Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (47 page)

This was how Old Greece expressed its disdain for what it termed its New Lands with all their Balkan heterogeneity, an ambivalence about the fruits of victory which would, if anything, only intensify in the future. It would take years to change the city’s Ottoman character, and the rivalry and comparisons with the Greek capital were there from the start. But Papavasileiou was perhaps unfair to Salonica’s existing Greek inhabitants. They might not have been as numerous or prominent as he had expected—after all, they were less than one-third of the population—but they had turned out in force to greet the conquering heroes. Blue-and-white Greek flags festooned every street. “Our entry was a triumphant progress,” wrote a British journalist with the Greek troops. “The streets were packed and the Pioneers’ Regiments were obliged to force a way with the butts of their rifles. The Greeks of Salonika, whose tongues had been muzzled for weeks past, gave free vent to their joy at seeing the Greek uniform.” The grand marble fountain at the top of the Hamidié boulevard which a year earlier had welcomed Sultan Mehmed V Resad was now draped with slogans hailing “The Victorious Greek Army.”
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In the days before the Greeks arrived, the authority of the Ottoman state had been dwindling fast. On 17 October, the former sultan, Abdul Hamid, was quietly embarked on the German
Lorelei
and whisked away to a new island exile in the Sea of Marmara (and thence to Istanbul itself). News of his departure provoked nervousness within the city, as did the arrival of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting in the countryside. With the Ottoman army in retreat, large numbers of soldiers deserted, taking their pack-animals with them. On 22 October, the municipal council met in emergency session and sent a resolution
to the overall military commander, General Taksin Pasha, urging him for the sake of the city not to resist further. He was not initially sympathetic to the idea, but the Greek army’s crossing of the Vardar River on 24 October brought home the hopelessness of the situation. The city was surrounded by hostile forces and thoughts of a last-ditch stand vanished in the rain and mud. Back in Istanbul, news of the surrender was greeted with dismay. “How could you leave Salonica, that beautiful home-town of ours?” Mustafa Kemal berated a friend of his. “Why did you hand it to the enemy and come here?”
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Once in possession of the city, the Greeks seemed unconcerned by the possibility of Ottoman revanchism and permitted the imperial gendarmerie to continue to help police it. For several weeks incoming troops were astonished to see armed Turks still patrolling the streets. They also allowed many of the mosques which had been converted from Byzantine churches to remain in Muslim hands, at least for the initial weeks. “What good to have conquered the Turk?” wrote an outraged philhellene in the first days of Greek rule, “to be obliged still to wander through a mosque of Allah when one wanted to go and pray to Saint Dimitrios?”
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In fact it was not the Turks but the Bulgarians who were provoking the Greeks’ anxiety. Having sparred over Macedonia for several decades, Greece and Bulgaria had been unable to agree on how to carve it up and the treaty they had reached earlier in 1912 was an essentially defensive alliance eloquent in its silence on this critical issue. Once hostilities began, both armies headed for the city, but the Bulgarians were bearing the brunt of fighting against the Ottoman forces elsewhere and the Greeks got there first by just eight hours. Sixteen thousand Bulgarian troops, accompanied by numerous
komitadjis
, were streaming down the Langada road and insisted on making their own entry two days later. They did not disguise their dissatisfaction at the course of events. “The hatred and loathing felt by the Bulgarians for the Greeks are only intensified by the war,” reported a journalist. “If they hated each other before, they now loathe each other a hundred times as much as they did in the past.”
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Over the next few months, the tension built up. The Greeks had made it clear that the city was under their sole control and to underline the point, King George and his court transferred themselves there from Athens. Meanwhile, Sofia was presenting Salonica’s liberation as
its
achievement. Most of the Bulgarian troops were soon withdrawn under Greek pressure, while an influx of civilian administrators,
gendarmes and fresh troops strengthened the Greek hand. Nevertheless, even the reduced Bulgarian presence constituted a daily challenge to the legitimacy of Hellenic rule at a time when internationally the Great Powers had still not determined the city’s future. There were almost daily incidents involving Greek and Bulgarian soldiers, while the
komitadji
bands themselves stirred things up further. In March 1913, the two sides clashed openly about thirty miles northeast of Salonica. It was a harbinger of worse to come.
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When the First Balkan War ended formally in April 1913, the diplomats gathered in London to discuss the terms of peace. Greece and Serbia had won far more than they had dared hope for; Bulgaria had ended up with much less. Greece’s population and territory both nearly doubled, as did Serbia’s, and Ottoman Macedonia was largely partitioned between them. Bulgaria’s gains, on the other hand, were largely confined to Thrace, even though it was not Thrace for which it had gone to war. Feeling cheated of the spoils of victory, the Bulgarians prepared to fight for what they wanted. A second conflict, this time among the former Balkan partners, was clearly in the offing, and Greece and Serbia hastened to conclude a defensive alliance. “Trains are being hurried to Salonica, packed full of men, guns and horses,” reported the
Manchester Guardian
at the start of June 1913. “There are all the signs of a very pretty quarrel.”
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On 29 June, the Second Balkan War broke out, when Bulgaria launched an attack on the Serbs. The following morning the atmosphere in Salonica was electric: shopkeepers boarded-up their stores, and patrols of Cretan gendarmes “passed slowly up and down the deserted tramway lines.” Fighting broke out the same afternoon and ended—after a night’s worth of “the incessant din of musketry and the churning crackle of machine guns, punctuated by the boom of the deeper-throated artillery fire”—with the outnumbered and surrounded Bulgarians surrendering; thirteen hundred soldiers and over five hundred
komitadji
were transferred by steamer to the prisons of Old Greece where they sat out the end of the war.
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The repercussions went further than this. Hundreds of long-time Bulgarian residents of the city were arrested by the Greek authorities; others left on Bulgarian steamers. The Bulgarian gymnasium, which had been a base of operations, was looted by Greek soldiers, and the Exarchate was banned. The Second Balkan War—over in barely a month—brought, in effect, the end of Salonica’s Bulgarian community. By April 1914 the British consul was writing that “almost all those
who wished to go have gone. Those who remain have either conformed to the Patriarchate or are living as best as they can as Exarchists.” Saint Dimitrios had triumphed again—over the Slavs. In November 1913, the Greek claim to the city finally received international recognition and the Bulgarians, who had been roundly beaten on all sides, were forced to acknowledge their defeat. But the threat they posed never really went away. In both world wars Bulgarian troops crossed the frontier, and both times the city’s inhabitants trembled that they might take their revenge for the events of 1912–13.
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T
HE GREAT POWERS
were not overjoyed at the thought of Salonica becoming Greek either. Their subjects had enjoyed a privileged status under the Ottomans, and many questioned whether the small Balkan state was capable of rising to the challenge of effectively administering such a potentially important city and guaranteeing its prosperity. Austria-Hungary coveted Salonica for itself, and continued to criticize the Greek administration there for some time. Italy, Germany and France, while not making direct claims of their own, hoped to extend their influence by offering their protection and passports to the city’s Jewish merchants. Britain was concerned about its holdings of the Ottoman debt, and wondered whether the Greeks would be ready to take this over.

Within hours of Greek forces assuming control, a French naval commander in the port was threatening to sink their two vessels unless he received a public apology for an incident with Turkish ships he claimed were under his protection. The Greeks had to comply but the humiliation smarted. The consuls themselves not only brokered the Ottoman surrender but tried to throw their weight around as well. The German consul sought to take all the city’s Muslim subjects under his protection and distributed passports to several Turkish officials before he was forced to back down. On the streets, German, British and Habsburg flags challenged the primacy of the Greek blue-and-white as the city’s foreign nationals publicly proclaimed their own divided allegiances. In six months, 2400 Jews changed nationality to avoid Greek citizenship—Spain and Portugal being, alongside Austria, the preferred options, while prominent Muslims took French and Austrian papers, and investigated the chances of emigrating not only to Anatolia but also to Tunisia, Marseilles, Belgium, Egypt and India. The vogue for changing citizenship allowed local fraudsters to enrich
themselves by offering new passports in return for large fees. Only after it abolished the Ottoman capitulations, which had allowed foreigners sweeping immunities from domestic law, was the Greek state finally able to enjoy full sovereignty in the city.
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S
ALONICA’S JEWS HAD GIVEN
the victorious Greek army a cool welcome as well. “It must be said that the Jew was not in a mood for celebration,” wrote a Jewish schoolteacher shortly afterwards. “He adopted a correct and appropriate stance, as befitting someone who had lost … Only when we lose what we have do we value it truly, and the Jews who had never forgotten the rare virtues, the patience and generosity, of the Turkish people, feel today … that they have just lost their most secure and stable foundation.” Many had serious doubts about a future Greek administration. Warning that annexation by Greece would be economically disastrous, cutting off the city from its traditional markets, some Jewish leaders proposed instead that Salonica and its environs should, in effect, become an autonomous statelet guaranteed by the Great Powers, a Jewish-run metropolis detached from the rivalries of its Balkan neighbours. The internationalization project was discussed with émigré Young Turks in Vienna, with Salonican
Ma’min
acting as intermediaries. In Istanbul a Turkish-Jewish-Vlach Macedonian Committee was formed to promote the idea. Some prominent Jewish Ottoman sympathizers may have gone even further and promised the Ottoman government financial support if it continued to fight against the Balkan states.
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None of this went anywhere—the Great Powers were not going to reverse the Greek
fait accompli
—but it was more than enough to anger many Greeks. The local Greek press whipped up anti-Jewish feelings and there were incidents, widely reported abroad, of troops breaking into houses and assaulting civilians. In March 1913 the city was transfixed by the news that the much-loved elderly King George had been assassinated while out for his daily stroll in the city suburbs. Suspicion immediately fastened on the Jews and Muslims, and fuelled new assaults before the authorities clarified that the culprit was a deranged Greek with a history of mental disturbance.
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The soldiers’ disorderly conduct, however, contrasted with the liberal aspirations of the Greek leaders. Proclaiming martial law on the morning after his entry into the city, the military commander, Prince Constantine, issued a statement—in the city’s four languages,
Greek, French, Turkish and Judeo-Spanish—in which he hailed the “will and courage of the Hellenic army” which had spent “glorious Hellenic blood” in order to “safeguard the rights of nationalities and of Man considered as individual and citizen.”
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Gradually, as the troops were brought under control, the solicitous policies of the Athens government bore fruit. After all, the maltreatment of non-Greeks—whether Muslims, Bulgarians or Jews—undermined its own international standing and jeopardized the position of Christians in the Ottoman empire itself. The country’s leadership, led by the royal family, endeavoured to reassure Salonican Jewry in particular of its good intentions. In a policy it defined as “hyper-semitism,” it proclaimed its willingness to protect Jewish interests in particular and the country’s new minorities in general. The Jewish community, for its part, came to accept that the Greeks were there to stay: Greek flags hung outside Jewish homes on state festivals; rabbis and bishops attended each other’s holiday ceremonies. The last Ottoman mayor, a
Ma’min
called Osman Said Bey, was kept in his post and the town council continued to include members drawn from the city’s non-Greek confessional groups.

H
ELLENIZATION

T
HE TASK OF INCORPORATING THE CITY
into the Greek state was entrusted to Constantine Raktivan, the new civilian governor-general of Macedonia. Raktivan was a leading jurist and the minister of justice in the Liberal government of Eleftherios Venizelos—itself perhaps the most energetic and reformist administration in Greek history. In his first proclamation, Raktivan declared that the war had been waged to remove “the tyranny and poor administration which the existence [of the Ottoman Empire] had allowed to last for centuries, and to bring the benefits of liberty to all the inhabitants of the country.” Genuine liberty, he continued, presupposed “a complete equality between the different races living under the aegis of the same state” and he promised an administration “worthy of a civilized State, strong and impartial at the same time.”
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