Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (40 page)

juvenile delinquency:
“Some urchins belonging to the lower classes of the population, are not ashamed to undress on the quay and bathe shamelessly before the scandalized eyes of passing men and, especially, women. If these individuals apparently do not know the most elementary notions of decency, the agents of the police should remind them.”
²⁹

bathing:
“It is incontestable that Salonica is growing day by day in density of population. The more the city expands, the more bitter the struggle for existence. These rude daily assaults weaken the constitution, they bring exhaustion and illnesses most of which are capable of being cured by sea bathing … The building of a bathing station, comfortable, large, well-placed and presenting the dual advantages of hygiene and modern comfort, has been a necessity for years past.”
³⁰

begging:
“Perhaps it is time to deal with the problem of begging which has become a scourge in Salonica … The municipality alone can give a favourable solution to this question.”
³¹

Other, perhaps more sensitive, subjects were raised as items of news, with no further commentary: the plague of pickpockets, stabbings, shootings and street robberies; the issue of drunkenness leading to assaults in cafés and tavernas; and the question of prostitution. Here the authorities were more likely to be commended than criticized, brave policemen praised for their public-spiritedness; nevertheless, the necessity of official action was once again underlined.

In the pages of the press, a new balance is struck between public and private interest, between the enclosed space and the open. Widening the main street is greeted with enthusiasm, for it will give Salonica “the physiognomy of a grand European city.” Openness—to the world, the surrounding countryside, to the street outside one’s door—is a virtue. There is no longer any need, readers are reminded, not only for city walls, but even for the courtyard walls which still surround many houses. These are a sign of past times when security could not be guaranteed. If Salonica’s inhabitants want a “new and light city,” then they should demolish them and have more “trust” in each other. They should be “more sociable, leaving behind all unnecessary barriers more fitting for fields than houses, since day by day civilization spreads its beneficent wings.”
³²

Civilization meant running water piped to the home by the Compagnie des Eaux de Salonique rather than long waits in the open air around communal wells and springs. The surge in Salonica’s population had placed a huge strain on local water supplies and in the 1880s the newspapers had criticized the authorities for their indifference to the city’s needs. Successive mayors had invested in the traditional solution of new public wells, but by 1893 Belgian investors had won the contract to establish a modern piping system. The journalists now directed their fire at the city’s water carriers, from whom people used to buy their drinking water in the past: they were written off as fossils from a more primitive age, and those who could afford it were
encouraged to subscribe to the Compagnie des Eaux—though subscription rates were well beyond the means of most. Modernity meant also not being afraid of gas lighting and of leaving behind the memories of a time when the nocturnal city was wrapped in darkness. It meant keeping the roads clean, not urinating in the streets now that public urinals had been constructed, taking action against the vile smells generated centrally by the fish market, local factories, oxen, donkeys and horses, and training housewives not to throw their slops outside the door.

Valuing business enterprise the city’s press sometimes turned in their pages to the vast realm of investment possibilities. Why, one journalist urged, did not some clever businessman open up a building for wedding receptions: he would make much money, and passers-by would be freed from the crowds of guests that milled around and blocked the narrow streets whenever people got married. The owners of the private seashore villas were criticized for allowing people through their gardens for free swimming, since by doing so they were depriving investors who had set up special bathing areas of an income. But some kinds of entrepreneurs were clearly preferable to others. Wandering street-sellers were “the phylloxera of local trade”: one ought not to buy from them because they offered unfair competition to shopkeepers and defrauded the public purse by not paying taxes. Between the old bazaar and the new shops along Sabri Pasha, there was no doubt which the journalist “Diogenes” preferred: the spectacle of the former was “truly repugnant—a real human morass of vendors of all sorts, bread, fruit, vegetables, set up in the best part of the road with no thought to the pedestrians whose passage they block.”

Staying true to “Europe”—the ultimate goal—thus meant encouraging some activities and discouraging others. Mme. Evangelia Paraskevopoulou’s performance of
La Dame aux Camélias
was highly praised. Tennis matches and the events of the White Star Cycling Club were covered in loving detail. Wrestling, on the other hand—one of the city’s favourite sports—was condemned for its primitivism. “While Paris, London and everywhere else get excited about horse-racing, bicycling, yachting and a mass of other fashionable sports, Salonica, faithful to the cult of the past, will hear only about the fights of the
pehlivans.
At the news of a bout between famous wrestlers, the Salonican feels the same frisson of pleasure as the Catalan at the corrida.” The epic bouts of Kara-Ahmed and Dramali Ali attracted crowds of eight thousand or more and were still talked about fifty years later; gypsy musicians, drums and clarinos blaring, heralded the fighters’
parades through the streets; beys gave the victor live sheep, and belts of gold. Yet all this was mere embarrassment for the journalists of the
Journal de Salonique.
They would have been astonished to learn that the heroic Jim Londos and Timonides “the Macedonian” would be fighting it out with Mehmed Mustafa, Black Demon and John Patterson before huge crowds of appreciative Salonicans well into the 1960s.
³³

R
ICH AND
P
OOR

I
N THE 1890S, THE TRAMLINE
which ran eastwards out of the city beyond the White Tower facilitated the emergence of a pleasant leafy new suburb along the shoreline of the bay. The municipality lined the avenue with acacias and provided a police station for the protection of its residents. Gradually many of the city’s wealthiest families moved out and built themselves “towers” and villas with views over the sea to Mount Olympos. From their verandahs the fortunate residents could enjoy the evening breeze, watch the spectacular sunsets and see the lights come on in the city itself, a short distance around the Gulf. Here lay the city’s future, at least as imagined by devotees of liberalism and progress—a future defined not by religion or language but by class.

At the avenue’s end stood the imposing Villa Allatini, behind its park of pines. Sultan Abdul Hamid was exiled there in 1909, following the Young Turk revolution, and was shocked, on entering its doors, to find its owners had been so Westernized that they had omitted to build a Turkish-style bathroom. The road back into town was lined with the palatial homes of prominent Greek, Bulgarian,
Ma’min
, Jewish and Turkish families—the Château Mon Bonheur, for instance, the Villa Ida and the Villa Bianca—some of which still survive, though their once extensive gardens have shrunk, and their sea frontage has disappeared with postwar infill. Vitaliano Poselli, the elite’s favourite architect, designed the new
Ma’min
mosque, the Yeni Djami, in a solid bourgeois Orientalizing style, and the Beth Saul synagogue, which survived until blown up by German troops in the summer of 1943. (He was also responsible for the Catholic and Armenian churches.) The merchant Osman Ali Bey constructed a renaissance villa with a magnificent sweeping staircase to the main door; Piero Arrigoni devised the
Ma’min
industrialist Mehmed Kapanzis a chalet-like residence complete with tower; the popular Greek architect Paionidis built a villa for a Turkish army officer which combined a baroque façade with neo-Orthodox
onion-domes at its corners. More conservative Muslims and Jews preferred to remain in the older, crowded city centre where they could hear the familiar chant of the muezzin, the town crier and the nightwatchman. But others sought to avoid the diseases and over-crowding of the town, and enjoyed the distance from poverty, crime and disease the new suburb provided.

Yet if Kalamaria, with its “marble palaces,” its “fashionable drive by the sea, screened by flowering acacias and garlanded with roses,” was the preserve of the rich, the railway lines on the other side of the city were a magnet for the ever-growing numbers of indigent refugees and newly arrived peasants from villages in the interior. Between the station, the gas works and the new warehouses by the port lay the notorious Bara district, an area which had been a poisonous malarial swamp until it was partially drained in the 1870s. Thereafter as an industrial zone grew up around it, it became a muddy quarter of cheap wooden shacks, taverns and inns. Nearby was the humble Hirsch neighbourhood, an encampment of single-storey homes built thanks to the generosity of foreign benefactors, and the miserable rotten huts of the Mustafa Effendi and Simtov Nahmias quarters where the unheated dwellings were “unfit even for dogs.”
³⁴

By the end of the century, poverty—always a feature of Salonican life—was becoming an overwhelming challenge to the municipal authorities and communal leaders. The city’s rapid population growth—from roughly 30,000 in 1831 to more than 150,000 by 1913—had brought down the cost of wage labour and facilitated the economic boom. The power of many of the old guilds had been broken by the flood of cheap imports, while the new socialistic ideas which frightened some notables were slow to make their appearance; the mass of small artisanal concerns which made up the bulk of the city’s manufacturing did not encourage unionization. When the governor Reouf Pasha shared the first tram ride in the city in 1893 with the company’s Belgian manager, and commented on the cheapness of local labour compared with the cost of horses, the latter replied: “Had I known men cost so little here, I would not have bought horses to pull the cars.”
³⁵

Communal bodies had always handled poor relief among their own brethren; there was, after all, a powerful local charitable tradition, and wealthy Christians, Jews and Muslims generally left bequests for the city’s poor and needy. But the end of the nineteenth century saw private philanthropy applied in what one journalist called a “fever of charity.” New hospitals, orphanages and clinics testified to the concern of
community leaders—the colossal Greek Papapheion orphanage was easily the largest building in the city. There were dances, recitals and subscriptions to raise money for flood victims, refugees and the feeding of poor schoolchildren. For its part, the municipality provided free drugs and serums to fight diphtheria and its fledgling medical services attempted to regulate the activities of the many unlicensed doctors and pharmacists who operated there. But as the municipality could not even keep the streets clean, or the garbage collected promptly, the state and smell of the backstreet slums can be imagined, especially as the lack of fresh and safe drinking water in the homes of the poor allowed disease to spread. Out in the western suburbs, several hundred could fall victim to malaria in a bad summer.

Poverty had always plagued the Jews in particular; the 1835 census reveals a far higher proportion of Jews coming from poor households than anyone else, and their high birth rates (compared with the Christians and Muslims) and low average age of marriage intensified the problem. Towards the end of the century it was clear that despite the impressive wealth of a few, the vast majority of Jews lived in great misery. More than twenty thousand of the poorest of them were rendered homeless by the fire of 1890, and when another two thousand Ashkenazim arrived fleeing pogroms in the Tsarist lands, the “homeless turned the city into a camp.” After the 1911 cholera epidemic which left hundreds dead, mostly from among the residents in the rotten and airless tenements of the centre of town, there was bitter criticism of both municipality and communal leaders. Nearly half the community was in receipt of welfare assistance by this point, and the new bourgeois leadership did not appear to have any more satisfactory answers to the plight of the poor than the rabbinate had had.

S
ALONICA’S NEW LINKS TO EUROPE
did not strike everyone as an unmixed blessing. Writing in 1888 at the time of the first Paris train’s arrival in the city, a Greek journalist had questioned the prevailing euphoria. “Even fearing lest we be denounced as pessimists,” he wrote, “we cannot hide our opinion and declare that, in part at least, we do not share in the joy which this event has prompted.” He went on to warn of the importation of “political ideas and opinions which scarcely serve the interests of our empire and which were not till now able to develop on account of the difficult and indirect state of communications.” As for the moral aspect, he frankly anticipated the worst—“the poisonous
seeds of social dissipation and corruption which we euphemistically call European civilization.”
³⁶

Visitors greeted at the quay by the prostitutes from the
Alcazar di Salonico
, or surrounded by crowds of young Jewish men offering “every kind of encounter we might desire,” knew what he meant. The city’s flourishing prostitution trade was merely a symptom of social immiseration, however. For bringing the values of Europe to Salonica turned out to mean bringing its divisions too. The new cosmopolitan elite sought to bridge the gap between Christians, Muslims and Jews, but as they did so other, more fundamental social chasms opened up, between the rich and the poor, between factory-owners and workers. In the days of the old, walled city, rich and poor had lived as neighbours, sharing membership of congregations, and suffering Salonica’s misfortunes together. But after 1880, as it expanded, they grew further apart.
³⁷