Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (72 page)

For returning Jews the experience was a haunting one. Jacques Stroumsa was a young engineer who had helped construct the Hirsch camp, and had survived Auschwitz, where his parents and his pregnant wife had been killed. After the war, unwilling to return home, he had left for good. When eventually he came back for a brief visit, he spent hours sitting on his hotel balcony and looking out over the sea: “I was smoking cigarette after cigarette for fear the tears would come. A Greek Orthodox friend found me alone around midnight and said: ‘I understand you, Jacques, you don’t really know any more where to go in Salonica, the city where you once knew every stone.’ And that’s how it was.”
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Conclusion
The Memory of the Dead

We are turned to hollow bones, shall we be restored to life? A fruitless transformation!
¹

—Q
UR’AN

B
EFORE THE
F
IRST
W
ORLD
W
AR
, the dead were to be found, not only in the weed-strewn cemeteries which lined the approaches to the walls, but also within the city itself, crammed into the small railed enclosure by the Saatli Djami, under the trees of the Vlatadon monastery, in dervish
turbes
and roofed family mausoleums on street corners. A tiny graveyard of richly carved turbaned tombs stood near the Hamza Bey mosque, surrounded by pastry-shops, watch-menders, bakeries and general stores in the busy commercial quarter where the
Kapali Çarsi
—the main shopping arcade—met the old
Bezesten.
When they drew water at the fountain, or entered their church, mosque or
hamam
, the living saw inscriptions which reminded them of how much they owed to those who had gone before them. But they remembered them too in public pilgrimages to the cemetery like the Jewish
Ziyara grande
which took place thirteen days before Yom Kippur. Women paid visits to their relatives’ graves to pray for domestic advice and tied small pieces of paper or ribbons to tomb railings.

The dead, with their powers and demands, thus formed part of the world of the living. When a rabbi died, a note was often placed in his hand prior to burial asking for some important favour from God: this was done when Rabbi Levi Gattegno passed away in the middle of a dry spell, and the rains came within hours. Bodies which had not decomposed indicated the presence of a restless spirit; bodies laid the wrong way or face down would rest uneasily in the ground. Sometimes tombs were re-opened to check that all was well. But people also visited
cemeteries for picnics and conversation. The dead watched the living enjoying themselves as well as lamenting their passing. Above the graves the city’s inhabitants worked, begged, grazed their animals and indulged in a variety of activities which Ottoman legislators vainly tried to curb.
²

In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the dead and the living began to move apart. Following the 1866 International Sanitary Conference in Istanbul, Ottoman regulations proscribed burial within the capital. Graveyards had to be moved to a sufficient distance from the walls to avoid their “putrid emanations” endangering public health. Similar measures were introduced in Salonica, and the occupants of some of the small neighbourhood graveyards within the city were incorporated in the larger ones outside. City burial became an exclusive matter: only spiritual leaders could still be buried in their places of worship, a privilege which was sometimes extended to religious benefactors as well. Was this a mark of honour for these men of distinction, or a sign that their remains radiated a special power that helped those living among them?
³

After the 1917 fire, Hébrard’s plan for the modern city envisaged radical changes in the use of urban space, and relegated the dead definitively to the margins. Where the Jewish cemetery was concerned, German occupation in the Second World War simply provided an opportunity for the municipality to carry out its own modification of Hébrard’s ideas. Today the area is dominated by the massive Corbusier-style faculty blocks, concrete plazas and landscaped avenues of the Aristoteleion University; but the ground had been prepared in the winter of 1942 when council workers turned the old cemetery into a rubble-strewn waste-land of vandalized graves, with shattered fragments of marble, brick and human bones everywhere. “Desecration of the graves is forbidden,” wrote the Salonica novelist Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis in his stream-of-consciousness
Mother Thessaloniki.
But whose graves?
⁴

M
ADAME SARA
, one of the last exponents of a powerful Ottoman tradition, was born in Edirne in 1926 and now lives in Istanbul. She is Jewish and is much in demand as a spirit medium, communicating with the dead at the request of the living. She first realized the gift God had given her when she was a child, and used to collect water from a fountain near a Muslim cemetery. There she saw others praying to a wise man, and soon heard him calling her over. Sadik, a Muslim holy man who had died more than a century earlier, became her spiritual guide, and has helped her ever since, in her own life and in her work.
⁵

Not so long ago this kind of story was less exceptional than it is today. For over many centuries the power of the dead remained an ecumenical one. The Ottoman authorities acknowledged the potent sanctity of the blood of Christian martyrs. Saint Dimitrios’s tomb was guarded by a Mevlevi dervish who advised Christian pilgrims how its holy earth should be used. But as the empire fell apart and nation-states came into being, something changed in people’s minds. The age of mass migrations began, waves of refugees came and went, and the dead who stayed behind suddenly became just another target for the living whose political passions and enmities brought them humiliation, desecration and eviction.

In Salonica, it was not only the Jewish dead who were treated as though they were less valuable than the land they occupied and the slabs that covered them. The city’s Muslim and
Ma’min
graveyards had already vanished under new roads and buildings. With the exception of the mausoleum of Mousa Baba, a couple of tombs in the precinct of the Rotonda, a sarcophagus stored on the west side of Ayia Sofia, and another grander one in the garden of the Yeni Djami, there is virtually no resting-place for the Muslim dead in the city today. General Taksin Pasha, the Greek-speaking Ottoman general who surrendered Salonica to Prince Constantine in 1912, is said to have been buried on the city’s outskirts on his death a few years later, but no trace of his tomb has survived. The Bulgarian cemetery was expropriated after the Bulgarians were expelled in 1913, and graves with inscriptions in Slavic lettering are hard to find, though one or two remain in the grounds of the old Catholic seminary in Zeitenlik.
⁶

The compulsory population exchange of 1922 was the turning-point. For like the departing Muslims, the Greek immigrants had been forced by the catastrophe that befell them to leave their own forebears behind. Since the dead who counted to them lay far away, often in unknown graves, why should they have attached importance to those who happened to be buried in their new places of settlement? Some refugee women—having chatted with the Turkish women of the neighbourhood before the latter left—continued to pray at the graves of Muslim holy men in the upper town. But these practices became rare. Feeling at home in Salonica meant turning it into an entirely new city, building settlements on the outskirts that had not even existed in Ottoman times. It meant re-baptizing it, with names that created ties to their own homelands (much as the Jewish refugees from Spain had done four centuries before them), and finding new homes for the precious icons they had managed to bring with them. Nostalgia for the
lost lands of Christian Orthodoxy thus meshed with the city’s expansion and modernization.

The rising death toll and mass violence of the twentieth century also played their part in this devaluation of the dead. The era of political assassination had come to the city as the century began, but politically motivated killings soon multiplied. At its murderous apogee, the 1940s brought not only the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of their graves, but also the loss of hundreds of civilians shot by the Germans in mass executions, and hundreds more in the civil war that followed. “Our city is full of dead people whom nobody escorted to their final resting-place,” wrote Pentzikis, who lived through it all. “The lovely dawn, which best shows off the flowers, often brings corpses to light on the roads. Mutilated faces. With no nose or ears. Blood on the steps of the garden gate. On the pavement.”
⁷

T
O MANY GREEK WRITERS
after 1912, the generation of the new arrivals, Salonica seemed suspended in the present, cut off from any recognizable past. Brought up on Pound, Eliot and Joyce, they inhabited a melancholic wasteland of alienation and anomie. But in the meantime, the archaeologists were helping to restore a past they could connect with, creating new forms of historical memory to bolster local Hellenic pride. Digging deep into the earth, they exhumed long-forgotten paleochristian tombs, and brought to light old gods, temples and shrines. Some decades earlier they had turned the Athens Acropolis into a contemporary icon of antiquity by ridding it of its medieval and Ottoman buildings. Salonica did not have the Acropolis, but it had its churches. In 1914, a Greek scholar declared it the “Byzantine city
par excellence
,” and described it as the symbol of “the new great historical horizon” that the victories of the Greek army had made possible. “Athens represents, embodies better, antiquity in our history and in our consciousness,” writes the novelist Ioannou. “Salonica Byzantium.” An inspectorate of Byzantine monuments was established in 1920, and the restoration of the city’s churches, with islands of space carved out around them to allow them greater prominence, indicated how much importance was being attached locally to this historical legacy. After the Second World War, an old Byzantine festival in honour of Saint Dimitrios was revived, and eventually the city even acquired its long-promised Byzantine museum.
⁸

Byzantium’s material re-emergence helped Greeks to feel
confident the city was theirs, a place of resurrection and of miraculous Orthodox renewal. But much as in Athens earlier, recovering the memory of one past meant forgetting or even destroying another. The centuries of Ottoman rule were written off as a long historical parenthesis, a nightmare of oppression and stagnation. Any surviving remains associated with them not only lacked historical value but potentially threatened the new image the city was creating for itself. This was the primary explanation for the demolition of the minarets and the total destruction of the Jewish cemetery, and why Greek archaeologists published learned articles on the ancient inscriptions that came to light on the reverse side of many uprooted Jewish tombstones, whilst ignoring their Hebrew, Portuguese or Judeo-Spanish epigraphs. Anything post-Byzantine in the city was at risk, except for the White Tower which had quickly achieved such symbolic status that most people refused to believe it was an Ottoman construction. It took the 1978 earthquake to get surveys made of the remaining fin-de-siècle villas on Queen Olga Street, and only in the 1980s did state funds begin to be assigned to Ottoman monuments.

Today, it is true, a few grand Ottoman houses have been converted into libraries or museums. The old mill has become a busy complex of bars, jazz clubs and galleries and the streets behind the long-neglected lumber yards are jam-packed with parked cars till the early hours; the Yedi Koulé fortress—where leftists were held to be executed in the civil war—has been smartened up and turned into a cultural space, and Ladadika, the last remaining pre-1914 downtown quarter, has seen the warehouses on Odos Egyptou turned into restaurants. In fact, there is a far greater willingness than ever before to find historical value across all periods and in all kinds of buildings. But much of this is less the indication of a new cultural consciousness than a reflection of the scarcity of old buildings of any kind in Salonica today. The anxiety that globalization will soon eradicate whatever particular charm the city possesses has put new wind in the preservationists’ sails. As a result, prestige is now attached to anything dating back more than a few decades.

History itself had not always been seen as a handmaiden of the nation: indeed, in 1880, when Mihail Hadzi Ioannou published the first description of Salonica in Greek, he deliberately called his work a “Description of the City” (
astugrafia
), preferring this to the clumsy term “Description of the Fatherland” (
patridografia
), since as he put it, he wished to write something “for everyman.” But after 1912 this kind of cosmopolitan outlook became uncommon. As Greece’s rulers set
up new institutions of learning to shape the national consciousness of the city in fundamentally new ways and with a different kind of authority—the authority of historical science—they found they could rely on scholars to fulfil their side of the bargain.
⁹

Through research institutes, publishing programmes and higher education, those in command of the twentieth-century Greek state showed they were fully conscious of “the possibilities of a past”—that consciousness which seemed so strangely lacking in the city when the century began but which came to be indispensable to its emergent national identity. In 1939, a Society of Macedonian Studies was founded, with support from the municipality. During the Cold War struggle with the communist Slavs to the north, this enjoyed government backing, moving into spacious premises in a prime location just opposite the White Tower. The Society played a crucial role in developing historical research into the city and embarked on a major publishing programme of its own, giving birth to two important new institutions—the Institute of Balkan Studies in 1953, and the Historical Archives of Macedonia the following year. All three have since generated many scholarly works—without the society’s journal
Makedonika
, for instance, this book could not have been written. But they were also closely connected with local centres of power. The governing committee of the archives had the metropolitan as chair and the mayor on the board. The Society of Macedonian Studies itself was founded by the president of the city’s Federation of Merchants: fifty years later, his successor boasted that the society had been able to promote scientific research “within the framework of our national identity.” That much good work emerged did not alter the fundamentally instrumental conception of history which motivated their backers.
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