Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (57 page)

Residential housing, after all, was in very short supply. Departing Muslims—far fewer in number than the incoming refugees—had not left more than 4600 buildings behind them and most of the 50,000 Jews and 10,000 Greeks who had lost their homes in the 1917 fire still needed housing. Because the burnt-out central zone was off-limits, and subject to the slow pace of the urban planners, refugees headed towards the Upper Town, where the city’s Muslim population had mostly lived. They settled themselves in abandoned houses, and built another 2500 dwellings in courtyards, empty plots and open spaces. By 1925 virtually all the inhabitants of the narrow streets above Ayios Dimitrios were refugees, and many remained there for years to come. The fields and pastures which had characterized the Upper Town since the fifteenth century disappeared under the weight of this new population.
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The change wrought by the refugees was staggering. As late as 1913, 73% of Salonica’s population had lived within the walls in a space dominated by Jews and Muslims; by 1932 more than half—and they were now mostly Christians—lived in the 36 refugee settlements,
7 Jewish quarters, and 13 mixed ones which stretched in a vast sixteen-kilometre arc from north to south around the historic centre. A “second” city had grown up encircling the old one. “There exist few examples of cities,” wrote a French architect, “partially or utterly destroyed, so rapidly reconstituted … through the form of new extended neighbourhoods.” It was mostly the wealthy who could afford the high prices of a location in the newly remodelled streets south of Egnatia; the poor—whether refugees, local Greeks or an estimated 25,000 working-class Jews, were displaced and forced into the Upper Town or to the periphery from where they trudged in to work, cursing inadequate public transport and the unfinished roads.
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A
THENS AND PIRAEUS
were surrounded by shanty-towns, but in Salonica, the planners talked of “anarchy” with even more reason than usual. Refugee organizations demanded exemption from planning provisions, while slums hindered traffic and jeopardized public health. A 1921 city plan had envisaged Salonica growing to a size of 2400 hectares with a population of 350,000 over the next fifty years; in fact the city reached 2000 hectares and a population of 274,000 even before the Second World War broke out.
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The extreme political instability of the time—the coups, counter-coups, revolutions, and no less than five changes of government in 1924 alone—and the country’s poverty did not help. Few wealthy states could have easily afforded to handle an influx amounting to an additional fifth of their total population and Greece was not rich. The government’s distribution of loans to refugees, though a burden on the state budget, alleviated their plight slightly and the League of Nations helped with money and advice. Occasionally, the ministry of welfare organized the building of a new neighbourhood itself, or provided land to private developers. But as it turned out, homes actually constructed by the state for the refugees amounted to a fraction of their total housing needs.

In the end, the primary means of salvation for the impoverished Greek state were land expropriation and the remarkable energy of the refugees themselves. Plots were handed over to numerous self-forming groups who then built their own homes. Thirty members of the Smyrna Refugee Group, for instance, another body of sixty Refugee Tramdrivers, and a group of Refugee Army Officers were all allocated land on the estate of Hamdi Bey, the former mayor of the city (and architect of its tramway system). Dozens if not hundreds of estates were
similarly broken up.
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In many cases, refugees simply squatted in buildings or began occupying land which did not belong to them. Some of these illegal settlements were being dismantled as late as the 1950s, but many others were legalized retrospectively and the new claimants allowed to stay. If the land’s original owners were not affected by the population exchange agreement and demanded compensation, the resulting lawsuits could drag on for decades. Right through to the end of the century, the courts were being asked to adjudicate on such claims, and among those using the city’s rich and well-ordered Ottoman archive one still finds lawyers chasing up their clients’ documentation.

The necessity for continued reference to Ottoman land titles—for from the legal point of view, the empire remained very much alive—created all kinds of complications. In 1925 for instance, the Salonica Cooperative of Vegetable Growers, a non-refugee association, protested to the prime minister that they had been unjustly deprived of their gardens in order to settle refugee families—one of many cases which was leading to what they termed “fatal hatred between natives and our brother refugees.” The problem was that the growers themselves had no freehold title to their land—they had cultivated it for generations under a Turkish arrangement called
yediki
, according to which they passed down the usufruct to their children in return for regular payments to the land’s Muslim owners. Because the owners had gone, they too were in danger of being evicted, even though they were Greeks. They asked for recognition of their claim, and if not for the return of their gardens then at least for compensation for the value of the
yediki
payments they had made over the years. (Perhaps fearful that this line of argument would not work, they also reminded the authorities of the great contribution they had made in the final years of Ottoman rule to the Greek guerrilla struggle in Macedonia, smuggling weapons in from the coast, hidden in their carts under piles of vegetables.)
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The point is that legal uncertainties of this kind allowed cases to be influenced by political factors, and with the refugees now in a majority in the city, their political weight was substantial. Because there was no cadastral survey for the city as a whole, it was hard, if not impossible, for former owners or their heirs to establish definitively that they had indeed once held the land in question. What looked at first sight therefore like bureaucratic confusion and incompetence possessed a logic of its own: it helped the state, with relatively little outlay of its own, to
settle its priority group, the Greek refugees, as quickly and permanently as it could.
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T
ROGLODYTES AND
S
UBURBS

T
HE TROUBLE WAS
that even if such a strategy may have been pretty much all that was open to the cash-strapped Greek authorities, it still left many refugees in penury, making the city’s old problem of poverty infinitely worse. In 1928 the governor-general of Macedonia painted a grim picture of conditions in the “other Thessaloniki.” What he called “the city of the wretched and the miserable” extended into the heart of the fire zone, where next to “the city of magnificent apartment buildings” more than 2000 people still shivered through icy winters in makeshift shacks—“piteous, ramshackle constructions made out of corrugated iron sheets, mud-bricks and cheap materials of any kind.” Out to the east, the suburb of Kalamaria, home to 20,000 refugees, was sandwiched between the middle-class villas which lined the shore and the “truly European suburb” of Toumba on the hills above. The state appeared to have done nothing for the inhabitants of Kalamaria other than providing them with a few petrol lamps to break the nocturnal darkness, and its half-finished streets and tiny half-ruined wooden huts resembled a “gypsy encampment” alongside its more respectable neighbours. As for the Café Koulé quarter in the Upper Town, people feared to walk home at night lest in the darkness they “drown in one of those lakes which the rains have created.”
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Things were even worse in the grim and dirty slums around the railway station. “There are troglodytes in Thessaloniki,” claimed a local reporter describing conditions in the Tin Neighbourhood (Teneké Mahala), which got its name from the flattened tins which formed the basic building material of its Lilliputian homes. These primitive hovels consisted of “one or two rooms, like large cans of sardines which come up to one’s waist, a minute window, misshapen, with a bit of a window pane, an ill-fitting front door, narrow and low … And all this from blackened cans of petrol.” Between the shacks snaked constricted alleys carrying smells, vermin and sewage; paper-thin walls made sleep and privacy rare commodities.
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The Tin Neighbourhood was among the poorest and most wretched quarters of all, a zone of disease, over-crowding and poverty which the state appeared to have forgotten. In fact the only sign
of Greek officialdom there was the nightwatchman, a former prison inmate with repeated convictions for smoking hashish and gambling. Other new districts, situated on higher ground, were more desirable. Toumba, a vast eastern suburb in the foothills, enjoyed the advantage of a slight elevation above the malarial low ground immediately surrounding the old city. Its roads were wide and straight, and spacious building plots allowed the new residents to expand their homes as their wealth grew. “Settlement! What am I saying? Suburb, yes, suburb is the proper term for this section of our city,” wrote one visitor impressed by its changed appearance within a couple of years. By 1933 Toumba had a population of 32,000—almost the size of the city itself a century earlier.
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Similarly fortunate, the small cooperative settlement of Saranta Ekklisies (Forty Churches), one of the few quarters to be settled almost entirely by refugees from one locale (in this case from Eastern Thrace) was perched immediately above the Jewish cemetery on the old city’s eastern flank, utilizing land expropriated by the state in 1926. New homeowners commissioned local architects and built houses and gardens from which they could look down towards the White Tower and the sea. In Top Alti, up against the northwestern walls, settlers whitewashed their tiny homes and tilled the surrounding fields after their work in the lower town had ended. In neighbouring Neapolis, the neat rows of one-storey blocks were built by their owners—mostly working on the railways, the trams and in the tobacco factories—without any real state assistance. Even the Upper Town, though it remained without electricity or properly paved roads long after these had appeared in the streets of the commercial centre below, preserved its rural character and allowed its new inhabitants far more space and more abundant light and fresh air than they would have enjoyed in the grimy backstreets of Bara, Vardari or Teneké Mahala.

New Jewish working-class quarters—Campbell, 151 to the east, Regie and the older Hirsch on the west—were also a level above the degradation of these. Yet many of their inhabitants spent years in draughty converted First World War barracks, or in sheds and cabins which had little of the charm of their former haunts in the city centre. Once they had hung out their laundry in the common
cortijos
of their homes; now it was in the grassy, open spaces between their half-built shacks. The elderly reminisced about life as it had been before the fire, but this was already a lost world to the younger generation. “Their language,” wrote one young Jewish journalist, “with its coarse words,
constitutes an old-fashioned style that piques one’s curiosity. Just hearing the old names of the Jewish quarters leaves me amazed.”
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The 1929 municipal city plan

The fire had destroyed the original synagogues with their reminders of Spain and Portugal, and the Hébrard Plan displaced their congregations from the heart of the town they had come to regard as theirs. Time-honoured Turkish and Jewish names for the city’s quarters were disappearing from the map. At the same time, the newcomers were baptizing the suburbs with their own reminders of home—Neapolis, for the town of Nef-Shehir in Cappadocia, Troiada and Saranta Ekkliseis—after the places they had been forced to abandon. In the villages, the Turkish and Slavic Ottoman names—Arapli, Verlantza, Kirtzilar—were also being Hellenized as the refugees moved in. The
Alcazar di Salonico
was long gone; the new tavernas, ouzeris and cafés had names like “Lost Asia Minor,” “Smyrna Betrayed” and “Dreams of Nicomedia.” Under the pressure of refugee nostalgia—a nostalgia for another faraway Ottoman past—the signposts of Ottoman Salonica were being discarded.

19
Workers and the State

P
ROSPERITY HAD ALWAYS COME
to Salonica through its command of far-flung trading routes. At one time, these linked it to Venice and Egypt; later, to France, Russia, Britain and central Europe. It was, wrote William Miller in 1898, “one of the most flourishing commercial towns of Eastern Europe … intended by nature to be the outlet for the trade of the whole Peninsula on the Aegean.” Any partition of the region among the nation-states of the Balkans threatened to cut it off from its key markets. Economic self-interest therefore helps explain why the city’s Jewish population in general, and its mercantile class in particular, remained loyal to the Ottoman sultans. Like many at the end of the nineteenth century, Miller thought that empires fostered trade more successfully than small states. He was one of the first commentators to suggest that as Ottoman power waned, so Austria-Hungary should “ ‘run down’ to Salonica and occupy Macedonia as she has already occupied Bosnia and the Hercegovina, to the general advantage of mankind.” But the nation-states of the Balkans proved more powerful than the great empires of the past, and Greece’s triumph left interwar Salonica in the unfavourable position many commentators had feared—cut off from its Balkan hinterland, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and enclosed within the confines of a small country. The timing too could not have been worse: opportunities for emigration—a regional safety-valve before 1912—were curtailed by American immigration quotas; the country was bankrupted by the war and struggling to regain international financial respectability, and to add to the gloom, the global economy was growing more slowly than ever before or since. The result was proletarianization, poverty and political unrest.
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