Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (3 page)

With later visits, I came to see that these traces of the Ottoman past offered a clue to Salonica’s central paradox. True, it could point,
as Athens could not, to more than two thousand years of continuous urban life. But this history was decisively marked by sharp discontinuities and breaks. The few Ottoman monuments that had endured were a handful compared with what had once existed. The old houses were falling down and within a decade many of them had collapsed or been demolished. Some buildings have been recently restored and visitors can see inside the magnificent fifteenth-century Bey Hamam, the largest Ottoman baths in Greece, or admire the distinguished mansion now used as a local public library in Plateia Romfei. But otherwise the Ottoman city has vanished, exciting little comment except among preservationists and scholars.

Change is, of course, the essence of urban life and no successful city remains a museum to its own past. The expansion of the docks since the Second World War has obliterated the seaside amusement park—the Beshchinar gardens, or Park of the Princes—where the city’s inhabitants refreshed themselves for generations; today it is commemorated only in a nearby ouzeri of the same name. In the deserted sidings of the old station, prewar trams and elderly railway carriages are slowly disintegrating. Even the infamous swampy Bara—once the largest red-light district in eastern Europe—survives only in the fond memories of a few ageing locals, in local belles-lettres, and in its streets—still bearing the old names, Afrodite, Bacchus—which now house nothing more exciting than car rental agencies, garages and tyre-repair shops.

But ridding the city of its brothels is one thing and eradicating the visible traces of five centuries of urban history is quite another. What, I wondered, did it do to a city’s consciousness of itself—especially to a city so proud of its past—when substantial sections were at best allowed to crumble away, at worst written out of the record? Had this happened by accident? Could one blame the great fire of 1917 that had destroyed so much of its centre? Or did the forced exchange of populations in 1923—when more than thirty thousand Muslim refugees departed, and nearly one hundred thousand Orthodox Christians took their place—suddenly turn one city into a new one? Was the sense of urban continuity, in other words, which had so powerfully attracted me to Salonica at the outset, an illusion? Perhaps there was another urban history waiting to be written in which the story of continuity would have to be told rather differently, a tale not only of smooth transitions and adaptations, but also of violent endings and new beginnings.

For there was another vanished element of the city’s past which I was also beginning to learn about. On the drive into town from the
airport, I had caught intriguing glimpses of substantial nineteenth-century villas hidden behind rusting railings and overgrown weeds amid the rows of postwar suburban apartment blocks. The palatial three-storey pile in its own pine-shaded estate, now the main seat of the Prefecture, turned out to have been originally the home of wealthy nineteenth-century Jewish industrialists, the Allatinis; this was where Sultan Abdul Hamid had been kept when he was deposed by the Young Turks and exiled to the city in 1909. Along the same road was the Villa Bianca, an opulently outsize Swiss chalet, home of the wealthy Diaz-Fernandes family. On the drive into town, one passed a dozen or more of these shrines to the eclectic taste of its fin-de-siècle elite—Turkish army officers, Greek and Bulgarian merchants and Jewish industrialists.

Turks and Bulgarians figured prominently in the histories of Greece I had read, usually as ancestral enemies, but the Jews were in general remarkable only for their absence, enjoying little more than a bit-part in the central and all-important story of modern Greece’s emergence onto the international stage. In Salonica, however, it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they had dominated the life of the city for many centuries. As late as 1912 they were the largest ethnic group and the docks stood silent on the Jewish Sabbath. Jews were wealthy businessmen; but many more were porters and casual labourers, tailors, wandering street vendors, beggars, fishermen and tobacco workers. Today the only traces of their predominance that survive are some names—Kapon, Perahia, Benmayor, Modiano—on faded shopfronts, Hebrew-lettered tombstones piled up in churchyards, an old people’s home and the community offices. There is a cemetery, but it is a postwar one, buried in the city’s western suburbs.

Here as elsewhere it was the Nazis who brought centuries of Jewish life to an abrupt end. When Kurt Waldheim, the Austrian politician who had served in the city as an army officer, was accused of being involved in the deportations, I came back to Salonica to talk to survivors of Auschwitz, resistance fighters, the lucky ones who had gone underground or managed to flee abroad. A softly spoken lawyer stood with me on the balcony of his office and we looked down onto the rows of parked cars in Plateia Eleftherias (Freedom Square), where he had been rounded up with the other Jewish men of the city for forced labour. Two elderly men, not Jewish, whom I bumped into on Markos Botsaris Street, told me about the day the Jews had been led away in 1943: they were ten at the time, they said, and afterwards, they broke into their homes with their friends and found food still warm on the table. A forty-year-old woman who happened to sit next to me on
the plane back to London had grown up after the war in the quarter immediately above the old Jewish cemetery: she remembered playing in the wreckage of the graves as a child, with her friends, looking for buried treasure, shortly before the authorities built the university campus over the site. Everyone, it seemed, had their story to tell, even though at that time what had happened to the city’s Jews was not something much discussed in scholarly circles.

A little later, in Athens, I came across several dusty unopened sacks of documents at the Central Board of Jewish Communities. When I examined them, I found a mass of disordered papers—catalogues, memoranda, applications and letters. They turned out to be the archives of the wartime Service for the Disposal of Israelite Property, set up by the Germans in those few weeks in 1943 when more than forty-five thousand Jews—one fifth of the city’s entire population—were consigned to Auschwitz. These files showed how the deportations had affected Salonica itself by triggering off a scramble for property and possessions that incriminated many wartime officials. I started to think about deportations in general, and the Holocaust in particular, not so much in terms of victims and perpetrators, but rather as chapters in the life of cities. The Jews were killed, almost all of them: but the city that had been their home grew and prospered.

The accusation that Waldheim had been involved in the Final Solution—unfounded, as it turned out—reflected the extent to which the Holocaust was dominating thinking about the Second World War. Sometimes it seemed from the way people talked and wrote as though nothing else of any significance had happened in those years. In Greece, for example, two other areas of criminal activity—the mass shootings of civilians in anti-partisan retaliations, and the execution of British soldiers—were far more pertinent to Waldheim’s war record. There were good reasons to deplore this state of cultural obsession. It quickly made the historian subject to the law of diminishing returns. It also turned history into a form of voyeurism and allowed outsiders to sit in easy judgement. I sometimes felt that I myself had become complicit in this—scavenging the city for clues to destruction, ignoring the living for the dead.

Above all, unremitting focus upon the events of the Second World War threatened to turn a remarkable chapter in Jewish, European and Ottoman history into nothing more than a prelude to genocide, overshadowing the many centuries when Jews had lived in relative peace, and both their problems and their prospects had been of a different kind. In Molho’s bookshop, one of the few downtown reminders of
earlier times, I found Joseph Nehama’s magisterial
Histoire des Israélites de Salonique
, and began to see what an extraordinary story it had been. The arrival of the Iberian Jews after their expulsion from Spain, Salonica’s emergence as a renowned centre of rabbinical learning, the disruption caused by the most famous False Messiah of the seventeenth century, Sabbetai Zevi, and the persistent faith of his followers, who followed him even after his conversion to Islam, formed part of a fascinating and little-known history unparalleled in Europe. Enjoying the favour of the sultans, the Jews, as the Ottoman traveller Evliya Chelebi noted, called the city “our Salonica”—a place where, in addition to Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian, most of the inhabitants “know the Jewish tongue because day and night they are in contact with, and conduct business with Jews.”

Yet as I supplemented my knowledge of the Greek metropolis with books and articles on its Jewish past, and tried to reconcile what I knew of the home of Saint Dimitrios—“the Orthodox city”—with the Sefardic “Mother of Israel,” it seemed to me that these two histories—the Greek and the Jewish—did not so much complement one another as pass each other by. I had noticed how seldom standard Greek accounts of the city referred to the Jews. An official tome from 1962 which had been published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its capture from the Turks contained almost no mention of them at all; the subject had been regarded as taboo by the politicians masterminding the celebrations. This reticence reflected what the author Elias Petropoulos excoriated as “the ideology of the barbarian neo-Greek bourgeoisie,” for whom the city “has always been Greek.” But at the same time, most Jewish scholars were just as exclusive as their Greek counterparts: their imagined city was as empty of Christians as the other was of Jews.
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As for the Muslims, who had ruled Salonica from 1430 to 1912, they were more or less absent from both. Centuries of European antipathy to the Ottomans had left their mark. Their presence on the wrong side of the Dardanelles had for so long been seen as an accident, misfortune or tragedy that in an act of belated historical wishful thinking they had been expunged from the record of European history. Turkish scholars and writers, and professional Ottomanists, had not done much to rectify things. It suited everyone, it seemed, to ignore the fact that there had once existed in this corner of Europe an Ottoman and an Islamic city atop the Greek and Jewish ones.

How striking then it is that memoirs often describe the place very differently from such scholarly or official accounts and depict a society
of almost kaleidoscopic interaction. Leon Sciaky’s evocative
Farewell to Salonica
, the autobiography of a Jewish boy growing up under Abdul Hamid, begins with the sound of the muezzin’s cry at dusk. In Sciaky’s city, Albanian householders protected their Bulgarian grocer from the fury of the Ottoman gendarmerie, while well-to-do Muslim parents employed Christian wet-nurses for their children and Greek gardeners for their fruit trees. Outside the Yalman family home the well was used by “the Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews, Serbs, Vlachs, and Albanians of the neighbourhood.” And in Nikos Kokantzis’s moving novella
Gioconda
, a Greek teenage boy falls in love with the Jewish girl next door in the midst of the Nazi occupation; at the moment of deportation, her parents trust his with their most precious belongings.
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Have scholars, then, simply been blinkered by nationalism and the narrowed sympathies of ethnic politics? If they have the fault is not theirs alone. The basic problem—common to historians and their public alike—has been the attribution of sharply opposing, even contradictory, meanings to the same key events. Both have seen history as a zero-sum game, in which opportunities for some came through the sufferings of others, and one group’s loss was another’s gain: 1430—when the Byzantine city fell to Sultan Murad II—was a catastrophe for the Christians but a triumph for the Turks. Nearly five centuries later, the Greek victory in 1912 reversed the equation. The Jews, having settled there at the invitation of the Ottoman sultans, identified their interests with those of the empire, something the Greeks found hard to forgive.

It follows that the real challenge is not merely to tell the story of this remarkable place as one of cultural and religious co-existence—in the early twenty-first century such long-forgotten stories are eagerly awaited and sought out—but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative. National histories generally have clearly defined heroes and villains, but what would a history look like where these roles were blurred and confused? Can one shape an account of this city’s past which manages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical discontinuities—the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements and genocide—which it has also experienced? Nearly a century ago, a local historian attempted this: at a time when Salonica’s ultimate fate was uncertain, the city struck him as a “museum of idioms, of disparate cultures and religions.” Since then what he called its “hybrid spirit” has been severely battered by two world wars and everything they brought with them. I think it is worth trying again.
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·  ·  ·

I
N THE 1930S
, the spirit of the Sufi holy man Mousa Baba was occasionally seen wandering near his tomb in the upper town. Even today house-owners sometimes dream that beneath their cellars lie Turkish janissaries and Byzantine necropoles. One reads stories of hidden Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea. One hears rumours of buried Jewish treasure guarded by spirits which have outwitted the exorcists and proved themselves too strong for Mossad agents, former Nazis and anyone else who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they protect.

But Salonica’s ghosts emerge in other ways too, through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city’s multifarious past has not been for lack of sources. Sixteenth-century rabbis adjudicate on long-forgotten marital rows, business wrangles and the tribulations of a noisy, malodorous crowded town. The diary of a Ukrainian political exile depicts unruly Jewish servants drunk in the mud, gluttonous clerics, a whirl of social engagements, riots and plague. Travellers—drawn in ever-increasing numbers by the city’s antiquities, by the partridge and rabbits in the plains outside, by business, art or sheer love of adventure—penned their impressions of a magical landscape of minarets, cypresses and whitewashed walls climbing high above the Aegean. From the late nineteenth century—though no earlier—there are newspapers, more and more of them, in half a dozen languages, and even that rarity in the Ottoman lands—maps. As for the archives, they are endless—Ottoman, Venetian, Greek, Austrian, French, English, American—compiled conscientiously by generations of long-departed foreign consuls. Drawing on such materials, I begin with the city’s conquest by Sultan Murad II in 1430, delineate its daily life under his successors, and trace its passage from the multi-confessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman world—as late as the First World War, Salonican boot-blacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages—to its role as an ethnically and linguistically homogenised bastion of the twentieth-century nation-state in which by 1950, more than ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants were, by any definition, Greek.