Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (59 page)

Worker militancy was fed far more by heavy-handed official repression—and by the poverty of the city’s refugee masses—than it was by communist tactics. In the early 1920s, when the authorities had little manpower to spare, they hired thugs and bravos, known colloquially as “cudgel-carriers” (though they were equally fond of using knives, guns and explosives), to help the gendarmerie sort out labour problems.
⁸
These brawlers, often themselves working men in employer-financed “yellow unions,” clashed enthusiastically with leftist groups. In April 1921, bakery workers were assaulted by them, while armed members of a monarchist gang beat up the general secretary of the Workers’ Centre. The Allatini flour mills—one of the largest factories in the Balkans—were the scene for repeated attacks of this kind. In October 1921, royalist bravos accompanied the police to the Beshchinar Gardens: together they broke up a gathering of the guild of bootmakers which was having its evening dinner there. Gendarmes turned a blind eye, and often continued to make the victims “eat wood” [as the Greek expression has it] in the privacy of police cells.

These gangs eventually formed the nucleus of a network of anti-communist, nationalist groups which flourished in close conjunction with the military authorities over the next half a century and played a deeply baneful role in Greek politics. Through the civil war and the 1950s the presence of this so-called “para-state” dominated the city’
s streets and exploded into prominence with the murder of a leftist deputy in 1963—an episode which shocked the country and inspired the film
Z.
But once the Asia Minor war ended, their role against organized labour diminished. The Greek police became better organized, and city policing in particular was professionalized and placed in the hands of a special force.

The city police, and especially the feared Special Security branch, saw the fight against communism—which for them meant much the same thing as the repression of the union movement—as their main task. It looked like an uphill struggle in a place where, as the police directorate notified Athens, the worst elements “more than in any other city in Greece find fertile ground.” Special agents were described by their own bosses as “useless and unskilled, lacking disguises and sufficient funds.” When foreign spies jumped into cars and sped away, their pursuers could not afford the taxi fare to follow them. Understaffed—there were only a hundred policemen in Salonica, less than one for every two thousand inhabitants and less than a third of what police officials judged the necessary minimum—they relied on informers. Following the Ottoman tradition—the Venizelist head of the security section had started in the gendarmerie on Ottoman Crete in 1901, and the Ottoman term for these stoolpigeons,
hafies
, passed into Greek—the city’s police chiefs ran large networks of spies, often placing two in the same organization to report—unwittingly—on one another.
⁹

As any police chief knows, intelligence is no use without the means to act on it, and the nervous political elite of Athens was only too happy to provide this. Activists and their relatives were initially punished under old anti-brigandage laws. Crimes of opinion had been punishable since 1924, the year the republic was founded, and more than 1000 labour activists were exiled during the short-lived dictatorship of General Theodore Pangalos. A further draconian step forward came in 1929 when the Venizelos government legalized the repression of suspected communists through its so-called Special Law, which punished people simply for having beliefs that aimed at the overthrow of what the law itself described as “the bourgeois status quo.” There followed over 16,000 arrests and perhaps 3000 supposed leftists were sent into internal exile. Yet despite these measures, communism was still gaining ground—at least according to the experienced head of the Salonica city police, a long-time Venizelist from Crete called Georgios Kalochristianakis. Reporting in 1932 to Venizelos himself, Kalochristianakis noted gloomily that although the KKE had been hit by the use of
the Special Law, as well as by its own internal disputes, and although any increase in its recent vote was to be attributed to the effects of the economic depression rather than to the party’s own tactics, nevertheless

Both [the party and the Archive Marxists] have as many conscious elements as ever who ceaselessly and daily proselytize for new recruits, especially the Archive Marxist faction which by its system of educational circles has instilled in the souls of the young the microbe of Marxist theory. And to this we must also add the psychological state of young people who have been naturally inspired by Liberal and revolutionary tendencies and easily embrace these.

Kalochristianakis had fought with Venizelos against the Turks to liberate Crete and Greece. Faced with the Red menace, however, and its threat to the country’s national integrity, the policeman’s older revolutionary sympathies were being whittled away. As he saw it, the Communist Party might be relatively weak but its message was attractive. The emergence of a sympathetic body of students at the new university provided a depressing indication of a future shift to the left. As for the workers, one thing—he warned Venizelos—was clear: “Most are communists because they lack even their daily bread.”
¹⁰

D
AYS OF
1936

I
N
S
ALONICA’S TAVERNAS
, during the cold days of early 1936, a new song made the rounds:

All those who become Prime Minister are sure to die
The people hunt them down for the good they do.

Kondylis is dead, Venizelos gone.
Demertzis died too, when he might have found the way.

I’ll put down my name for the PM’s job
So I too can sit like a bum and eat and drink.

And get up in the House and give them their instructions
,
I’ll force the
narghilé
on them, and get them stoned.
¹¹

An unexpected sequence of deaths that spring suddenly transformed the Greek political landscape: the first to go was the strongman General George Kondylis, who had put down an attempted Venizelist coup the previous year, and brought back King George from exile; then, out of the blue, he was followed by Venizelos himself. The greatest and most controversial Greek statesman of the twentieth century had plotted that last coup to regain power, fled after it failed, and died in exile in Paris. And the month after him the macabre series continued with the death of Prime Minister Konstantinos Demertzis, a minor figure who had been appointed by the king as caretaker to guide the country into calmer waters.

New elections in January 1936—the first since the restoration of the monarchy—had shown how deeply the country was split. The antagonism between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists which had emerged during the First World War lingered on, a matter of loyalty, memory and affiliation rather than ideology or policy. Each camp polled over 40% of the votes and ended up with 47% of the seats. Holding the balance was the Communist Party, with 6% of the vote and just fifteen seats. It was the nightmare scenario for the “bourgeois world.” The Venizelists declared their acceptance of the monarchy, but even so they and their opponents were unable to agree to terms for a coalition. In March the leader of the Liberals was elected president of the Chamber thanks to communist support. The latter, obediently following the popular front strategy laid down in Moscow, were now closer to real influence if not power than ever before.

This perspective scared many conservatives, and on 13 April, after Demertzis’s death, King George appointed a faithful royalist army man, Ioannis Metaxas, as prime minister. General Metaxas had been a brilliant staff officer but an undistinguished politician: in the last elections, his Free Opinion Party had polled less than 4% of the votes. What mattered to the king, however, was first his loyalty—which was unquestioned—and second, that Metaxas could control the army, always an unpredictable factor in Greek political life. Within two weeks, Metaxas had called for and received a vote of confidence, and parliament itself broke up early for its summer recess. It was not to convene again for another ten years.

The spring of 1936 was a time of great tension in and beyond Europe: the international battle-lines between right and left were emerging in Germany, where the troops of the Third Reich marched into the Rhineland that March, and in France, where a Popular
Front government was formed the following month. On 5 May, Italian troops captured Addis Ababa, dealing a death-blow to the prestige of the League of Nations. But it was on 9 May, the day that the Italian king Victor Emmanuel was declared Emperor of Ethiopia, that dramatic events took place in Salonica itself which showed the depth of unhappiness within its working classes and the scale of the crisis which faced the country.

After a bitterly cold winter, labour unrest had grown, bringing fresh intimidation in its train. At the end of April, tobacco workers struck for higher wages and union rights and the strike quickly spread elsewhere over the next few days. In Cavalla, workers called for an end to “the state of terror,” and shopkeepers closed their shops in sympathy: the local prefect responded by arresting and deporting union and guild leaders. By 8 May, the Salonica tobacco workers had grown tired of waiting for serious negotiations to begin, and the trades union federation called its members out on strike. When crowds headed for the town hall, the police fired over their heads to try to stop them, scuffles broke out, and several workers who had been arrested were freed by their comrades. Then another 3000 workers ignored police road blocks and made their way from the warehouses near the Beshchinar into the centre. Feeling they were losing control of the streets, the authorities called up reinforcements, mounted gendarmerie and army conscripts. The latter were mostly local boys and unreliable in their sympathies, in some cases siding with the workers rather than the police. That evening, more guilds came out: cab and tram drivers, workers at the electricity plant, the docks and the railways. With at least 25,000 on the streets, the city was paralysed. The response of Prime Minister Metaxas was uncompromising: he forced the rail-workers and tram drivers back to work under martial law—and gave the police “freedom of action.”

Next day, an anticipatory silence hung over the city: shutters were drawn down over the shops, there was no traffic on the streets. Groups of protesters gathered in clusters, watched by patrols of police and soldiers and ignoring orders to disperse. Strikers stopped a police car containing men who had been arrested for refusing to work and released them. Others put up barricades across Egnatia. Then, as the crowd grew and tens of thousands gathered in the heart of the city, shouting such slogans as “Long Live the Strike” and “Down with the Police,” the police themselves opened fire. On the very corner where, nearly thirty years earlier, Young Turk gunmen had marked the start of their revolution by assassinating Abdullah Bey, the local head of the
Hamidian police, the gendarmerie now claimed several victims of their own. By the time the masses of protestors had dispersed, several hours later, the police had shot twelve people dead and left another thirty-two badly wounded. The victims included two chauffeurs, and four tobacco workers; three of the twelve were Jews. The verdict of the British consul was that “the police acted with unnecessary brutality as was their custom.” And he continued: “The town at that time certainly looked and sounded as if it had been invaded by an enemy.”
¹²

Fearing the crowd’s revenge, the police were confined to quarters, control of the streets was handed over to the army and fresh units were ordered in. Thousands of workers turned out to mourn the dead, whose corpses were carried through the streets on biers, and flowers were strewn where they had fallen. There was, however, no further violence. After a few days in which the government’s authority appeared to have almost completely broken down, the demands of the tobacco workers were granted, and the general strike was called off. The American ambassador, Lincoln MacVeagh, who had been in the city throughout these events, was quite clear that their underlying cause was the government’s neglect of labour conditions in northern Greece, and of the economic plight there in general. “The region as a whole feels itself in a hopeless situation,” he wrote. “Is the Greek Government going to heed these lessons? Or is Salonica destined to become another Barcelona and spread the infection of economic revolt throughout the whole rotten body politic of this country?”
¹³

MacVeagh was not blind to the possibility of communist agitation behind what had happened, but it was not, for him, the real reason for such widespread protest. After all, had the unrest been revolutionary in its aims, it would not have subsided so quickly. Prime Minister Metaxas, however, was of a different mind and played up the threat of subversion. When the trades union federation announced a general strike for 5 August, he was given the pretext he had sought. He told the king the country faced a communist plot to overthrow the political system, and with the latter’s approval, he declared martial law the day before the strike was due to begin and assumed dictatorial powers.

20
Dressing for the Tango

I
N THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH
of the Asia Minor catastrophe, the Greek state could scarcely maintain its authority beyond Athens. Brigands ruled Samos, ransacking the island treasury, and unlocking the prisons. In Salonica, the Salikourtzis gang, refugees from Asia Minor, terrorized the city for two years, robbing merchants with impunity before they were caught and shot. But perhaps most notorious of all was the brigand Giangoulas who roamed the slopes of Mount Olympos. Occasionally he ventured into the plains and in June 1925 he was reported to have entered the city disguised as a priest, taken a coffee at the
zaharoplasteion
Doré, and then strolled off towards the White Tower, with the police close behind him. Giangoulas was a worthy descendant of those robber bands that had terrorized Salonica and its hinterland for centuries. Like his forebears, he boasted in grandiose terms about making “his own justice,” and styled himself in letters in half-literate Greek as “King of the Mountains.” But like them he too depended on the protection of powerful local politicians, and as the nature of politics changed, his way of life was jeopardized. Worried about the impact of his activities on Greece’s image abroad, Athens ordered him to be hunted down. In September 1925 he was killed, and in the usual way a photograph of his severed head was published in the press to confirm his death before being sent to the University of Athens for criminological study.
¹