Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (62 page)

They could not be missed—for tavernas, in addition to orchestras and live bands, were now relying on amplification too. “Woman is like a gramophone,” ran a song of this time. “And the man is the dynamo/which makes her sing.” In an era when few people yet owned cars, when the most familiar sounds in the streets were still the braying of donkeys, cock-crows at dawn, the trumpet reveille in the barracks and the sing-song cries of passing traders, the “murderous instrument” introduced the city for perhaps the first time to the eminently modern problem of noise. The silence of the Ottoman city was becoming a thing of the past. As one journalist wrote sadly:

Once, when the gramophone was not so widespread probably it was a means of enjoyment and musical delight. But now, alas! … It is a monster which tears apart your ears, beats the nerves, turns your intestines upside down, unscrews your brain, kills relaxation, sleep, beauty, our very humanity … Just when you are dying of heat and stop at a café to cool off with a lemonade and relax, the moment when you need quiet and flee to the suburbs, where you think that all is asleep, unmoving, suddenly you leap up terrified, as if from a nightmare … What is it? The hoarse, asthmatic, apoplectic, crippled loudspeaker hangs from some tree or from the entrance … and without excuse or by your leave, attacks you and crushes you with the lament from Traviata or informs you that the young lady is asking her mother for “a young man/sweet and tasty,” who with everything else will be “handsome and an Athenian” and she can’t restrain herself.
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One of the reasons why the tavernas flourished was Salonica’s insatiable appetite for music of all kinds. Before 1912, musical contacts with Istanbul had been very close, and musicians in the sultan’s service used to give concerts at the Café Mazlum on the waterfront. “Spring in Salonica,” ran one popular Judezmo song, “at Mazlum’s café/a black-eyed girl sings the
amané
and plays the
oud.
” Music united all tongues and faiths. “There was not a Salonican who did not run to hear the voice of Karakas Effendi which set the great old Mazlum Café in a tremble,” remembered an enthusiast. Backed by violin, clarinet,
oud
and
kanun
, Karakas Effendi—“an elderly man, tall as a pine, his 75 years hidden in a black frock-coat”—was an Istanbul Jew who moved easily, like many musicians, between the café and the synagogue, challenging the cantors to see who could chant the blessings more beautifully. Ottoman Salonica itself boasted the gifted
Ma’min
vocalist “Kyor Ahmet”—a member of the aristocratic Kapandji clan—described later as “master of the pashas, beys and Ottoman colonels of high society; and the Caruso of the common folk.” Dimitrios Semsis—sometimes known as “the Salonican” or “the Serb”—had been a youthful violinist in Abdul Hamid’s entourage before he settled in the city. Later he became an important record producer for both Columbia and His Master’s Voice.
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Mazlum’s café was burned down in the fire, and the upper-class Hotel Méditerranée was built in its place, but some of Kyor Ahmet’s Jewish students continued to develop and adapt his Ottoman legacy. “Maestro Sadik”—the blind Jewish
oud
player Sadik Nehama Gershon—collaborated with the song-writer Moshé Cazés who paid tribute to his partner as “truly an ‘international musician’ who plays many instruments and sings in Turkish, Greek,
Judezmo
and Arabic. The excellent traditional musicians who reached Salonica from Istanbul during the period of the population exchange categorize Master Sadik as a ‘gramophone’; it suffices for him to hear any piece of music
just once in order to learn it; and if it contains mistakes, he will correct them.” In the cafés, players clustered round as Sadik taught them new songs “freshly arrived from Istanbul. Since all the musicians take the lesson together, you can easily imagine how the café turns into a veritable dervish centre, Sadik with his
oud
and everyone else beating rhythm, some on their clothes, others with their feet.” And it was not only the musicians and their songs which still came from Turkey, but record producers and devotees, like another student of Kyor Ahmet’s, the Turkish poetess Madame Aziz, who frequented the café where Sadik played.
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On the street, too, the old-established musical styles could be heard—the gypsy drummers,
klarino
players from the mountains inland, the mandolin bands and the love songs or
kantades
with which musicians and lovers still serenaded girls outside their homes. Christians like the Vlach violinist Mikos Salonikios played alongside Jewish bands, and hung out in the musicians’ cafés—the Dolma Batché, and the Nuevo Mundo (New World) where cantors, tobacco workers and professional players adapted the old Ottoman modes—
hijaz, segah
and
shetaraba
—for a new clientele. This was also the last generation of the uninhibited, sharp-tongued Jewish entertainers, men of local renown like Moshiko el Mentirozo (the Liar), the Fratelli Nar, Los Ratones (the Mice), Nataniko, Daviko el Chiko (Little Dave) and Baruh el Dondurmadji (Baruch the Icecream Man)—whose scabrous rhymes and songs were the highlights of any wedding.
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These performers were nothing if not adaptable. Just as the
café chantant
gave way to the
café variété
, so the violin and the
kanun
were slowly being replaced by the bouzouki and guitar. Old-time musicians occasionally deplored the headlong rush into “European” fashions. “Everything goes out of style, even the traditional Turkish music ensemble. The piano, bass and violin have defeated the Eastern violin,
oud
and tambourine. The fox-trot has beaten the Eastern-style love song,” wrote Sadik and Gazoz. But they were, after all, businessmen too, and they managed to adapt tangos and other European dances in their repertoire with little fuss and much humour. “ ‘Having a good time’ today means dancing, and dancing without end. The old people say, ‘The good ones go, the bad ones stay.’ But
we
say, ‘The old routine has gone; the new ways are here to stay.’ ” Sadik himself was said to be able to handle songs “en turko, en grego, en ewspanyol i franko/mezmo los tangos ed Edwardo Byanko [in Turkish, Greek, Spanish and French/Even the tangos of Eduardo Bianco].”
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And there was still an insatiable demand for music in “the Oriental style,” with all the
memories this conjured up. A journalist described the evening bedlam of one street in the Upper Town which was lined with tavernas, all loudly competing to attract customers: “One tries to present the best singer who can hold the wail of the
amané
highest and play the tambourine, another the best players who can charm up, with the
oud
and the
santouri
, nostalgia for the much-mourned East.” In the city’s tavernas, at least, the Ottoman world remained alive.
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B
ACKLASH

N
OISE, SEX, BRASH MATERIALISM
and immorality—it is perhaps not surprising that the disappearance of the old ways produced a backlash of nostalgia and condemnation. “We went to bed mules and woke up Franks,” complains Auntie Benuta in a popular satirical series in the Jewish press. Its elderly protagonists railed against the “snot-noses,” “little Franks,” the “messieurs” as they were ironically called, who used fancy words like “progress,” “coiffeur” and “hypertension.” Yet of course even in the old days, “when fruit stones were sweet,” according to the saying, the entertainments and pleasures of city life had come under attack. In the nineteenth century, the rabbis had denounced “frivolous gatherings,” and warned parents not to let their boys become musicians or dancers “for these professions expose one to meetings between unmarried men and maidens at weddings and dinner parties and in coffee-houses or hideaways and such, and this can cause one to engage in forbidden behaviour such as profanation and frivolity, jesting and lightheadedness.” Both rabbis and
hodjas
inveighed against the evils of the coffee-house in particular, though the incessant stream of prohibitions is probably a clue to their lack of effectiveness. The city was known for its cafés, and most men went to pass the time in dominoes and backgammon, if nothing worse.
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Between the wars, antipathy to the city’s pursuit of modernity was as strong as it had been in the mid-nineteenth century. The refugee crisis and the near-disintegration of the state prompted a mood of something close to panic at the nation’s collective moral health. General Pangalos banned short skirts, while churchmen and police authorities closed down the city’s first open-air gymnastics society, founded by an Italian devotee of sunlight and naturalism. And at the beach by the Beshchinar gardens, guards in boats tried to patrol the space between the male and female bathing cabins to prevent any mixing of the sexes,
something which bewildered many of the refugees from the Asia Minor coast, for whom mixed bathing had been customary.

What was new in the 1920s was not the fact of protest but its source: religious authorities could still make their presence felt—especially the church—but it was the organs of state who now assumed the primary responsibility for the enforcement of social norms. The police adjudicated on propriety, checked dress and even reported on civil servants spotted in gambling dens. As we have seen, however, the police’s ability and even willingness to perform this task was often in doubt. Sure enough, before long mixed bathing was commonplace and as for sex outside marriage that, so far as some commentators were concerned, appeared to be taking place in every nook and cranny of the city, churches not excepted. The boundaries of respectability were constantly being redrawn, in no small part because of the needs of commercial profit and the media. Society was policing itself as much as it allowed itself to be policed, and groups defined their own terms of acceptability. The shoemaker’s guild, for instance, had no difficulty accepting “Simonetta,” a gay man much prized by his fellow-guild members for his designs as well as his wit during their weekly parties; he in turn kept out of their interminable political rows—they were Archive Marxists and used to have regular brawls with members of the Communist Party—insisting that “these matters are not for women.” In the cinemas, the dance-halls, the streets and the tavernas, a new topography of pleasure was emerging: through the experiences it generated, and the memories and places it claimed, it was establishing the city in the affections of a new generation of inhabitants. The taverna, claimed one journalist, was drug-store in daytime, refuelling stop in the evening, and theatre of political and personal passions at night, when it became a “parliament, a session of the League of Nations, a conference to solve all outstanding social problems.” “The Beshchinar is your life, your lungs, your joy,” proclaimed an advertisement for the city’s oldest public park in 1934. It was no longer strictly true: the oil refineries which surrounded the once elegant Garden of the Princes where Sultan Abdul Mecid held court in 1859, the rail tracks, slums, tanneries and meat yards whose refuse polluted its beach, all pointed to its imminent and sad demise. But in a wider sense it was so: Salonica’s pleasure gardens, parks, suburban and seaside centres of entertainment and distraction were, in times of exile, unemployment, poverty and political unrest, the places that people would remember, that made the city itself not only bearable but, to an ever-larger proportion of its inhabitants, home.
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21
Greeks and Jews

A
UNTIE
D
JAMILA
: You don’t want to hear anything that has to do with modernism.

U
NCLE
B
OHOR
: Doesn’t “modernism” mean … “anti-Semitism”?
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L
ANGUAGE AND
I
DENTITY

B
EHIND THE
G
RECO
-T
URKISH
population exchange of 1923 lay an apparently simple logic: Muslims should be made to settle in Turkey and Orthodox Christians in Greece. But where were Salonica’s Jews to go? No one in Madrid or Lisbon (or Salonica for that matter) suggested they return to Iberia. Only a minority considered Palestine. Some did emigrate to France and the USA. But for the vast majority, their home was the city, and if asked they would have naturally described their nationality—as one emigrant did to the French authorities in 1916—as “Salonican.”
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As a result of its conquests in the First Balkan War, Greece’s total Jewish population had shot up from ten thousand to well over eighty thousand, of whom around seventy thousand lived in Salonica. The tiny communities of Old Greece spoke Greek and were highly assimilated whereas the Sefardic Jews of the north, who played a highly influential role in what was now the country’s second-largest city, were quite distinct from the Greeks in both language and culture. Lucien Wolf, a British Jew who helped draw up the post-WWI minorities treaties of Eastern Europe, wanted Greece to guarantee many of the traditional rights which the city’s Jews had enjoyed under the Ottomans. But when he discussed the idea with the Greek ambassador in London, the
latter saw such concessions as preserving all the humiliations of an Ottoman system of capitulations, and retorted that “to ask us to make special distinctions or grant special privileges would be to upset the very principle of equality which is on the other hand demanded of us.” It was a fair point; Ottoman diplomats had been making it for decades before him.
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