Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (24 page)

These bloody events were a turning-point in Salonica’s history. In the first place, they led to the shrinking of the city’s Greek population and its impoverishment. The loss of several thousand lives, numerous properties and hundreds of exiles continued to be felt for generations. The costs of putting down the revolt were borne by the community itself, a crushing burden, which the Porte was still struggling to apportion in 1827. Five years on, houses still lay empty, at least to judge from an imperial decree permitting the sale of abandoned properties belonging to Greeks, to prevent their dilapidation. The city itself did not recover for more than a decade.

The second momentous development was the emergence, for the first time in Ottoman history, of an independent Christian successor state scarcely one day’s voyage from Salonica itself. The very idea was an affront to Muslim sensibilities and to Ottoman pride. An imperial firman from 1828—just two years before the declaration of Greek independence—had warned the emperor’s subjects about the extent of the international support for the “Greek revolutionaries of the Morea and the other islands of the White Sea” and underlined the impossibility of ever granting them their goal—“for this would mean—may it never happen—that we set Muslims in the place of
rayah
and the
rayah
in the place of Muslims, something which would touch the entire Muslim people and is impossible from the point of view of holy law, politically and religiously for us to accept, or even countenance.” Yet just this came to pass, and Athens—a small town less than half the size of Salonica—eventually became the capital of the new state.
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The Kingdom of Greece was too weak to mount a serious challenge to the empire for many years to come. Nevertheless, its very existence was a marker of Ottoman failure and a pointer to the strength of a new force in the eastern Mediterranean—nationalism—especially when this was backed up by the Christian states of Europe. In 1835 the first Greek consul took up residence in the city, placing local Christians in a novel situation. Greeks were henceforth torn between loyalty to the empire, which still contained the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Christians in the Levant, and allegiance to the tiny Kingdom; Slav-speaking Christians would in turn have to decide whether they were merely Orthodox or also Greeks, a choice which pressed heavily upon them as the century closed and new Slavic states emerged as well. Jews, and of course Muslims, felt no such tug, and if anything their attachment to the empire took on an anti-Greek tinge.

But the sick man of Europe was not dead yet, and Sultan Mahmud II was among the first to draw lessons from his defeats. In 1826 he ordered the disbanding of the janissaries and thanks to his ruthlessness succeeded where many of his predecessors had failed. In Salonica, a few weeks after they burned down the pasha’s palace, the janissaries were systematically hunted down and many were imprisoned in the Tower of Blood (better known today as the White Tower) and killed. Overnight they were eliminated as a force. Some fled to the same dervish monasteries that had sheltered Greeks five years earlier. Others burned their uniforms and payslips. Only occasionally in the years that followed would an Ottoman official, perhaps justifying his conservatism, let
slip his regret at their passing, or perhaps even refer to his own janissary past. With their destruction Mahmud could begin the hard work of administrative reform—improving internal security, re-establishing central authority and banishing the memories of the chaos and anarchy which had afflicted the city through the eighteenth century.

7
Pashas, Beys and Money-lenders

T
HE
S
ULTAN’S
V
ISIT

S
HORTLY AFTER EIGHT O’CLOCK
one morning in July 1859, a salute from the town batteries heralded the arrival of Sultan Abdul Mecid. The imperial squadron—a flotilla of paddle-wheel frigates, steamers and cutters—glittered in the bay. On the carpeted wharf stood the heads of the town’s religious communities, the governor, notables and consuls; thousands of curious and respectful inhabitants lined the approaches. The sultan—together with his brother, three sons, the grand admiral and Riza Pasha, the minister of war—proceeded through the town. Their passage flanked by detachments of troops, they made their way along streets specially widened for the occasion to the mansion of Yusuf Bey, the most powerful landed proprietor in the region, and one of the wealthiest men in the city.

Over the next few days, the sultan held public audiences in the Beshchinar gardens by the shore. Under the plane trees he received the homage of local Ottoman dignitaries, the chief rabbi and the metropolitan, while hundreds of petitions were handed to him by townspeople and villagers seeking his aid in curbing brigandage, eradicating corruption and guaranteeing just administration. His aides distributed more than sixty thousand piastres for the benefit of local Ottoman, Greek and Jewish schools, hospitals and the poor “of different nations.” By night, the town was brilliantly illuminated as lanterns festooned the minarets and ships. When he departed three days later, he took with him not only the cheering memory of his enthusiastic reception but also an attack of the local fever, brought on by exposure to Salonica’s notoriously unhealthy summer climate (and—so it was whispered
among observers—“to his imbibing other things besides bad air when sitting there” for he was known for his fondness for alcohol). Two years later, he was dead, not yet forty years of age.
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This was the only royal visit paid to Salonica, the empire’s most important and prosperous European city, during the whole of the nineteenth century, and probably the first such since Mehmed IV wintered there in 1669. But then Abdul Mecid was not a man overly concerned with convention: he had shocked people a few years earlier by attending the wedding of the daughter of one of the leading Christians at his court, and had even graced with his presence a ball held by the British ambassador. Twenty years earlier, his Gulhané (Rose Garden) decree had ushered in far-reaching changes to the way his empire was ruled, and in 1856, following the Crimean War, a second proclamation had spelled out the need for modernization and religious equality in even greater detail. Breaking the isolation which had come to surround the figure of the sultan, Abdul Mecid naturally wanted to see for himself the results of his reforms.

For the Ottoman empire was never the static and unchanging entity its critics (and idealizers) insisted it was. After the Napoleonic wars, its sultans learned an important lesson from the success of imperial rivals like Russia, the Habsburgs and Prussia: no state could hope to survive without centralizing military, judicial and fiscal authority. Mehmed Ali’s regime in post-Napoleonic Egypt had begun this process, demonstrating that an Islamic country was capable of modernizing itself along European lines. Indeed so successful was the experiment that by the 1830s Egypt had emerged as a serious threat to the empire itself.

It was in the midst of this Egyptian crisis that Abdul Mecid came to the throne and that his reforms—the “Auspicious Reorderings” (Tanzimat i-Hayriye)—had their origins. Mehmed Ali, a servant of the sultan, had been bitterly disappointed that the help he had provided against the Greek rebels had not been better rewarded, and once the Greek crisis was over, he sent his new French-trained army into the sultan’s Syrian provinces. In June 1839, just after Mahmud II’s death, the Ottoman grand admiral surrendered the entire fleet to the Egyptian upstart, and when the youthful new sultan, Abdul Mecid, offered to make Mehmed Ali hereditary governor of Egypt, the latter demanded Syria and Adana too. Faced with humiliation, the Ottoman foreign minister was sent to London to secure British backing. A joint British-Austrian and Ottoman fleet bombarded Beirut and forced the Egyptians out of Syria and in 1841 Mehmed Ali backed down, accepting hereditary rule over Egypt under the nominal suzerainty of the Ottoman crown.

During the crisis, the influential British ambassador in Istanbul, Stratford Canning, and reformist Ottoman diplomats had both become convinced that the only hope for the survival of the empire lay in sweeping institutional change. Mustafa Reshid, the Ottoman foreign minister, led this movement and it was in November 1839, while the delicate negotiations for British help were continuing in London, that from his residence in Bryanston Square he sketched out a draft of new legislation fundamentally altering the constitutional basis of the Ottoman state. The draft itself became the famous decree of Gulhané in which Abdul Mecid declared his intention to safeguard the security of life, honour and property of his subjects, to do away with tax-farms and state monopolies, to bring in a regular system of tax assessment and collection, and to introduce a new means of conscription into the army.
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Even though the proclamation was short on specifics, it was an astonishing departure from tradition, for in outline the Gulhané decree projected an entirely new relationship between the sultan and his subjects. His pledge that “the Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of our lofty Sultanate shall enjoy our imperial concern” marked, at least in embryo, a policy of formal equality of all Ottoman subjects, regardless of religion, a policy which would transform the very foundations of Ottoman rule. In addition, it defined relations between ruler and ruled in a completely new way: the empire’s subjects were no longer merely the sultan’s property, governed through a range of intermediaries, contracts and special concessions; they were now individuals bound politically in a direct relationship with the head of the state. Thus began the transformation of Ottoman administration, law, economy and politics which reached its apogee in the 1876 constitution and the short-lived parliament of the following year.
³

Thanks to the support of the Great Powers, especially the British, the Near Eastern crisis of 1839–41 removed the Egyptian threat to the Ottoman dynasty, and Sultan Abdul Mecid could begin the difficult task of realizing the promises he had made. Imperial ministries were established and expanded, and the new civil service became the generator of change. An invigorated central government started to re-assert its power over the provinces. The tax system was reformed so that collection no longer lay, at least in theory, in the hands of the provincial governors and their tax-farmers but by salaried tax collectors sent out from Istanbul. Administrative boundaries were re-drawn to clarify the chain of command. Governors were supposed to pay more attention to local advisory councils, marking the first time the principle of
representative government had been acknowledged. New criminal and commercial tribunals came into existence alongside the older
kadi
courts. And finally, the military and civilian functions of provincial administrators were separated, and the army itself was reorganized, with new supply services and an autonomous military school system. It was, on paper, a radical transformation.

The challenge was to sell it to the populace. In April 1840, therefore, the governor of Salonica, Namik Pasha, called a meeting of leading inhabitants to explain the principles behind the new decree. The Christians appeared pleased, but the beys were annoyed by the idea that Muslims and non-Muslims might pay the same taxes. Over the coming months, it became clear that opposition to the reforms was mobilizing. On the other hand, support for them was discernible too among the peasantry, shopkeepers and guilds. By the end of 1842, the British consul was optimistically noting “a more correct system of administration in all the branches of the Local Government, less oppression, less plundering, and everyone being free, it may be said, to dispose of his own.”
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Yet in fact, it was early days and the struggle was just beginning: the central government might propose, but it was those with power in regional centres like Salonica who disposed. The destruction of the janissaries had removed one of the most unruly obstacles to the authority of the sultan, and brought relative peace to provincial society, but other interest groups and powerful classes remained. In mid-century Salonica, three centres of influence predominated—the governor, the local landed elite, and the private bankers and money-lenders who controlled the supply of credit. The success or failure of the Ottoman state’s attempt to reform itself depended on the relations between them.

T
HE
P
ASHAS

I
T WAS SURELY NOT BY CHANCE
that Sultan Abdul Mecid did not stay in the governor’s residence on his 1859 visit. A sprawling wooden building in the centre of the town, in a walled enclosure with gardens, outbuildings and offices, it was not a particularly grand or awe-inspiring affair. Its imposing fin-de-siècle replacement—a palatial neo-classical pile designed by an Italian architect at the end of the nineteenth century—was very different, and showed how far the power and majesty of the Ottoman state had grown. Today this building
still houses the offices of the pasha’s Greek equivalent, and the car-parks, widened streets and open spaces which detach it from its surroundings signal its authority. But at the time of Abdul Mecid’s visit, the pasha’s
konak
was surrounded by narrow twisting streets, inns, stables, a
hamam
and the Saatli (Clocktower) mosque, its theological school and cemetery: it was not left in majestic isolation, and had not yet succeeded in imposing its demands on the urban space around it.

The pasha’s divan, however, was the administrative heart of the city: through the double-guard at its gates thronged all those seeking an audience. When summoned they removed their shoes and walked down carpeted corridors to a large, light reception room lined with sofas and stools. Here petitions were presented, complaints aired and information passed on, all in full hearing of the many other supplicants seated and awaiting their turn: news of everything that had been discussed at the divan spread through the coffee-houses of the town within hours. Access was surprisingly easy, and restricted neither by religion nor status. The wealthy Omer Pasha, “though as fond of pomp and show as most pashas,” nevertheless ensured that “the most humble individual may at any moment obtain an interview.” Distinguished visitors were greeted by the pasha in person, and invited to seat themselves beside him. Sweetmeats, coffee, sherbets, cigarettes and fine
chibouks
with amber mouth-pieces were handed round, and newcomers were engaged in polite conversation, or encouraged to report the news they brought with them. Hierarchy and informality were blended in ways unfamiliar to Western visitors: Ottoman Christian subjects displayed servility, like the elderly
dragoman
from the consulate, who “raised his hand to his head” each time he addressed the pasha. On the other hand, Muslims of all ranks behaved with greater ease, and village peasants spoke as freely as dignitaries visiting from the capital.
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