Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (52 page)

Eleftheria Square should be removed from the new plan and turned into a cemetery.

We should preserve some ruined houses from the fire and declare them historic monuments.
¹¹

And indeed, reality—as is its way with town planners and architects—soon modified and whittled down the initial proposals. How could it not have done when there were no less than ten changes of government between 1920 and 1924, the most turbulent period in Greece’s history? Within the city centre, Mawson’s original plan to unify the railway termini into one grand new station was quickly abandoned: the various lines and stations continued to confuse visitors for several more decades. And after 1920 a new government made more changes, reducing the size of secondary squares, narrowing roads, doubling the number and cutting the size of the plots in order to appease the discontented owners.

Money—or the Greek state’s lack of it—was the key obstacle. Even the socialist Papanastasiou soon realized that without private investors, the centre would never get rebuilt. Thus most of the actual construction was left to individual property-owners and well-connected private developers, who did their best to thwart Hébrard’s visions of a regulated and uniform aesthetic approach. The hotels, office blocks, apartment buildings, cafés and cinemas of the interwar years ended up in a bewildering variety of styles—pseudo–Louis XV, neo-Renaissance, -Venetian and -Moorish, Art Deco, “Mauritarian-Islamic” and even the occasional glimpse of Bauhaus—alongside the rather stolid Byzantine-Italian mode that Hébrard had deemed most suitable for the city as
a whole. There were also gaps and lags: the central waterfront square, Plateia Aristotelous, was finished only in the 1950s and 1960s, and Plateia Eleftherias was just one of the planned open spaces to be turned into a car-park.

Even the city’s Byzantine character was emphasized in a slightly absent-minded fashion, as if the planners were more interested in the future than the past. Mosques were converted back into churches, and restored—or, in the case of the fire-ravaged Saint Dimitrios, rebuilt—in a way that cleansed them of the accretion of centuries and brought out what the architects regarded as their “highest value.” Sheds, shops and other unworthy elements were removed from the main sites, allowing them to be appreciated in a sanitized environment stripped of all distractions and encumbrances. Yet apart from the use of a few well-known churches as visual reference points, the planners appear to have attached little importance to the city’s monumental past. The Arch of Galerius still sits as an afterthought near the eastern end of Egnatia; had Hébrard had his way, it would have been dwarfed by an entirely new colossal Arch of Triumph—never, as it turned out, to be built. To the fury of the inspector of antiquities, no provision was made for an archaeological museum, and he had to struggle to get permission to house his collection in the Yeni Djami, the
Ma’min
mosque.

Downtown, the basic layout of streets remained surprisingly close to the plan’s original conception. But outside the city centre the plan’s impact fell away sharply. Grand schemes for garden towns remained on paper, and many refugees either housed themselves in shacks made of beaten-out tin, planks and board, or were housed in the army barracks and military hospitals left by the departing French, Italians and British. A model workers’ settlement was only half-finished. Mawson’s vision of a new university campus adjacent to the eastern walls would have to wait till after the German occupation in the Second World War. And, as we shall see, with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of new refugees in 1922–23, the city expanded rapidly in all directions, too quickly and too haphazardly for the hard-pressed municipal and national authorities to do much more than monitor what was happening.

But back in 1917 the planners could have been forgiven for failing to anticipate the new challenges the city would face. Between 1917 and 1923 the Greek-Turkish antagonism reached a new pitch, climaxing in a further war, the Greek landing and occupation of Izmir, and the invasion of Anatolia; this was followed by catastrophic defeat at the hands
of Mustafa Kemal’s new Turkish army, and a forced movement of populations without any precedent in history. More than thirty thousand Muslims were obliged to leave the city. At the same time, nearly one hundred thousand Christian refugees arrived from eastern Thrace, Anatolia and the Black Sea, and turned Greeks back into a majority of Salonica’s population for the first time since the Byzantine era. In 1913, Greeks had been a minority of the city’s 157,000 inhabitants; by 1928 they were 75% of its population of 236,000. Thanks to war, the fire and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, this was now a new city, organized on new principles and populated by newcomers. By 1930, only a small proportion of Salonica’s inhabitants could remember the city as it had existed in the days of Abdul Hamid.
¹²

17
The Muslim Exodus

A
N OLD COLOURED POSTCARD
shows a vast Muslim cemetery stretching into the distance, shaded by cypresses and guarded by a low parapet. Hundreds of tombstones, some turbanned, others unadorned, peep through the high grass. In the background there are larger, more distinguished graves, decorated with marble columns, clusters of grapes and wreaths, and behind them a long building of some kind. The message on the back reads:

22 Juin 1916

Mon cher Papa. Voici encore une curiosité de Salonique, un des rares cimetières turques à peu près. Au fond se trouve la mosque des dervishes tourneurs dont il ne reste plus qu’un seul specimen, par contre des familles musulmanes refugies y sont établi leurs campements …
^*

The author was probably a French soldier, and the card is one of the last images we have of the cemetery adjoining the main Salonica
tekke
of the Mevlevi dervish order, among the loveliest spots in the city. Perched on rising ground outside the northwest corner of the walls with a view over the gulf and the Vardar plain, it marked, according to legend, a place of conspicuous piety. In the early seventeenth century, the vizier Ahmed Pasha had been forced out of Istanbul by his enemies, and was living in disgrace in Salonica, when he went for a stroll and fell
into conversation with a Mevlevi hermit inhabiting the boughs of a huge tree. The hermit prophesied his return to power and after this came to pass, Ahmed Pasha endowed a
vakf
to support the Mevlevis and built a monastery on the spot of their encounter. The hermit became the
tekke
’s first
sheykh
and over the centuries the monastery itself became renowned throughout the empire for its wealth.
¹

A wall fortified it against intruders, and behind its large iron gate a garden of cypresses shaded the tombs of the faithful. The main building was fronted by a curving wooden façade of colonnaded porticos with a verandah and huge overhanging timbered eaves that ran its entire length. Inside there were reading rooms and cells for the monks, giving on to a richly decorated central hall which greatly impressed the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Chelebi: “It has a remarkable cupola, more beautifully constructed than the Mevlevi dervish monastery in Besiktas. Even Habib-Noutzar, the patron himself of carpenters, could not make a dome like this one. The paintings are like magic.” Here was the space where adepts performed the ecstatic whirling dance which brought them closer to the divine. But the
tekke
was also a place of learning, where the
Mesnevi
of the founder Djelaladin Rumi was recited and the Qur’an discussed, a place of charity, which fed the poor and lodged pilgrims, as well as a centre for festivities at the start of each summer.
²

In Salonica itself, the Mevlevi order enjoyed great prestige. With revenues from the salteries around the gulf, and from other duties, the
sheykh
ran a foundation of considerable local power. In the early nineteenth century the incumbent was known locally as “Talleyrand” for his political acumen. It was a Mevlevi
hodja
who admitted pilgrims to Salonica’s most important shrine—the chapel of Ayios Dimitrios—in whose miraculous powers he believed no less than anyone else. Many notables, including governors of the city, belonged to the order and Sultan Mehmed Resad V attended a service in 1911, during the final imperial tour of the European provinces. The visiting card of Ali Eshref, the last
sheykh
, gave his traditional Mevlevi title—Head of the
Sheykhs
—but he was also known to have liberal and constitutionalist sympathies, and was widely respected by the population as a whole. Today, the only trace of the Mevlevis in Salonica is the name they have given to the neighbourhood where they once were based. Nothing remains of the monastery, nor of the cemetery, and a school now stands on the site. When our French visitor penned his postcard in 1916—barely five years after the Sultan’s visit—the building was
crumbling through neglect, and was being used to house Muslim refugees from the hinterland.

Between 1912 and 1924 its fate mirrored that of Islam in the city as a whole. Emigration—first voluntary, then forced—depleted the place of Muslims; the cemetery was desecrated, its walls were torn down, the tombstones and urns sold off for building materials. When the bones of distinguished former
sheykhs
were threatened with being disinterred, a Greek priest sympathetic to the order helped gather and transport them to the safety of their sister
-tekke
in Istanbul. But to have required Christian help was already a sign of the order’s weakness. Deprived of both the living and the dead, the Muslim presence in Salonica was brought to an end.

R
EFUGEES
, 1912–1914

T
HE EXODUS BEGAN
during the Balkan Wars themselves. International observers described the first campaign as a “war waged not only by the armies but by the nations themselves”—a war whose aim was “the complete extermination of an alien population.” The judgement may have been excessive, for many hundreds of thousands of Muslim peasants were still farming their land in Macedonia a decade later: massacre and extermination are not the same thing. But perhaps it was not so much excessive as premature, for all the protagonists in the conflict saw that what the Balkan Wars involved was a historic reversal of the prevailing balance of power between Muslims and Christians.
³

As it marched towards Salonica across the Vardar valley, the Hellenic army was far less violent towards Muslim civilians than its Serbian and Bulgarian allies (in fact, many Muslim peasants fled
into
Greek-held territory to get away from the other armies, and, especially, from the bands of irregulars which accompanied them), and for the most part it preserved its discipline. When Bosnian Muslims, recently settled by the Young Turks in villages in the plain, greeted the troops with the traditional gesture of surrender by offering them bread and salt, there was no trouble. Nevertheless, there was plundering, looting and killing elsewhere, and when the first Greek troops marched into the city, Salonica’s Muslim inhabitants kept off the streets, avoiding the assaults and robberies that accompanied the first hours and days of the transition. Once the civilian administration established itself, calm was restored and the initial anxieties were assuaged.
⁴

In the countryside, however, it was a different story. During the fighting, the peasants rose in what was described as “a species of Jacquerie … throwing themselves ravenously upon the property of the land-owners … and destroying much of what they could not carry away.” The violence there was more intense from the start, fuelled by a combination of religious and economic resentments. Memories of the Macedonian Struggle—of Greeks and Bulgarians killing each other, of Ottoman soldiers killing both—were still vivid. Outside Kilkis, Christian sharecroppers killed Muslim land-owners as soon as the Bulgarian army approached, and when others attempted to return several months later to reclaim their estates they too were murdered—their bodies were found by the roadside—or warned off. This was a war of the poor against the rich, and Christian as well as Jewish land-owners’ homes were also ransacked. Nevertheless, the Muslim beys were the most vulnerable and the least able to protect themselves. In Salonica a group of them requested British assistance in regaining possession of their estates; the governor of Izmir, Rahmi Bey, tried to exchange his properties around Salonica for Greek-owned estates in Anatolia.
⁵

As for the hundreds of thousands of poor Muslim villagers, tobacco-farmers, carters and vegetable gardeners, they were vulnerable even after the fighting ended, and for all the fine words of Athens politicians, they experienced Christian rule very differently. Soon their cemeteries were being ploughed over, their
medreses
requisitioned, and sheep and pigs were being sheltered in village mosques. In Serres, the mausoleum of Yusuf Pasha was destroyed and the great mosques were turned into hay lofts by the Bulgarians. Villagers began to leave. According to an observer:

One needed to be at the Serres market last Tuesday to see with one’s own eyes how the business is being done. It was impossible not to cry seeing villagers from the purely Muslim villages … emptying their stores and coming into Serres to sell up without thinking about the price. I asked all of those who were preparing to emigrate why they were going and they told me, with tears in their eyes and weeping that “We’re used to living freely and in honour, but seeing how they seize our fields and even enter our homes, we feel life has become impossible for Muslims.”
⁶