Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (44 page)

At dawn on 23 July, news reached the city that proclamations were being distributed in Monastir calling for the satisfaction of the Young Turks’ demands. In Salonica itself crowds started to gather outside the prefecture building and discussed what was happening. Then, at ten in the morning, the Greek archbishop, the president of the local Bulgarian Committee and the
mufti
came out onto the balcony, embraced one another and called on the onlookers to do the same in the name of fraternity. A great shout of joy erupted, and an enormous flag was held up with the words “Long Live the Constitution!” in Turkish, and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Justice” inscribed in its four corners. Standing in front of it, an excited
hodja
raised the cry “Long Live the Constitution!” The crowd responded immediately. “There was indescribable delirium,” wrote a French officer watching the scene. Soon army officers and civilian CUP supporters—including Jews, Greeks and Bulgarians—were speechifying from the steps of public buildings, on café tables and hotel balconies, “enthusiastically cheered by crowds of all nationalities.” The streets were filled late into the night with groups waving the Ottoman flag as well as the red and white stripes of the CUP.
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The government’s capitulation the next day—the plotters had threatened to march on Istanbul if a commitment to restore the constitution was not immediately forthcoming—produced further public jubilation. Hilmi Pasha presented himself on the steps of the town hall in front of a crowd estimated at fifteen thousand and announced the reconvening of the General Assembly in the capital. Few were aware of the astute way in which this experienced bureaucrat had brought his master into line; all they could see was that the sultan had
finally brought back the constitution he had scrapped three decades earlier. “The rest of the day was given up to demonstrations of popular rejoicing of which I doubt the like has ever been seen in Turkey,” wrote the British consul. “The whole town was dressed in flags, processions paraded the streets, speeches were delivered in every public place—the populace, half-intoxicated with a sense of unwonted freedom applauded uproariously on every possible occasion. At nightfall the city was illuminated and the wildest enthusiasm prevailed when Enver Bey … who had fled from Salonica to form one of the earliest insurgent bands, returned about nine o’clock from Ghevgheli and was conducted in triumph through the town to the Garden of the Tour Blanche.”
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A few days later, the same Enver Bey, a dapper mustachioed figure, addressed a large crowd outside the cafés in what had just been renamed Place de la Liberté. “Citizens!” he began. “Today the arbitrary ruler is gone, bad government no longer exists. We are all brothers. There are no longer Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, Jews, Muslims—under the same blue sky we are all equal, we are all proud to be Ottomans!” Europe, he continued, would be forced to recognize that its mandate over the empire was finished, for the empire had been reborn, as a state belonging not to the sultan but to all its citizens. This was the official ideology of nineteenth-century reform pushed to its limits. “Yesterday massacre and words of hate, today the unanimous joy of liberty and fraternity,” wrote a French observer. “We could hardly believe our eyes and ears. After having witnessed five years of carnage and horrors, we believed we were living in a dream. And yet it was unquestionably reality. This new situation, created by the committee, responded well to the secret sentiments of all the populations whatever their race and religion. Everyone thirsted for a little peace and tranquillity.”
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Enver himself stood at the beginning of the dizzying ascent which took him in just a few years from the post of staff officer to pasha, ruler of the empire and husband of an imperial princess. Later there would be the disastrous decision to enter the Great War on the German side, the ensuing military catastrophe in the Caucasus, the Armenian genocide and eventually his flight and death on the battlefields of central Asia during the Russian civil war. That lay in the future, but his astonishing talents were already on display. For a moment it seemed as though the vision of social harmony he had conjured up might bring peace even to Macedonia. Brigands and band leaders made their way
down from the hills to pay homage to the empire’s new masters. Sandanski—the man responsible for kidnapping Ellen Stone a few years earlier—delivered an anarchist speech from the balcony of the Hotel d’Angleterre and declared his loyalty to the CUP. Under pressure from the Young Turks, the men of violence were being diverted temporarily into the path of peaceful politicking. Electioneering began for the new assembly.

The main obstacle to reform was the sultan himself. On 1 September, the anniversary of his accession,
Yeni Asir
, a loyalist Turkish newspaper, declared that “the Ottoman CUP has torn down the curtain which separated the sultan from his people. July 11th has opened a new horizon of happiness to the Nation and the State.” But few people saw things that way. “Long Live the Sultan!” cried Hilmi Pasha, after he had read out the firman announcing the restoration of the 1876 constitution to a large crowd: there was no answer. Twice he repeated the traditional formula: the crowd remained stubbornly silent. Abdul Hamid himself resented the humiliation the revolution had caused him, and believed he could eventually marginalize and dispose of these new opponents as he had with others so often in the past.

This time, however, they controlled a powerful section of the army as well. Or did the army control them? In April 1909, news came in of an attempted counter-revolution in the capital. Fearing that the sultan was scheming to suspend the constitution again, the “Salonica Army” advanced on the imperial capital. General Mahmoud Shefket Pasha—Hilmi Pasha’s successor as inspector-general of Macedonia—assumed control, not in the name of the CUP, but “in the interests of the Army and … of the Nation … whose constitutional liberties the Army had been the principal instrument in defending and remains the only power capable of defending from the threatened reaction.” The struggle had begun for the right to lead the nation, a struggle between the men on horseback and those in frockcoats that would bedevil Turkey (and for that matter Bulgaria and Greece) long into the twentieth century.
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The counter-revolution was quickly put down and Constantinople was soon under the control of the “Salonicans.” Suspected Hamidian sympathizers and plotters were arrested, and a more compliant government was installed. Abdul Hamid himself was forced by the revolutionaries to hand over power to his younger brother Reshad. At first he refused, believing he would be killed; then he learned he was to be sent into exile to the birthplace of the revolution. On the night of 28 April 1909 a special train from the capital pulled up at the military
station outside Salonica’s city limits. Rumours had been circulating all day that the sultan—who had last visited the town as a child with his father, Abdul Mecid, half a century earlier—was arriving. Stepping down from the train, he spurned the automobile offered by General de Robilant, the Italian inspector of gendarmerie, and climbed into a hired landau instead. Escorted by thirty mounted gendarmes, he and his entourage rode through the backstreets of the Upper Town and along the avenue that ran by the sea beyond the White Tower before reaching his destination—the Villa Allatini—shortly before midnight. “Although a good many people were still in the streets in consequence of the illuminations that were in progress,” wrote an observer, “yet the passage of the cortege attracted remarkably little attention and gave rise to no sort of demonstration whatever.” “Half-awed amazement” was how the British consul described the public reaction. With time the awe decreased and the sultan became a tourist attraction. In 2002 one centenarian in Istanbul still recalled being taken as a boy by his father and glimpsing a stooped figure on a balcony in the distance through the railings. Salonican newspapers published unkind snippets of information about the comings and goings at the Villa Allatini, for like Napoleon in exile, the heavily guarded Red Sultan remained “an enigma and an object of curiosity.”
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His entourage was confined to his two small sons, three sultanas, four cadines, four eunuchs and fourteen other servants. In the capital, the rest of his staff were dismissed. The First Eunuch—the former Guardian of the Gates of Felicity—was hanged from the Galata Bridge, while the Second Eunuch, Nadir Agha, having won the faith of the Young Turks by showing them how to enter the treasury of Yildiz, remained alive to conduct visitors round the imperial palace which he knew better than almost anyone else. More than two hundred surplus members of the imperial harem were brought by carriage—more than thirty were needed—from Yildiz to the Top Kapi, to be met by their relatives and taken home. Elderly Circassian mountaineers were escorted to the palace where they scrutinized the faces of the unveiled women and tried to recognize daughters they had last seen years before.
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In the Villa Allatini the former sultan made no effort to escape. He passed his time doing carpentry, listening to his wives reading him the newspapers, and playing in the garden with his Angora cat. He demanded a Turkish rather than a European bath, and this was built for him. But his efforts to attend mosque were rebuffed with warnings
that he might be assassinated. And when his brother, now Sultan Mehmed V Reshad, visited the city in 1911, no direct contact was allowed between the two men, although the new sultan did send his private secretary to enquire after his brother’s health. Abdul Hamid requested that one of his sons be allowed to study in Istanbul, and asked for information about a bag of jewels left behind on his departure from the Yildiz palace. Gradually he fell into a state of melancholia, irritability and incoherence. Even astrology and predicting the future through cards lost their charm. Perhaps it was just as well: otherwise the ex-sultan would have foreseen the disasters to come—the losses of the Balkan Wars, which virtually ended Ottoman power in Europe and brought him back to his final gilded cage in the Beylerbey palace in Istanbul; the First World War and its catastrophic consequences; the occupation of Istanbul itself by Allied soldiers only a few months after his death in 1918; and the ignominious end of the last sultan of the Osmanli line, who died in exile in San Remo pursued by his creditors.

O
TTOMANISM

T
HE
Y
OUNG
T
URK REVOLUTION
started out as an assertion of the values of cosmopolitan loyalty to the empire over the divisive power of nationalism. It replaced the old version of Ottomanism—shared allegiance to the person of the sultan—with one which stressed common participation in a constitutional government acting in the name of the “People” or the “Ottoman nation.” Today it is easy to wonder at the naivety with which the population rejoiced at the CUP’s triumph. But the ideology of what was officially termed the Unity of the Elements (
Ittihad-i Anasir
) seemed attractive for a time, especially in places like Salonica where nationalism offered no sure future for either the Muslims or the Jews.
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The trouble was that the CUP’s Ottomanism hid competing and contradictory impulses. For some, the restoration of constitutional government was an end in itself. For others it was a way of warding off Western meddling and a means of reasserting Ottoman sovereignty and the dignity of the state. Some wanted to dismantle the capitulations which immunized foreign residents from Ottoman law and to replace the numerous privileges enjoyed by different communities with a single source of authority. For the Christians on the other hand, it made no sense to abolish their privileges unless they were allowed a greater
say in the running of the state. The CUP itself talked the language of liberalism and representative government; yet in its origin it was a conspiratorial organization, modelled on the example provided by underground Russian and Bulgarian revolutionary committees, and with an equally suspicious attitude towards the forms of parliamentary democracy. Following the success of the revolution, its instincts led it to act as puppet-master behind the scenes rather than to form a government of its own, for its leaders regarded parliaments as instruments of symbolic importance to be shaped and guided by those who held real power. In October 1909 it decided to cease operating as a secret society; in practice, its behaviour did not change.

At first there was a widespread desire to give it a chance. Although some of its Muslim opponents disliked its secularism—in the spring of 1909, for instance, an opposition “Mohammedan Committee” was formed in the town of Serres by a group of
hodjas
, theology students and teachers—many more Muslims supported its defence of the constitution. Macedonian
komitadji
, hoping for a social upheaval which would give more power to the peasantry, saw the CUP and the continued existence of the empire as the only alternative to falling under the tyranny of Greece or Bulgaria. The Patriarchate looked to the preservation of its traditional privileges (which it would lose if the empire disappeared) and some Greek deputies argued that only an Ottoman constitutionalist framework would safeguard the Orthodox communities scattered throughout Asia Minor. Several Greeks in Salonica echoed this line, demanding support for the CUP and even joining its ranks. When one of the city’s main Greek papers came out for the CUP—there were rumours of bribes and subventions—the community was deeply split.

Soon, however, it was clear that the CUP did not have the solution to the empire’s problems. Indeed these became altogether more serious when, in a sudden series of humiliating body-blows, Bulgaria declared its independence, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia, and Cretan insurgents proclaimed union with Greece. The new government was shocked by its territorial losses and clamped down hard in the Macedonia
vilayets
, for if these were lost, it would mean the end of five centuries of Ottoman rule in Europe. Greek, Bulgarian and Serb national organizations were outlawed, new laws were passed against brigand bands and the population was ordered to hand in its arms.
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