Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (42 page)

Because foreigners made lucrative targets, the consuls became used to dealing with ransom demands. In 1880 John Blunt, the British consul, tackled a kidnapping made more difficult because the victim was a friend of his, Colonel Synge, a deer-hunting sportsman who had retired to Macedonia, where he kept busy helping Muslim refugees and organizing his estate. The perpetrator was one of the most notorious and vainglorious of the Greek brigands in the region, Kapetan Niko, a man who was, wrote Blunt’s wife in her memoirs, “well known for his savage cruelty. He would commit a murder or two in a town or village and carry off boys of tender age, and then barter the noses and ears of his victims for cash with the helpless parents; or he would send the heads of the boys to horrified relations in cases where the stated amount was not forthcoming.”
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Synge’s letter, most of which had evidently been dictated by his captors, went straight to the point:

My dear Blunt

Send 15,000 liras, 15 Martini rifles, 500 cartridges for each rifle, 15 gold watches with gold chains, 15 revolvers with 500 cartridges for each; 15 Palles [swords], Damascus blades … these must be of the best description and fifteen cigarette holders of amber, and fifteen Comboloya [worry beads] of Amber and fifteen gold rings, one to have Niko written on it, another Nikina, another Vassil
adelfos tou Niko
[brother of Nikos] and fifteen Salpingas [trumpets] and don’t leave me to be lost … The Almighty made Niko, neither Panayia neither Mahomed does he believe in, he has no religion in him, wickeder and worse than Niko there is not in the world.
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The “bloodthirsty ruffian” himself opened with the usual threats. If the deadline was not met, he warned, he would send first Synge’s nose, then his ears and finally his head. “I do not write to you at length because few words are useful,” he told Blunt. Eventually, after some haggling, the price dropped by one-fifth. Even so, it was a huge sum of money: Europe was enriching the local economy in more ways than one.

As businessmen, the brigands had their own code of honour, and could be relied upon to stick to their side of a bargain: when the ransom was delivered, Synge was produced, rather the worse for wear—“so overcome with emotion that he recognized nobody and could not speak a word”—offered cognac as a restorative, shaved (by one of the brigands) and given back his valuables. The twelve thousand Turkish pounds were carefully counted by Niko himself, who exchanged any defective coins. Finally, he handed fifty pounds over to Synge, “saying to him that it was the commission which rightfully belonged to him from the ransom.” This kind of brigandage was a means of earning money but it was also, at least in the eyes of the brigand, a matter of honour.
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On his release, Synge described the band as best he could. It was—like many local trades at that time—a family business, and Niko’s brother and brother-in-law both helped him. The manpower was provided by deserters from the Greek army (including a former monk from Mount Athos), and Christians who had been involved in insurrections against the Turks.

From other sources we learn that the bands typically treated their victim well; so long as he kept off the subject of his release, he was free to discuss any topic with them. Not only did brigands enjoy good intelligence of what was happening around them; they were also able to read the shoulder-blade of a roasted sheep or goat to predict the outcome of their venture: a small hole in the flat portion represented the grave of the prisoner—bad news for all concerned—while small lines running towards the leg bone indicated that everything would turn out well and the ransom would be paid. Brigands were curious about modern
marvels such as the telephone and the phonograph, but they were also prone to boasting in bloodcurdling terms of “the most atrocious and brutal deeds of which they have been guilty.” Of these, of course, Niko had more than his fair share. Like most of his kind, he was not able to enjoy the fruits of success for long. Despite making a typically daring visit disguised in European dress to a Salonica theatre, two years passed before he could return to his native village and he was killed a short while later. Instilling fear was an indispensable part of professional success in his line of work, as was proclaiming his credentials as a Christian. Even so, when one reads of the unfortunate peasant quartered with a
yataghan
before his mother’s eyes, the villager who was rubbed in oil and set alight because he refused to hand over a small silver cross, or the
hodja
forced to climb a tree and call the people to prayer as though from the minaret, it is hard to feel much regret at the brigand’s often violent end.
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Most of them liked to dress up their activities with noble rhetoric, justifying their violence either by pleading poverty or by boasting of their ability to humiliate the authorities. But as the century progressed and Greek nationalists cast their eyes northwards, some brigandage acquired a political tinge. Would-be liberators of Macedonia’s Christians had been making forays across the Greek border since before the time of the Crimean Wars, usually meeting with a disappointing lack of interest from the objects of their concern. In 1866, Leonidas Bulgaris—“a well-educated but half-crazy enthusiast”—was captured by Turkish troops at the head of “what they supposed to be brigands.” Having hoped to incite the local Greeks to rise up, Bulgaris admitted that the latter had not sympathized with their “would-be liberators” but had actually helped the Turks capture them. But once an autonomous Bulgarian state emerged in 1878, Macedonia became a battle-ground for insurgent bands. Secret guerrilla units, supported from Sofia, were formed by intellectuals aiming to restore the greater Bulgaria of the San Stefano Treaty. Kidnapping rich foreigners now provided a way of bringing much-needed cash into revolutionary coffers while simultaneously shining the unwelcome spotlight of international attention on the deficiencies of Ottoman administration.
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In 1901 the new political brigandage made international headlines in the so-called Miss Stone affair when a redoubtable American missionary was kidnapped in a narrow valley north of Salonica. Ellen Stone was, in fact, the first American victim of twentieth-century terrorism. Her kidnappers had spoken Turkish when seizing her in order to
throw the weight of suspicion on the Ottoman authorities, and to encourage Western opinion to believe that the latter could no longer guarantee law and order in their European provinces. But the ring-leader was a young Bulgarian-Macedonian activist, Yane Sandanski, and his profile in no way fitted that of the typical brigand of yesteryear: literate, a socialist, and a schoolteacher, he was a leading figure in an underground political grouping called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Violence was no longer merely a means to a livelihood; in the hands of activists, it was becoming an instrument of nationalist politics in what the world came to know as the Macedonian Question.
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B
ULGARIANS AND
M
ACEDONIANS

I
N
S
ALONICA A SMALL NUMBER
of Bulgarians broke away from the Greek community and joined the Exarchate in 1871; by 1912 they numbered about six thousand. They were stonemasons, traders, shopkeepers and teachers—practical men drawn from the Macedonian hills—with no one of any great wealth to lead them and little influence in municipal affairs. They were supported, however, by the Russian consul, and once a Bulgarian state was founded, by its representatives as well. They were greatly heartened by the remarkable outcome of the 1876 uprising against Ottoman rule, and encouraged further by the territorial provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano which would—had it been allowed to stand—have handed over most of Salonica’s hinterland to Bulgaria. Schooling was one of their priorities, and in 1880 they founded a gymnasium—many of whose pupils soon found their way into the ranks of new pro-Slav political movements.

To be “Bulgarian” initially meant to support the Exarchate: it was a linguistic-religious rather than a national category. But after the creation of an autonomous Bulgarian principality in 1878, irredentist politicians in its capital, Sofia, started demanding autonomy for “the Macedonians” as well. Meanwhile, in Salonica itself, a militant new organization was incubating: in November 1893 the “Bulgarian Macedo-Adrianopolitan Revolutionary Committee” was founded by a group of men reared on the ideas of Russian anarchism, and proclaimed open to any who wished to fight for liberation from the Turks and autonomy for Macedonia. Sofia-based activists regarded it with suspicion and did not trust its commitment to Bulgarian interests.
Eventually the committee dropped any reference to Bulgaria from its name, and it became known simply as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) with the slogan “Macedonia for the Macedonians.”
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Most of IMRO’s youthful members were not much bothered about the old disputes over dead sacred languages. What was the difference between the Greek of the liturgy and Old Church Slavonic? After all, hardly anyone understood either of them. Between these youthful secularists—whose motto was “Neither God nor Master”—and the devout supporters of the Bulgarian Exarchate a gulf emerged.
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Even within its own ranks, IMRO was deeply factionalized. Sandanski’s band—which was responsible for the abduction of Ellen Stone—was barely under its control. Moreover, although the kidnapping bought rifles and explosives for the cause, and IMRO units killed beys, tax-collectors and gendarmes, the peasants were often reluctant to follow them. The province was heavily policed and when a pro-Bulgarian leader crossed the border in 1902 with two hundred band members to start a general revolt, he was driven out by the local inhabitants. It might be going too far to say that IMRO was a more coherent and efficient force in the minds of its enemies than it was in reality but it certainly made little impact on the Ottoman state.

Politically IMRO was no more successful. Autonomy for Macedonia—which was the name Balkan Christians (and Europe) gave to the Ottoman
vilayets
of Salonica, Monastir and Uskub (Skopje)—was the goal: a “Bulgarian” governor would rule the province from Salonica, all officials would be “Bulgarian” Slavs, and Bulgarian would be an official language on an equal footing with Turkish. But faced with such a prospect, Greeks lent the support of their intelligence networks to the Ottoman authorities, and in Salonica itself Greek agents in the Hamidian police helped track IMRO sympathizers. Even more important an obstacle was the opposition of the Great Powers. Russia was now focused on central and east Asia—the conflict with Japan was only a few years away—and Britain and Austria saw the Balkans as one area where they could all work in harmony to support the status quo. They pushed—as Great Powers often will—for incremental reform rather than revolutionary change, and merely urged the Porte to take steps to improve the administration of the province.

Frustrated with the impasse which faced them, and believing that targeting the symbols of European capitalism might force the Powers to intervene, some young anarchists in Salonica took matters into
their own hands, and decided to blow up the Ottoman Bank, in the European quarter. Under the influence of their beloved Russians, they called themselves the “Troublemakers,” and later adopted the term “the Boatmen”—by which they identified themselves with those “who abandon the daily routine and the limits of legal order and sail towards freedom and the wild seas beyond the law.” They bought explosives in Constantinople and smuggled them as cases of “sardines” into Salonica. Then they rented a grocer’s shop opposite the Bank, dug a trench under the street and packed it with explosives. In January 1903, a meeting of IMRO activists was held in the chemistry lab of the Bulgarian gymnasium, and the older men denounced the plotters for their “stupid childish games.” It had little effect.

By April, rumours of the plot were circulating in the town and Panayiot Effendi, a Greek secret agent with the local police, was on their trail. When the manager of the Hotel Colombo, which stood next to the Ottoman Bank, reported that his drains were blocked, the plotters feared discovery and accelerated their plans. They also decided to magnify the impact of their campaign by simultaneously blowing up the French steamer
Guadalquivir
which had arrived in the port, and one of them went on board as a passenger with twelve kilos of dynamite. Another plan was to destroy the main electricity generating station, a fourth to set fire to the
Bosniak Han
, and—at the last moment—the harbour-front cafés and the branch-line of the train running into the city were added to the list.

At 11:20 on the morning of 28 April 1903, a huge explosion rocked the city as the
Guadalquivir
was holed. Smoke and flames rose from the stricken steamer, and although the bystanders who gathered along the quay to watch believed the boilers had burst it was quickly evident from the gap in its side that the damage had been caused by a bomb. The same evening, while the town still speculated over the identity of the perpetrators, another bomb went off beneath the branch-line train pulling into the central station. Fortunately, the explosives had been poorly laid and little damage was done. The next morning Pavel Shatev, the man responsible for bombing the
Guadalquivir
, slipped out of town. When he failed to appear with the other passengers in the shipping company offices that lunchtime, the police were notified. Within a few hours, he had been arrested at Skopje station.

But the attack on the bank was still to come. At dusk, another of the conspirators blew up the main pipeline leading from the gas station, and all the lights in the city went out. This was the signal: bombs
were thrown at the generating station itself, causing little damage, and another explosion rocked the
Alhambra
café on the front, killing a waiter. The bar on the ground floor of the popular Hotel d’Angleterre was also attacked, and Vladimir Pingoff tried to set fire to the
Bosniak Han.
Panic spread through the city. Outside the Ottoman Bank, two members of the group pulled up in a carriage, jumped out and scattered bombs and grenades, killing a guard and a passing soldier, and wounding two others. Hiding in the grocer’s shop across the road from the Bank, Yordan Yordanov also took his cue from the sudden power failure and set off the fuse in the tunnel leading under the building. The tremendous explosion left only its outer walls standing, with several people buried under the rubble.