Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (51 page)

In 1917, the brick frontier advancing slowly southeastwards over centuries from the seaboard of northern Europe had not yet reached the Balkans, where wood still remained the chief means of construction. In Salonica, fires were such a regular occurrence that prayers against them formed part of the local Yom Kippur service. With the increase in the town’s population in the nineteenth century, and the growing shortage of water, they seem to have got worse. “The French consul,” reported Ami Boué in 1854, “told us that he was always obliged to safeguard his most precious papers before going to the countryside for fear of fire.” Forty years and three major fires later, an American scholar, hoping to add to his collection of Judaica, was repeatedly told in his book-hunting expedition round the town: “We had books, but they were burned.” The great fire of 1890 had done huge damage to the centre of the Hamidian city, especially near the Christian quarter round the Hippodrome. But this was dwarfed by the impact of the 1917 fire which destroyed the essence of the Ottoman town, and its Jewish core. Out of the ashes, an entirely new town began to emerge, one moulded in the image of the Greek state and its society.
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R
EBUILDING THE
C
ITY

“T
HE FIRE HAS CREATED THE CHANCE
to build a new Salonica, a showpiece of business and commerce, commanding the foreigners’ respect,” wrote a British journalist in
The Comitadji
on 2 September. But officialdom was ahead of the journalists and moving with astonishing speed. Within five days of the fire, a meeting had been convened in Athens to discuss the government’s response, and the important decision was taken to expropriate the whole of the fire-affected city centre, and to rebuild the area on a new basis. General Sarrail offered his assistance, and recommended the architects and engineers on his own staff
to the Greek authorities. As a result, a committee of Greek, French and British experts was quickly established. Prime Minister Venizelos had previously felt frustrated at his inability to force through what he considered badly needed aesthetic and hygienic improvements to Salonica during the previous four years. The fire, as he put it later, came “almost as a gift of divine providence” and he told the committee’s chairman, the distinguished British landscape architect Thomas Mawson, to regard the city as a blank slate. The results were far-reaching, and have been described by a recent historian as “the first great work of European urban planning of the twentieth century.” They eradicated the last downtown traces of the old Ottoman town and substituted the modernizers’ vision of a city conceived as an integrated whole.
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After the fire: the 1918 plan

Both Venizelos and his minister of communications, Alexandros Papanastasiou, were capable and decisive men who believed—in the prime minister’s words—in “thinking big,” and regarded the Ottoman city they had inherited as unworthy of the progressive and modern nation they wished Greece to become. Over the previous century, the ending of Ottoman rule had led to new towns being built throughout much of Greece, but nowhere—not even mid-nineteenth-century Athens—had these settlements come close to the size and importance of Salonica. For Papanastasiou, the problem was not only the unhygienic and uneconomic character of the old town; it was also the way that individual property owners had previously been able to block any attempt at improvements for the general good. Wholesale expropriation would allow the government to plan on the basis of new, larger and more regularly shaped building plots, allowing broader, straighter streets, larger squares and, in all, an urban design that was both more functional and more pleasing to the eye. Before August was out, a law had been passed providing for the immediate demolition of the affected area and prohibiting rebuilding without government permission. Engineers carried out the demolitions, and the huts, tents and benches of street-traders who had begun to drift into the centre were shifted to new areas on its outskirts, by the White Tower, and along the Langada road. The only living beings left amid the ruins were several hundred destitute Jewish refugees, who passed the winter in dark, damp cellars and half-rotten burned-out synagogues in danger of collapse.
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Mawson was a landscape gardener, best known for his work in colonial estates from Hampstead to Vancouver. But before the war he had also been advising the Greeks on urban improvements in Athens, and all concerned seem to have seen Salonica as an extension of this.
Barely three months after the planning committee first met, a preliminary study had already been exhibited to the public and an exhausted Mawson had been sent back to England to recuperate. Filling his place was a Frenchman, Ernst Hébrard, a younger man, who had been excavating Roman and Byzantine sites in the city for the army’s archaeological service. Hébrard was an architect too. Some years earlier he had published a study of the “world city” of the future; later he would go on to design towns in French Indochina. Like Mawson, he was a creature of the colonial era, only in his case, Salonica was an important stepping-stone near the start of his career and the plan that emerged bore his imprint.
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Putting theory into practice, the Hébrard Plan fundamentally changed the character of the historic heart of the city for it envisaged a chiefly administrative and business quarter, with residential space relegated to the outskirts and the new suburbs. A new industrial zone was to be established behind the port, condemning the old Ottoman pleasure gardens to a slow demise. The open slopes beyond the eastern walls were to be turned into parkland and the campus of a new university, displacing the vast cemeteries there. Space in general was identified on the basis of its use and function, something quite alien to the city that had preceded it. Streets were to be widened and straightened and the rectangular plot became the norm; the winding narrow alleys which had obstructed Emmanuel Miller’s efforts to carry off
Las Incantadas
in 1864 were banished for ever. Long vistas down regular thoroughfares would carry traffic, views, light and air into the very heart of what had been the most insanitary, crowded and unregulated part of the Ottoman town. Even architectural forms themselves were to be regulated, and the plan, with a typical mixture of authoritarianism and naivety, proposed a uniformity of building styles (functional for the workers and lower-middle classes, neo-Byzantine for the downtown municipal buildings), height and colours (“unaesthetic” shades were to be prohibited). A wide avenue was to be cut running down the hill from a large central square on the Via Egnatia to the sea, flanked by grand public buildings, with traffic carried through the city on intersecting roads which ran parallel with the shoreline.

There remained, however, the question of what was to be done with the former inhabitants of the fire-affected zone themselves. Where were they to live and what claim should they have, if any, on the expropriated land? Here was perhaps the most controversial aspect of the entire scheme. Desiring to preserve for itself as much room to
manoeuvre as possible, the government stuck fast to its original intention of compensating the owners with certificates which they could use to bid for building land under the plan when it was made available. Most refugees were housed temporarily in shelters and army barracks around the outskirts of the city. Gradually it became clear to them that they would not be returning home.

As the overwhelming majority of these were Jews, there was little doubt in the minds of the leaders of the Jewish community that one of the goals of the plan was to drive Jews from the city’s centre. Protests were sent almost immediately to international Jewish organizations to solicit their support. The government denied that “it sought to displace the [existing] population of Salonica and settle another in its stead.” Its goal was modernity and civilization, not ethnic engineering. Yet the two were not incompatible and it is striking that most of those entrusted with the plan itself appear to have assumed that its impact on the ethnic balance of the city was not a secondary consideration. “Mawson did state,” reported Hetty Goldman to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, “that the fundamental purpose of the plan was to deprive the Jews of complete control of the city.” But, she went on, he added “that there was no desire to oust them completely. On the contrary, the Greeks wished to retain the Jewish element of the population and … those who could afford to buy back the larger ground plots would doubtless be able to do so. The man with the small property would be the one to suffer.”
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This was an accurate assessment. The Jews were not an accidental target for they were, at any rate in their traditional pattern of settlement, an integral part of the fabric of the Ottoman city: one could not Westernize Salonica without uprooting the Jews. On the other hand, Jews were not barred from the new plots in the heart of the city, nor prevented from buying there. On the contrary, the Jewish community invested heavily in land in the central zone, and a number of Jewish businessmen did likewise, alongside their Christian counterparts and competitors. The Stoa Modiano was built to house the fruit and vegetable market and a new central synagogue provided the public face of the new, highly centralized religious community. What happened was as much a socio-economic change as an ethnic one. With the government relying on private investors to bear the costs of rebuilding, the wealthiest former inhabitants of the centre benefited most and returned, while those who sold their certificates early or lacked funds were pushed to the shanty-towns on the outskirts. Jewish workers
settled on the slopes to the east and west of the city, while the Jewish middle classes enjoyed sea frontage from their villas on the way to Kalamaria. In fact, some of the poorest Jews in the city may well have been better off as a result of the forced relocation. Noting that 2700 poor Jewish families had been rehoused by February 1920, a report from a committee representing their interests concluded that “on the whole the Jewish families have now been provided with better housing than those they had before the fire. As a matter of fact, in the old city, thousands of persons formerly lived in basements and cellars, where light entered in most instances, through very small shafts only, in narrow, humid and filthy alleys. In nearly all of the new quarters, the rooms are well aired. Nothing has been neglected to assure good hygienic conditions.”
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Continuing the trend evident since the 1890s, the city was separating on class rather than ethnic lines; workers were to be kept apart from the bourgeoisie, and their places of entertainment were separated too. But there was in fact a deeper truth to the complaints of Jewish leaders: the plan’s primary purpose—and here it surely succeeded—was to assert the control of the Greek authorities over the very heart of the city, and that goal was incompatible with the old spatial organization of Ottoman Salonica where the densely packed Jewish quarters had dominated its core. Today not even the lay-out of the streets betrays where exactly among the downtown boutiques the numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century synagogues were once situated.

F
ROM A LOCAL PAPER
at the end of December 1918 came the following comment, entitled “Papa’s Sketches”:

“You see Thessaloniki, how beautifully she has been rebuilt?”

“Where?”

“On paper, for now.”

“Let’s see.”

“Look! A first-class city, with everything. With areas for the rich and separate ones for the workers.”

“And have they really built somewhere specially for us workers?”

“Have they built it? It’s paradise.”

“And where are our neighbourhoods, then?”

“You can’t see them. They are behind the page.”
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The pretensions and ambitions of the planners quickly attracted comment from satirists and journalists even before Mawson’s preliminary plan was published. One “proposal” at the end of November 1917 suggested helpfully that

The piers should be turned into a hill where a
téléférique
transports people into the air.

The trams should be turned into boats, and canals built everywhere.

The harbour should become a square, the forum of Thessaloniki.

The Arch of Triumph, which is not pretty, should be demolished and the bits used to build an Eiffel Tower.