rendered useful services to their country. But we do not see how the said Constantine with his plums and his bad coffee, or M. Miltiadis, pouring out his raki, can raise the prestige of the city so far as to be honoured by the municipal scribe.

In Europe, squares and wide avenues carry as an honorific title the dates of national triumphs, the names of cities where the national army covered itself in glory, or where great generals are illustrated: the Boulevard Magenta and the Avenue de la Grande Armée in Paris, the Strada Manin in Venice, Trafalgar Square in London, are monuments which speak to the hearts of patriots. Each crossroads is a lesson and History is written on the walls. And is the history of our dear country so lacking in these glorious occasions?
²³

One conception of the past—the past which linked the city dweller’s pride in his country to that in his city—was coming to impose itself on
another—the past as local memory. No longer was it thought appropriate to commemorate random fires, the Old Horsemarket, the Old Quarantine, the Pasha’s Baths or the Old Telegraph Station. Emperors, notable officials and elevated political values would be written over the plane trees, the bath-towel makers and the religious benefactors of the past who had made the city their own. These names were stamped with the authority of the new municipal bodies and conformed to European norms. Ironically, although they were more transparent than those they replaced, they proved far less durable. In the twentieth century, wars, revolutions and sudden changes of regime led names to be discarded and replaced with ever-increasing frequency. The civil servants and bureaucrats were kept busy, but the city’s inhabitants were left little if any better off than they had been before.

M
UNICIPAL
I
MPROVEMENT AND THE
P
RESS

T
HE PRESS APPEARED LATE IN
S
ALONICA
compared with other ports in the Levant, held back by the obstructive attitude of the local rabbinate. In fact, its birth coincided with that of the municipality itself. In 1869, Sabri Pasha founded an official weekly gazette called
Selanik
, which carried news, decrees and proclamations in four languages. There followed a Turkish weekly,
Rumeli
, and two major independent newspapers, the Jewish
La Epoca
and the Greek
Ermis.
In 1895 they were joined by the
Journal de Salonique
and the
Ma’min-
owned
Asr
(whose successor still appears in Turkey today).

Newspapermen were, by definition, non-conformists and sceptical of their own religious authorities. They had often suffered at the latter’s hands and saw themselves on the side of progress, supporting the democratization of their own communities and cooperation with others.
Ermis
, for instance, identified Constantinople, not Athens, as the centre of Hellenism, and preached the necessity for the co-existence of Greeks and Turks. When the Jewish community leapt to the defence of the city’s Greeks, following a derogatory article abroad,
Ermis
welcomed that too. Operating under the watchful censorship of the Hamidian regime, journalists publicized the civic-mindedness of the city’s leaders and private benefactors and acted as mouthpieces for the state’s Ottomanist ideal.
²⁴

Where they did feel free to strike a more critical and forceful note was in municipal affairs. The journalists were satirists of the old ways
and proselytes for the new. Starting in 1880 they unleashed a barrage of criticism against the municipal council for its incompetence, and actually forced the resignation of the then mayor. The governor shut them down for three weeks for insulting public officials, a penalty which had to be repeated at intervals over the next few years.
²⁵
It did not stop them in their self-appointed task of educating the members of the municipal council, and encouraging them to ever-further intervention and regulation. A sample of the areas in which the authorities were being urged to assume responsibility over just a few months in 1896 would include:

safety:
“Saturday evening, on the quay opposite the Olympia, a distracted pedestrian bumped into a coil of mooring ropes and fell into the sea. The crowd, dense at that time, managed to drag him out safe and sound. These accidents could have been easily avoided if the municipality had taken up the giant iron rings set into the paving and placed them along the sea-wall itself.”
²⁶

public health:
“The construction of sewers in the fire zone [of 1890] has finally begun a few days ago; after a year of useless discussions, the municipal council has finally decided to act on this project of incontestable public utility.”
²⁷

keeping the streets clean:
“In the last month, mud has become a permanent feature of most of our roads, making circulation painful and even dangerous. We are truly pained to see our municipal counsellors left absolutely indifferent before this deplorable state of affairs.”
²⁸