Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (41 page)

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The Macedonia Question, 1878–1908

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and the prestige of the sultan to create common interests and allegiances, the leaders of fin-de-siècle Salonica promoted the idea of an Ottoman identity uniting the city’s different communities. But how far were these really becoming more integrated? After all, Muslims still dominated the public sector, and there were hardly any non-Muslims employed by the municipality, or indeed the army. Because the 1856 Ottoman reforms had led each non-Muslim community to develop its own regulations for self-government, they seemed more rather than less self-contained at a time when the absolutist rule of Abdul Hamid stifled moves towards representative government in the country as a whole: in the words of historian Niyazi Berkes, they turned into “little non-territorial republics and incipient nations.” “The most diverse civilizations shared [the city] but did not penetrate one another,” wrote a local scholar in 1914. “The city was not one. Jews, Orthodox, Donmehs, Muslims, lived side by side, without mixing, each shut in its community, each speaking its language.” Or as the city’s main workers’ newspaper wrote in 1911: “Salonica is not one city. It is a juxtaposition of tiny villages. Jews, Turks, Donmehs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Westerners, Gypsies, each of these groups which one today calls ‘Nations,’ keeps well away from the others, as if fearing contagion.”
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As European visitors arrived to “form an accurate opinion on that most important question—the present state and future destinies of the Levant,” they were struck by the bewildering variety of languages and religions the city contained: it was, in the words of two British travellers, “historically Greek, politically Turkish, geographically Bulgarian
and ethnographically Jewish.” “The population is hotchpotch,” wrote another, “but you have to note the features, the eye, the walk, the general manner, to decide whether this man be a Turk, a Greek, an Armenian, a Bulgarian or a Jew. The shifty eye tells the Armenian, the swagger of demeanour proclaims the Greek, the quiet alertness reveals the Jew.”
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Victorian theories of anthropology encouraged foreigners to see character, costume, physiognomy and physical beauty or ugliness not as the property of individuals but as the attributes of the race. Most visitors had their favourites—the Jews in the case of Braun-Wiesbaden, the Greeks for Choisy. The Slavophile Misses Irby and Mackenzie thought the Greeks compared badly with the Bulgarians: “The one is commercial, ingenious and eloquent, but fraudulent, dirty and immoral; the other is agricultural, stubborn and slow-tongued, but honest, cleanly and chaste.”
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But whether positive or negative, the assumptions of racial nationalism which shaped most European travel accounts were highly misleading when applied to the Ottoman context for they did not fit how people inside the empire saw themselves. Despite the prejudices of Irby and Mackenzie, for instance, most Slav Christian peasants in the Salonica countryside probably did not count themselves as either “Greeks or Bulgarians” at the time of their visit. Moreover “Turk” was a term which made little or no sense when applied to a Muslim population which ranged, as a German visitor noted, from “the black of Ethiopia” (in reality, slaves brought over from the Sudan and beyond), to fair-skinned Circassians, blue-eyed Albanians, and Hungarian, Prussian and Polish converts.
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To understand the forces of nationalism and their impact on the late-nineteenth-century city we need above all to appreciate their novelty. Much time, money and effort was required by disciples of the new nationalist creeds to convert its inhabitants from their older, habitual ways of referring to themselves, and to turn nationalism itself from the obsession of a small, educated elite to a movement capable of galvanizing masses. The Macedonian Struggle, which swept across the city and its surroundings, started out as a religious conflict among the region’s Christians but quickly turned into a way for activists to force national identities—“Greek” or “Bulgarian” or even “Macedonian”—on those who refused them. By the first decade of the twentieth century, thanks to years of fighting, there were indeed Greeks, Bulgarians and even Turks in a national sense, and their rivalries were threatening to undermine Salonica’s cosmopolitan Ottomanist façade.

The late Ottoman Balkan peninsula

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what had always mattered were religious rather than national or linguistic differences: Balkan Christians were either under the authority of the Patriarch in Constantinople or they were—more rarely—Catholic or Protestant. The Patriarchate shared the same outlook; it was indifferent to whether its flock spoke Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian or any other language or dialect. As for the illiterate Slav-speaking peasants tilling the fields, they rarely felt strongly about either Greece or Bulgaria and when asked which they were, many insisted on being known simply, as they had been for centuries, as “Christians.”

In Salonica itself, the growth of the Christian population had come from continual immigration over centuries from outlying villages, often as distant as the far side of the Pindos mountains, where many of the inhabitants spoke not Greek but Vlach (a Romance language akin to Romanian), Albanian or indeed various forms of Slavic. The city’s life, schools and priests gave these villagers, or their children, a new tongue, and turned them into Greeks. In fact many famous Greek figures of the past were really Vlachs by origin, including the savant Mosiodax, the revolutionary Rhigas Velestinlis, as well as the city’s first “Greek” printers, the Garbolas family, and the Manakis brothers, pioneers of Balkan cinema. “Twenty years ago there was nothing in Balkan politics so inevitable, so nearly axiomatic, as the connection of the Vlachs with the Greek cause,” wrote Brailsford in 1905. “They had no national consciousness and no national ambition … With some of them Hellenism was a passion and an enthusiasm. They believed themselves to be Greek. They baptized their children ‘Themistocles’ and ‘Penelope.’ They studied in Athens and they left their fortunes to Greek schools and Greek hospitals.” So many Vlachs settled in Salonica that in 1880 a Romanian paper claimed, to the fury of the Greek community, that there were no genuine Greeks there at all. Changing—or rather, acquiring—nationality was often simply a matter of upward mobility and a French consul once notoriously boasted that with a million pounds he could make Macedonians into Frenchmen.
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Money affected nationality in other ways as well. In the Ottoman system, the Orthodox Church was not merely a focus of spiritual life; it was also a gatherer of taxes. Peasants in the countryside, just like wealthy magnates in Salonica itself, chafed at the power and corruption
that accompanied these privileges. But while most bishops and the higher ecclesiastical hierarchy spoke Greek—the traditional language of the church and religious learning—and looked down on the use of Slavic, most Christian peasants around Salonica spoke Bulgarian—or, if not Bulgarian, then a Slavic tongue close to it. This started to matter to the peasants themselves once they identified Greek with the language not merely of holy scripture but of excessive taxation and corruption. In 1860, the Bishop of Cassandra’s extortions actually drove some villagers under his jurisdiction to threaten to convert to Catholicism: French priests from Salonica contacted the families concerned, promising them complete freedom of worship and a “Bishop of your own creed who will not take a single piastre from you.” Other villagers from near Kilkis demanded a bishop who would provide the liturgy in Old Church Slavonic, and got one after they too started to declare themselves for Rome.
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Yet what these peasants were talking was about shifting their religious not their national allegiance and it took decades for the discontent of the village tax-payer to be further transformed into nationalism. Greek continued to be the language of upward mobility through the nineteenth century. As for Bulgarian self-consciousness, this was slow to develop. Sir Henry Layard visited Salonica in 1842 to enquire into “the movement which was alleged to be in progress amongst the Bulgarians,” but he did not find very much. “The Bulgarians, being of the Greek faith,” he wrote later, “were then included by the Porte in classifying the Christian subjects of the Sultan, among the Greeks. It was not until many years afterwards that the Christians to the south of the Balkans, speaking the Bulgarian language, were recognized as a distinct nation. At the time of my visit to Salonica no part of its Christian population, which was considerable, was known as Bulgarian.”
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What led Slavic speakers to see their mother tongue in a new light was the influence of political ideologies coming from central and eastern Europe. German-inspired romantic nationalism glorified and ennobled the language of the peasantry and insisted it was as worthy of study and propagation as any other. Pan-Slavism—helped along perhaps by Russian agents—gave them pride in their unwritten family tongue and identified the enemy, for the first time, as Greek cultural arrogance. “I feel a great sorrow,” wrote Kiryak/Kyriakos Durzhilovich/Darlovitsi, the printer, “that although I am a Bulgarian, I do not know how to write in the Bulgarian language.”

For the Patriarchate, the priority was keeping its Slav-speaking
worshippers within the fold. It realized that many of them might leave the church if forbidden to use the old Slavonic liturgy, and it tried to ward off this danger by proposing its introduction in areas where there was a clear majority of parishioners in favour. In 1870, however, before an Ecumenical Council could meet to approve the proposal, the Ottoman authorities pre-empted it and established a Bulgarian autonomous church—known as the Exarchate—by imperial decree: this demarcated the area within which the Exarchate was to operate but also allowed for inhabitants elsewhere to join “if at least two-thirds of them should wish to be subject” to it. The way was open for an epic “battle for souls” between the Patriarchate and the Exarchate which would last more than four decades and turn quickly into a struggle between Greeks and Bulgarians.
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Within the Greek-speaking world, a divergence of views now emerged between the Patriarchate and Greek nationalists. Many senior clergymen like Salonica’s metropolitan, Ioacheim, wanted to conciliate the Slavs since they feared the fragmentation of their power and saw the Bulgarian Exarchate as a blow to the unity of the Orthodox
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and the purity of the creed. Lay Greeks, on the other hand, were more concerned about land than souls. To them the Bulgarians were less a religious threat than a national one in the struggle which the Near Eastern crisis of 1876–78 had unleashed for the territorial spoils of the Ottoman empire.

The rift between the “Hellenes” (as supporters of the new kingdom of Greece were known) and the Patriarchate was latent rather than overt, for even Greek nationalists realized that combating the Bulgarians would be helped by fostering good relations with the Ottoman authorities themselves. In October 1880, the Salonican Greek newspaper
Ermis
wrote that Ottoman Turkish ought to be obligatory in Greek communal schools since it would enable “a strong and sincere tie [to] more closely unite Greeks and Turks.” The Greek consul in the city, Logothetis, maintained very cordial relations with the governor Galib Pasha: as a result he managed to get anti-Greek Ottoman officials dismissed, and to have spies watch suspected Russian agents on Mount Athos. But Logothetis was also highly critical of many of the Greek clergy themselves. Close acquaintance persuaded him that it was their venality, nepotism and indifference to education which was responsible for turning so many of their flock away from the true path. Salonica’s doctors and teachers were more reliable advocates of Hellenism, and it was to them that the Greek state would increasingly turn: Athens was beginning to flex its muscles.
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, before the struggle between Patriarchists and Exarchists really boiled over, the chief problem for the Ottomans was of a different, and older, kind. Around 1870, “bands of Robbers” were reportedly “plundering and committing acts of bloodshed” in “nearly every part of this extensive Vilaet,” much as they had been doing for centuries. The 1878 Congress of Berlin created new borders across which the brigand could retreat when necessary, which made the problem worse. That year, three Jewish sheep-buyers were seized near the city, and a ransom note demanding fifteen hundred pounds was delivered to the chief rabbi; a prominent Turkish land-owner was another victim; so was one of the Abbott boys. Salonica’s hinterland was as unsafe as ever: the gangs of Caloyero and Karabatak controlled the slopes of Mount Olympos, the Karahussein band infested the hills near Kilkis, while army deserters and Circassians based themselves in the Kassandra peninsula.
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