Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (60 page)

We can therefore imagine the shock felt three years later when the driver of a car crossing the hills just beyond Salonica’s walls caught sight of Giangoulas and his gang in triumphant mood. Reversing fast, he drove off to the nearest police station; half an hour later a troop of cavalry arrived and chased after their man. Only in the nick of time
did the soldiers realise that the fustanella-clad band of brigands they were about to attack was in fact a bunch of film extras. An enterprising local producer had been inspired by the hero’s life and exploits: Giangoulas himself was being played by a Salonican journalist, his “wife” by a well-known actress. All was explained, a new pursuit scene was quickly added and the officers enthusiastically joined in.

C
HANGING
T
IMES

T
IMES WERE CHANGING
and a previously endemic threat to public order had been turned into a concept which would make Salonica—at least in the minds of the men responsible—“the Hollywood of the North.” It might be lagging behind Athens in literature and the fine arts, but perhaps Greece’s northern metropolis could become a centre for the new art of the twentieth century. That at least was the hope. Unfortunately, brigandage was not so far in the past that the nervous authorities felt happy heroizing these public enemies, and anti-brigandage laws stopped the movie being shown. Salonica’s own film industry never really got off the ground, though an academy which claimed to train students for a career in front of the cameras did good business for a time.
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But no one ever accused Salonica’s inhabitants of not knowing how to enjoy themselves. Entertainment was a vital part of daily life, a distraction from the anxieties of exile, separation and displacement common to virtually every family there. Offering
cowboïka
, Charlie Chaplin and Hollywood tearjerkers, cinemas like the
Dionysia
, the
Pallas
, the
Athinaion
and the
Royale
attracted crowds of regulars. The
Attikon
, on the western end of Egnatia, with its White Russian pianist—briefly accused of being a Bolshevik spy—was a favourite of leftists, being situated close to the end of town where the tobacco sheds and the union offices were to be found: political meetings were frequently held in its hall. The
Pantheon
played mostly “erotic” films—by which were meant, according to Aimilios Dimitriades, not the sex films of a later, less innocent era, but rather melodramas, adventure films—anything with women and without cowboys. On the quay, the
Modern
offered more Westerns, this time mostly to appreciative Jewish families who littered the floor with the traditional
pasatempo
(roasted pumpkin seeds) and drank
gazosa
through two or three viewings.
³

The cinema-owners would try any trick to keep their clientele.
In the intervals, singers performed arias from operettas. Others added cabaret and circus acts and called themselves “variety cinemas.” Child prodigies were a favourite—the “Miniature Little Devil, Nini Zaharopoulou,” or five-year-old Louisa Bellini, who “dances exotic dances in imitation of Josephine Baker.” The
Pathé
ran a lottery in the interval, with a prize—alarm clocks were popular. And when a long-forgotten masterpiece entitled “What Giannis Suffered” came to town, the same cinema announced free entry to anyone of that name.

Of course the cinema was not the only modern form of entertainment linking the city to worldwide tastes and fashions. The craze for speed made the first motorcycles an object of neighbourly amazement. During the First World War, airmen became symbols of human daring and technological wonder, much as the electric tram—
chaitan arabasi
(the devil’s carriage) the city’s older inhabitants had called it—had done earlier still. The air was starting to play its part in city politics too: in April 1922 the royalist government—in its final phase—had dropped leaflets over the city announcing the imposition of a forced loan, and a few months later, another plane brought in members of the Revolutionary Committee. In 1930, fifteen years after the first Zeppelin attack on the city, an English hydroplane, named “City of Salonica” for the occasion, landed in the bay and taxied to a stop in front of the Hotel Méditerranée, where it became an instant sensation and was blessed publicly by the Metropolitan Gennadios, “in front of the city authorities and a large crowd.” The owners recouped their expenses by charging 250 drachmas for a flight above the town, and their many customers later founded a Society of Friends of the Air in order to popularize the delights of air travel.
⁴

I
N THE OLD DAYS
, the best-known street sport had been wrestling, and well-known
pechlivanides
remained popular figures at fairs and on public holidays. One of them, Prodromos Tsaousakis, was later discovered as a singer by the great
rembetika
player Tsitsanis and became one of his finest interpreters. But strength was now being overshadowed by fitness. Soccer had arrived in the city even before the Balkan Wars, but exploded in popularity with the coming of the refugees, whose clubs formed its most important teams. Testifying to the interwar cult of the healthy body, new pitches were laid out on the edge of the Jewish cemetery, where they hosted professional matches and athletic competitions. Sports entered the school curricula, and the founding of the city’
s YMCA, housed in a massive neo-Byzantine building, popularized basketball and baseball. The Pan-Thessalonican athletics competitions—including sections for “classical athletics”—became a fixture, and by the 1930s the government had established an inspectorate of gymnastics for northern Greece. For unlike the old-fashioned individualistic strong-man, gymnasts, athletes and football players matched the new collectivist ethos of the times. Massed healthy bodies were a national priority.

Other kinds of exercise were less obviously useful to the nation. Probably even more popular than athletics was dance, and dance halls and academies proliferated. “Luxemburg was the most popular entertainment centre of those days, and it was in full swing,” recalls Erica Counio-Amariglio in her memoirs. “Many big names were singing or bringing their orchestras there. One summer the very famous Eduardo Bianco came with his orchestra. The centre was bursting with people every evening.”
⁵
Dancing was no longer just a cabaret act for the pleasure of the viewing male; it was a way for young men and women to meet and touch, out of sight of their parents. “One cannot imagine how clearly on the faces of the dancers shows the enchantment and an aesthetic satisfaction which comes from the pleasure of whirling around,” wrote a journalist in 1927. “Especially the coquetteish expressions of the young ladies, all red and shining from a kind of extreme pleasure.” It was, wrote another, “the instinct of necessity, the same instinct which brings the starving traveller outside the kitchen, the thirsty man to the spring, the lover beneath the window of his loved one.”
⁶

As for the sexually charged content of the new style of dancing, what attracted the crowds was exactly what alarmed more old-fashioned souls. In the interwar period, an anonymous composer tacked on a new ending to the well-known Judeo-Spanish “Song of the Fire.” In the song’s original version the catastrophe of 1917 had been attributed to
los pecados de sabat
(the sins of the Sabbath); but according to the new version God had punished the city because
Los mocicas de agora/todas visten de tango
(The young girls of today/all dress for the tango). Angeliki Metallinou, defender of civic virtue, warned that in the dance halls “poor young women learn to dance and proceed to worse.” Driven on by conservative commentators and churchmen, vice police raided dance halls, and harassed owners so much that one at least was driven to suicide. As a result, popular spots like the Ramona, or the Aaron in the Jewish 151 neighbourhood, tried to highlight their respectability. Katakolos’s dance hall assured parents that “inside the school of dancing the rules of order and morality are strictly observed.”
⁷

In 1929, following suggestions in the press, the mayor inaugurated the first Miss Thessaloniki competition in the Hotel Méditerranée. The short-listed candidates danced a tango with their partners, then a waltz. (The competition struck a chord in the city, and the gay men in Koufos’s taverna organized their own “Miss of the Evening” in homage.) The second year’s winner, a twenty-one-year-old refugee from Bursa called Roxani Stergiou, was the strong favourite to go on and win the Miss Greece title, but was deprived of that title after some behind the scenes manoeuvring by the mayor of Athens. As ever, the nation’s capital knew how to sabotage the prospects of its northern rival. The eventual winner, Aliki Diplarakou, went on to win Miss Europe in Paris too, before returning to Greece and hitting the front pages a second time when she aroused the anger of the church by secretly visiting Mount Athos with the help of a celebrity-struck priest.
⁸

M
ODERN
W
OMEN

A
NEW KIND OF COMMERCIALISM
was dissolving the grip of tradition, and women, especially younger women, found themselves challenging older ideas of what was proper. “If only someone would help me escape from this
modernizmo de mujer
[modernism of woman],” complains the elderly Uncle Bohor, in a popular satirical series in the Jewish press. In the old days, a respectable Jewish housewife—like her Muslim or Christian counterpart—stayed at home, let the man do the shopping and was not seen out unless properly attired and even veiled. In the suburbs and refugee quarters, neighbours and relatives still made sure young people did not get up to mischief. But in the city centre women were as visible—or so it seemed to some—as men, showing off like Frankish “madmwazeles,” or “devilish coquettes/with elegance, and chic” (diavlas koketas/kon la elegansa, el shik), as the composers of the fox-trot “Salonik sivilizado” complained.
⁹

This was not so much a question of politics—although there were feminist groups in the interwar city calling for an extension of the suffrage, to little avail—as economics. Among the refugees, in particular, there were far more women than men, forcing the former into the workplace. Women had always been wet-nurses and domestic servants. They now also served in tavernas and cafés, as shop-assistants, singers and dancers in variety shows; the
Beau Rivage
promised “extraordinary hospitality at the hands of Russian ladies.” In Salonica, sang
Tsitsanis, “I was loved by refugee girls/Blue-eyed, brown-haired and refined
modistroules.
”

The
modistra
—or dressmaker—was the icon of new femininity in the interwar city. Called into being by female spending power, she was also herself a symbol of economic independence. Together with the hat-maker, she passed into the city’s consciousness and the “little dressmaker’s apprentice” became the heroine of a popular song of the period:

Oh, my
modistroula,
mincing and flirtatious
,
With your needle how you pierce my heart
When you pass before me with such a posture
Bir boza bir boza—clicking your heels with such elegance.

Working alongside men, freed from parental supervision, female tobacco-handlers were a tougher breed, with a reputation for free-minded behaviour. The tobacco industry had traditionally offered employment to girls for a few years in order to earn their dowry, and between the wars, nearly half of all tobacco workers in the city were women. “Our suffragettes,” as their defenders called them, were prominent from the 1914 strike wave onwards. Not only did they often take a leading role in industrial action, to the consternation of the authorities, but they also lived by their own rules. “Regina”—a well-known Jewish worker—lived openly with a Christian man, something highly unusual at that time. The police, who were less comfortable beating up women than men, were often perplexed, then shocked. Outraged by the behaviour of one female worker, a police officer warned her that her conduct was suspicious and she would be sent for medical examination, “and if this shows anything she will be sent to the brothels.”
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H
ANOUMAKIA

A
N UNUSUAL THREAT
, no doubt, and one which testified not only to the authorities’ repressive instincts where women were concerned, but also to the important place occupied by prostitution in the interwar economy of the city: there were no less than forty-eight licensed establishments in 1928 and street-walkers outnumbered civil servants. The traffic in sexual pleasures had existed in the city since Ottoman times, when more than one visitor had been invited by an
apparently respectable Jewish youth to visit his “sister.” With the Russian revolution and the Asia Minor catastrophe came a new supply of impoverished White Russian aristocrats and abandoned Greek refugees. Some (male) writers might talk glibly about the “charm” and the “traditional erotic sensibility of the East” that the newcomers brought with them, but what spurred on many of these “unprotected and orphaned girls” was economic need or vulnerability. Chrysoula T., for instance, had “erotic relations” with Panayiotis Peiridis after he promised to marry her, but then found herself being led, not to their new home but to the brothel of an old friend and partner of his, Angela Machaira (“the Knife”). She went to the police but this was surely not the first time the device had been used, and many in her situation were too ashamed to do this.
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