Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (17 page)

What is surprising in many of these accounts is how reluctant the
kadis
were to order the death sentence. They could be forced to change their minds by local Muslim opinion, but they must have been conscious of the power of religious self-sacrifice and unwilling to add to the list of victims. As it is, martyrdom was not a common choice, and the vast majority of Christians who converted to Islam evidently never returned to the fold. The hagiographer of the martyr Nicetas suggests that by the early nineteenth century a note of scepticism was beginning to prevail among Christians themselves. A Salonica merchant, he tells us, cast doubt on the merit of what Nicetas had done, saying “it is not necessary to go to martyrdom in these days, when there is no persecution of the Christian church.” Only after a terrifying dream, in which a
loud voice told him that Nicetas was indeed a true martyr, did he change his mind. Following British pressure in the 1840s, capital punishment for apostasy was abandoned, and the need for such dreams ceased.
⁵⁵

Salonica’s sacred geographies

S
ACRED
G
EOGRAPHIES

I
N
1926, an eminent Albanian Bektashi
sheykh
, Ahmad Sirri Baba, stopped for a rest in Salonica during arduous travels which took him from Albania to Cairo, Baghdad, Karbala and back. By this point, the city’s Muslim population had been forced to leave Greece entirely as a result of the Greco-Turkish 1923 population exchange, and the
tekkes
had been abandoned. The
sheykh
’s journeys, as he moved between the worlds of Balkan and Middle Eastern Islam, were a last indication of channels of religious devotion which had once linked the city with extraordinarily diverse and far-flung parts of the world.

For centuries, Muslims from all over the Balkans congregated in Salonica to find a sea passage to Aleppo or Alexandria for the
haj
caravans to Mecca. Christians followed their example, acquiring the title of Hadji after visiting their own holy places. Others came to visit the remains of Saint Dimitrios before travelling onwards to the Holy Mountain. A Ukrainian monk, Cyril, from Lviv, arrived to raise money for the monastery in Sinai where he worked, and brought catalogues of the library collections there which he passed on to the head of the Jesuit mission in the city, Père Souciet, whose brother ran the royal library in Paris. For Muslim mendicant dervishes and Christian monks, the region’s network of charitable and hospitable religious institutions offered a means of permanent support, especially in the cold winter months when work and money were hard to come by. “One monk, almost a vagabond, came from Kiev to Moldavia,” noted a Salonica resident who met him in 1727, “and from there wandered aimlessly through Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Venice, then returned from that unnecessary peregrination to Moldavia, and from there to the Zaporozhian Sich whence, by way of the Black Sea, he came to Constantinople and to Mount Athos.”
⁵⁶

In short, the city found itself at the intersection of many different creeds. Through the Sufi orders it was linked to Iran, Anatolia, Thrace and Egypt; the Marranos bridged the Catholicism of the Iberian peninsula, Antwerp and Papal Italy; the faith of the Sabbataians was carried
by Jewish believers into Poland, Bohemia, Germany and eventually North America, while the seventeenth-century Metropolitan Athanasios Patellarios came to the city via Venetian Crete and Ottoman Sinai before he moved on to Jassy, Istanbul, Russia and the Ukraine, his final resting-place. Salonica lay in the centre of an Ottoman
oikumeni
, which was at the same time Muslim, Christian and Jewish. Perhaps only now, since the end of the Cold War and the re-opening of many of these same routes, is it again possible to calculate the impact of such an extensive sacred geography and to see how it underpinned the profusion of faiths which sustained the city’s inhabitants.
⁵⁷

^*
Frank, a messianic figure in his own right, was a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and Barouch Russo (see below).

^*
In Hebrew, the term is
Maminim;
in Turkish
Mümin. Ma’min
was a Salonica derivation.

5
Janissaries and Other Plagues

I
F SCARCELY ANY BUILDINGS
from Ottoman Salonica survive today, this cannot easily be blamed on the effects of war. Before the Ottoman conquest, the city had suffered one siege after another; after it, there were none. A visitor to the fortress vaults in the early nineteenth century found chests of rusting Byzantine arrows, their feathers worm-eaten: they were the long-forgotten remains of the ammunition left behind by the defenders of 1430. Every so often, hostile fleets approached the Gulf and on one occasion Venetian shells landed in the port. But apart from sporadic pirate raids, and a spot of gunboat diplomacy in 1876 which ended without a cannon being fired, that was all the fighting Salonica saw, before the Greeks marched in to end Ottoman rule in 1912.
¹

The early Ottoman rulers never imagined how little actual danger the city would face, and for three hundred years they kept the walls, gates and port in good order. Bayazid II wintered there. Suleyman the Magnificent built the White Tower at the end of the sea-wall, and another tower, now vanished, on the other side of the city. Both men were engaging the Venetians by land and sea, and Salonica was a crucial staging-post for their forces and a major manufacturer of gunpowder. They added batteries—like the “mouths of great lions”—at key points, and a new fortress between the harbour and the land walls. The traveller Evliya counted a tower every five hundred paces, and spent five hours pacing the entire perimeter across the hilly ground. Each night, he writes, “the sultan’s music” is heard within the walls, while the garrison patrols shout: “God is One!” No houses were permitted to be built on the far side of the walls for security, and even today a tiny lane, barely a car’s width, snaking round the outside perimeter past the
shacks which cling to the steep northwest side of the ramparts, traces what is left of the invisible outline of this policy.
²

But by the start of the eighteenth century, there were signs of imperial over-stretch. In 1732 a commissioner of the Porte reported that many of the towers were badly neglected. Within decades, the walls were of antiquarian interest only. An emissary of Louis XVI described the city as “of no importance” from a military point of view—“an enceinte of ramparts without moats and badly linked, even worse defended by a very small number of poor artillery pieces.” In 1840, the British army captain who drank sherbets and lemonade with the artillery commander found the troops excellent but the batteries “defenceless in themselves.” When the guns sounded, as they often did, it was to mark nothing more than the breaking of the Ramadan fast, the strangulation of a janissary or imperial celebrations.
³

Until the demolitions of the 1870s, however, which got rid of gates, towers and entire stretches of the
muraille
, the ring of ramparts held the city tight—marking the boundary between residents and strangers, the living and dead. The claustrophobic airless warren of lanes within contrasted with the dreary expanses of open country—“a mournful and arid solitude” wrote a nineteenth-century French visitor—on the far side of the walls, studded with water-mills, cemeteries, plague-hospices and monasteries. On the approach to the gates, the dangling corpses of criminals hung from trees to remind passers-by of the virtues of obedience. “We enter the Vardar-kapesi, or gate of the Vardhari,” wrote the imperturbable Leake. “In a tree before it hangs the body of a robber.” The gates themselves were manned by guards who checked the passes of non-residents and collected merchandise duties from farmers and traders. Come nightfall, tardy visitors were left outside, and everyone else kept in. The sharp sense of a division between city-dwellers and non-residents reflected the prevailing Ottoman conception of a close link between foreigners and crime. Vagrants, migrants and strangers were the cause of insecurity: the gates helped to keep them at arm’s length.
⁴

For even if it was never itself invaded or attacked, in other ways Salonica was deeply affected by the numerous disorders which punctuated the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With every campaign, rumours swept in: invading Austrian armies were approaching from the north, hostile Russian flotillas were just off Cape Caraburnu, a column twenty thousand strong of Napoleon’s troops was marching down from Bosnia. Wars against European states aroused the anger of local
Muslims and jeopardized the position of the Christians. In 1715, during the war with Austria, the French consul reported that “terror has spread among the Greeks, who fear being chopped to pieces in their churches, and the Franks, who have a reputation for wealth, are worried about a population which does not reason and cannot distinguish between the French and the [Austrians] who are only five or six days’ march from us.”
⁵

War brought the burden of extra taxation to pay for new galleys, uniforms, and provisions. In 1702 the orders were for gunpowder, in 1714 biscuit and flour, and in the great campaign of the following year, which drove the Venetians out of the Aegean, the city contributed the equivalent of 40,000 sheep and 150,000 kilos of flour as well as workers to repair the roads and bridges along which the Grand Vizier’s army passed. In 1734 lead, powder, iron, medicines and thirty cannons were demanded, in 1744 pack-animals. By 1770, during the war with Russia, the Greeks were “so exhausted from constant requisitions that they don’t know how they will manage.” Yet seventeen years later, the Greek and Jewish communities were instructed once again to find two hundred ox-carts and three hundred camels—or the equivalent sum in silver.
⁶

For many Muslims, there was also military service, disrupting trade and family life for up to six months in the year. Town criers publicizing the sultan’s demand for extra troops found little enthusiasm. When decrees were read out in the mosques calling for volunteers, angry voices shouted that Greeks and Jews should enlist too. Most of Salonica’s seven thousand janissaries were in theory liable to serve, but their commanders often claimed they could not be spared. In January 1770, an imperial decree called on all who believed in Mohammed to march on the Moldavians and Wallachians and to annihilate them for daring to rise up in rebellion against the Emperor. They were given licence to act as they would, and to take slaves.
⁷
Yet many preferred to give money and to shut themselves away in their houses. Another appeal for Muslims to enter the ranks explicitly allowed elderly and wealthy Turks, as well as the
Ma’min
, to make a monetary contribution instead. The city’s growing prosperity was creating new, more sedentary interests which clashed with the old
ghazi
warrior ideals.
⁸

For troops levied in the hinterland, Salonica was a mustering point whether they were marching by land or sailing across the Mediterranean. The Grand Vizier’s 1715 campaign against the Venetians in the Peloponnese was probably the last time the imperial army as a
whole gathered in its full glory outside the walls. But in 1744 at least twelve thousand landed cavalrymen embarked there for the Persian campaign, and three thousand
yürüks
—settled nomads liable for military service—gathered from the surrounding villages. Albanian contingents from the mountains arrived en route to campaigns in the Crimea and Arabia, and so many men of arms-bearing age flocked to the city that north African recruiters and privateers combed it for volunteers: at least five hundred took the coin of the Bey of Algiers on one recruiting drive in May 1757 alone.
⁹

Since there were no proper barracks, thousands of these unruly, poorly paid and ill-disciplined fighting men lodged in the city’s great
khans
and
caravanserais.
Their arrival invariably sent a shudder of apprehension through the town. In 1770, news that local levies might be ordered into the city provoked the Venetian consul to despair: “As soon as they enter the town, God knows what ill deeds they will perform and getting rid of them will be very hard.” Made up of poor villagers, who associated towns with authority, judges and tax-collectors, these troops often found it hard to stomach the wealth they saw around them. In 1788, a levy of fifteen hundred men, destined for the “German” front, “committed much disorder” and the shops were closed for two months until they left.