Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (73 page)

It was not only the “Turks” and “Bulgarians” that suffered as a result. The myth of eternal Hellenism flattened out the past of the Greeks themselves and made it less interesting. Instead of showing how Orthodox Christian villagers speaking Vlach, Albanian and Slavic tongues had come over time to see themselves as Greeks, the history books described a sense of Greekness that had been there from the start. There was, in other words, no Hellenization, only Hellenes. Such a denial of the past could not easily accommodate the real role the church had played in Ottoman times. It could not even deal with the experiences of the refugees, many of whom, as we have seen, had been ignorant of Greek and needed time to understand why they should stop calling themselves simply “Eastern Christians.” In fact, despite
the unmistakable contribution of the refugees to the life of the city, and despite their numbers, the refugee experience too was a kind of taboo, and for many years their own stories and sufferings were rarely discussed. “Today no one says he is a ‘refugee,’ ” declared Ioannou in 1982. “And at most perhaps, if pressed, that he is ‘of refugee origins.’ ”
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Then, in 1986, the Greek state set aside a day—14 September—as a “national day of remembrance” to commemorate the destruction of Smyrna and the exodus from Asia Minor.
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By now, the refugees were power-brokers in the city; they had broken the hold of the Peloponnesians and the Cretans, and stood for something more than funny accents and peculiar music. The identity politics of the second and third refugee generations began to chip away at the smooth façade of official Hellenism and broke down the emphatic nationalism of the Cold War era.

With the collapse of communism, the city and the world around it were transformed even more rapidly. Bulgaria was no longer the arch-enemy; with Turkey too a rapprochement was conceivable. True, bloodshed, war and ethnic antagonisms were what made the headlines whenever the Balkans were discussed internationally. But just as important in the long run was the fact that Salonica was connected again—for the first time in generations—to older markets, breaking out of the economic strait-jacket which had shut it in since 1912. Its businessmen were looking north and east to invest, for they were now the wealthiest and most experienced capitalists in the region. Coming the other way were thousands of migrants searching for work. By 1997 the city housed an estimated 100,000 of them, some 10 per cent of its population, and Albanian could be heard in the coffee-houses round the railway station. Others streamed in from Poland, Turkey, Moldova and Bulgaria. Pushed by Western Europe on the one hand, and Eastern Europe on the other, Greek society was changing fast, and the old historical truths (which in truth were not that old) no longer escaped criticism.

I
N 1994 A BITTER PUBLIC ROW
swirled around the Rotonda, one of the city’s most ambiguous and unusual buildings. Roman in origin, it had been a Byzantine church before being converted to a mosque in 1591 when Hortaç,
sheykh
of the nearby Halvetiye monastery, engineered its conversion by a demonstration of his miraculous powers. In 1912 it was returned to Christian use, and the following year it
was declared a “national monument.” When the city’s other twenty-six minarets were demolished by contractors in 1925, its was left standing and still survives.
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Although the dispute between Greece and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia rumbled on, Salonica had been nominated as Cultural Capital of Europe and European funds were pouring in for the restoration of its antiquities. The ministry of culture planned to use the Rotonda for concerts and exhibitions, and so at the end of 1994 it permitted the church to organize a display of icons there and allowed a prayer service to be held for the exhibition’s opening. The Sunday after the exhibition closed, however, worshippers gathered outside once again, and tried to get in to pray. This was evidently more than a mere misunderstanding, because the following day local church leaders called for an all-night vigil. Police had to be called to guard the building as a large crowd began to chant slogans: “Not a synagogue, nor a mosque but a Greek church!” and “This is not Greece, not Albania; onwards for Macedonia and Orthodoxy!” Eventually hundreds of the protestors forced their way through the gates, and the local church hierarchy demanded that the Rotonda be returned to religious use, and even brought a lawsuit against the Archaeological Service for plundering and desecrating it.

This ferocious row over the competing claims of culture and religion went to the heart of the very character of the Greek state. Both had traditionally been utilized in the name of Hellenism; now they were pitted against one another. As the crowd’s slogans suggested, it was not only the strong feelings generated locally by the Macedonia question that had prompted the stand-off: arguments over the city’s complex cultural identity were also involved. The demonstrators outside the Rotonda had equated control of the building by the ministry of culture with the return of Jews and Muslims to a Christian place of worship. And indeed there was a kind of symbolic truth behind the rumour, for Salonica’s designation as Cultural Capital of Europe had led many local commentators to stress its ethnically mixed past as a way of marking it out from, and perhaps proclaiming its superiority to, Athens. It was against these developments that the crowd had been protesting. “The people of God have triumphed,” asserted their ringleader Canon Tassias, after they disrupted a piano recital there the following October. “They tell us that Thessaloniki is a multi-historical city. If they mean that many conquerors passed through here, then I agree. But the Orthodox character of the city was never altered.”
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The politicians who opened the festivities of the Cultural Capital two years later did their best to smooth things over. There was much mention of “European values” and speakers underscored the historical significance of the Orthodox legacy for Europe as a whole. The mayor talked about “Greeks and Europeans” being initiates in the same mysteries, about being “re-baptized” in a “feast of cultural delights” and he declared that history was important in showing the 2300 years of a Greek Macedonian past in “one of the most multi-cultural cities in Europe.” The Commissioner of the European Union discussed Europe’s common future, and reminded his audience that Salonica was a place that had always welcomed refugees. The public debate about “multiculturalism”—a concept much in vogue at this time—reflected awareness of the recent wave of immigration. But the term itself was just a buzz-word and gave a very misleading impression. For all its newcomers Salonica at the end of the twentieth century remained predominantly Greek in culture and Orthodox in religion—and clung to this image of its past.
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T
ODAY, ACKNOWLEDGING ITS OTTOMAN LEGACY
still appears to be as unimaginable to most people as when the historian Kostas Moskof first proposed the idea, more than twenty years ago. The city’s older museums cover classical antiquity, Macedonian folklore and the Macedonian Struggle; newer ones, created in a recent frenzy of museological activity, cater for interests in Byzantium, photography, the cinema, modern art, water supply and musical instruments. The White Tower hosts a charming exhibition of the city’s history and art which begins with its foundation but ends emphatically at the Ottoman conquest of 1430. The Bey Hamam is being restored, but the sixteenth-century Pasha Hamam, which had been in use until 1981, remains in disrepair and the Hamza Bey mosque stands forlornly in the centre of town like an unwanted guest. The Yeni Djami, the quiet of its leafy courtyard barely disturbed by visitors, is used as an annex to the Archaeological Museum and an occasional venue for art exhibitions. Ironically, the best surviving example of nineteenth-century Ottoman architecture is probably Ataturk’s well-guarded birthplace, now the Turkish consulate.

The Jewish community—that other reminder of Ottoman times—recently opened a small museum of its own and at the end of the 1997 celebrations, a Holocaust memorial was unveiled, something the
community had been seeking since 1945. Yet its eventual location was suggestive of unease in the municipality. A proposal to set it somewhere central—perhaps in the square where the Jewish men had been rounded up in 1942—was rejected, and it was finally erected on a distant suburban intersection on the road out to the airport. The so-called Square of the Jewish Martyrs, one of the few street-names which makes any reference to the city’s Jews today, languishes in obscurity, unknown to all but the most experienced taxi drivers. And despite recent demands by many professors, successive administrators of the university have refused to mark the site of the Jewish cemetery.
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If all this mattered, it was only because by the late twentieth century, official monuments had become the way the living re-affirmed their connection to the dead. The Holocaust memorial joined the Giacometti-like cluster of Macedonian Fighters erected on a square in front of the Acheiropoietos church, Alexander the Great on the waterfront, an unknown Mother of Refugees, Venizelos, Prince Constantine and various ministers and mayors. What they had in common was their public character and their lack of any organic connection with the precise spot where they stood. None of them signified the presence of physical remains, like the mausolea of the past, nor that those they honoured had actually died there, like the humble paveside memorial put up in 1913 to King George at the place of his assassination, which has long since disappeared in its turn. Venizelos stood in the heart of the city he had rebuilt. Alexander the Great could have gone anywhere since the city did not exist in his lifetime.

Location was no longer about the site of a spiritual connection between living and dead so much as a reflection of electoral calculus. Salonica had turned into a symbolic space to be defined and redefined by its political masters. But there was no mystique in marble when the bones were not there, and the age in which people paid attention to monuments, if it had ever existed, was rapidly passing. All that could be said for them, like street-names, was that they helped establish the identity of those figures who the authorities regarded as important enough to be brought to the public’s attention. By the end of the twentieth century, therefore, the city’s relationship with the dead had been radically transformed. Although the churches remained, the Ottoman network of synagogues and mosques had vanished and the streets had been so comprehensively realigned that it was often difficult to know where they once stood. The cemeteries had long gone too and in their place a new archipelago of arts centres, museums, monuments
and carefully preserved sites of historical value provided the living with their entrance to the past, with curators and scholars serving as their guides.

Today nearly one million people inhabit this ever-expanding city. Its transport system is stretched, though there is talk of an underground train line—and the traffic, parking and pollution are, if anything, a worse headache than in Athens. In 1900 the waters of the bay were so clear that one could look down and see the fish; a century later, they are a murky grey-green, and diners at waterside tavernas risk their meal being spoilt by the stench of sewage when the wind is in the wrong direction. The city centre is bursting, prices even in the Upper Town are sky-high, and younger couples are being forced further and further into the suburbs. With all these problems to cope with, what use to them is the history of a small city, with a complex polyglot population, which disappeared many decades before?

And yet that older city may turn out to serve the living in new ways only now coming into view. Nation-states construct their own image of the past to shore up their ambitions for the future: forgetting the Ottomans was part of Greece’s claim to modernity. But today the old delusions of grandeur are being replaced by a more sober sense of what individual countries can achieve alone. As small states integrate themselves in a wider world, and even the largest learn how much they need their neighbours’ help to tackle the problems that face them all, the stringently patrolled and narrow-minded conception of history which they once nurtured and which gave them a kind of justification starts to look less plausible and less necessary. Other futures may require other pasts.

The history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences, the fictions necessary to tell the story of the rendezvous of a chosen people with the land marked out for them by destiny. It is an odd and implausible version of the past, especially for a city like Salonica, most of whose inhabitants cannot trace their connection to the place back more than three or four generations. They know that whatever they are taught at school, their own family experiences suggest a very different kind of story—a saga of turbulence, upheaval, abandonment and recovery in which chance, not destiny, played the greater role.

It is just such a history that I have tried to show unfolding, a history of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded. In this city, the dominant group for centuries was a
people who clung to the medieval language of the country from which they had been expelled, yet who felt in Salonica, as Rabbi Moses Aroquis put it in 1509, that “to them alone the land was given, and they are its glory and its splendour and its magnificence.” As it happened, God had already given it to the Ottoman sultans so that, in the words of the fifteenth-century chronicler Asikpashazadé, “the metropolis of unbelief should become a metropolis of Islam.” Before that he had given it to Christians, and in 1912, the city’s Greeks once again gave thanks to God for the triumph of their army. They all claimed the city for themselves in God’s name. Yet is it not said: where God is, there is everything?
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