Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (53 page)

With shops, warehouses, fields and public buildings being requisitioned before their eyes, more and more villagers abandoned
their homes and made their way to Salonica, from where steamers carried them to lands still under Ottoman control.

It was not only soldiers who were intimidating them. Gendarmes—many of them from Crete, which itself had only recently escaped Ottoman rule—found the reversal of power going to their heads. In one village a “law” was passed ordering all Turks who passed a gendarme to dismount and say “Yassou Effendi”: a beating was the punishment for those who failed. Gendarmes threatened any Greeks who were still in the employ of Turkish beys, and ordered them to quit their jobs. Muslims were forced to subscribe to the Greek Naval League and to wear a cross in their buttonhole to show they had paid. All the while, brigands and local farmers enriched themselves—men like Yorgios Papadoulis, a land-owner near Kilkis, who reduced the local bey to penury and behaved “like the absolute master of the region, the tyrant who disposed of the life and person of the entire Turkish population of which today none is left but two people like slaves in his lands.”

Much of this could be attributed to the excitement and the aftermath of the war itself. What kept tensions high was the arrival some months later of Greek refugees from Thrace. From late 1913, more than one hundred thousand Greeks suffered ethnic cleansing of their own: driven out of their homes by Bulgarian and Ottoman troops, they fled westwards. Once safely on Greek-controlled soil, they wanted revenge, occupying Muslim properties and trying to drive out their owners. Others were resettled in Muslim communal buildings. With no diplomatic representation of their own (at least before the arrival of an Ottoman consul in Salonica in 1914), and no political representation in Greece before the elections of 1915, Muslim grievances and remonstrations fell on deaf ears.

The Greeks claimed this was the fault of the Ottoman government and its unspoken policy of forcing through an exchange of populations after the war. They pointed to the influx of Greek refugees as proof that the Ottoman authorities wanted to expel Greeks from the last remaining Turkish-controlled lands in Europe and replace them with Muslim settlers. The Greek police claimed Ottoman agents were touring the villages telling Muslim peasants to sell up and leave. This may even have been happening in some places. Just four years earlier the Young Turks had responded to the loss of Ottoman territory in Bosnia by urging Bosnian Muslims to settle in Macedonia. Bringing them out of Macedonia into Thrace to resettle the strategically crucial lands just west of Istanbul with a loyal population would have been a logical
continuation of this policy. Ottoman diplomats did in fact propose a partial exchange of populations to the Greeks, though this was never implemented because of the outbreak of the First World War. But as an explanation for why Muslims were leaving, the idea that the Turkish authorities were to blame was a convenient over-simplification. The real reasons for the exodus, wrote the British consul, were not patriotic or religious feelings but “widespread massacres, forced conversions and the wholesale robbing of Muslim goods,” mostly by “Macedonian Christians,” in other words Slav peasants.
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By the spring of 1914 tens of thousands of Muslim villagers had passed through Salonica en route to Izmir and Istanbul. “Vast numbers of Moslems arrived on the outskirts of Salonica during our stay there,” wrote an international team of observers. “We saw them camped to the number, it is said, of 8000 in the field and by the roadside. They had come with their bullock carts, and whole families found their only shelter in these primitive vehicles. They had left their villages and their fields, and to all of them the future was a blank.” Refugees crowded into the courtyards of mosques, sheltering behind makeshift carpet partitions; others were put temporarily in unoccupied houses. The Greek government fed many, and the city’s Muslim Committee looked after the rest, and organized their transportation: as under the Ottomans, care of refugees was still regarded as primarily a communal matter. But of the 140,000 who had left by April 1914, only 24,000 were from the newly conquered Greek territories: the vast majority had fled the Serbs and Bulgarians, many in anticipation of future troubles.

The Turkish press had its own mirror-image of the Greek allegations: it was all the fault of the Greeks and their “systematic plan to force the Muslims to emigrate.” In reality there was no plan. The brutality of lower-ranking Greek officials and the anti-Muslim outlook of many of the men were unmistakable. But the government at higher levels was concerned at losing the “sober and hardworking” Muslim farmer through emigration, for who would then till the new lands? No one dreamed in 1914 that more than one million Greeks might eventually be forced to leave Anatolia. On the contrary, the need to make sure that
they
were properly treated was a major curb on any officially sanctioned Greek anti-Muslim policy. The Ottoman government did not bother to hide the link, and there was a clear relationship between the expulsions of Greeks and Turks. The arrival of Muslim refugees from Macedonia in Anatolia led to the formation of irregular
chetté
bands which wreaked
their
revenge on the Christian peasants there.
Turkish officials began organizing their own deportations in May 1914 and forty thousand Anatolian Greeks fled the Turkish mainland for the safety of Chios. Not for the first or last time, victims were becoming perpetrators, adding another twist to the spiral of nationalist war. To the British consul in Salonica the pattern of events was horribly clear:

The result of the massacre of Muslims at the beginning of the war, of the looting of their goods in the ensuing months, of the settling of Christians in their villages, of their persecution by Christian neighbours, of their torture and beating by Greek troops, has been the creation of a state of terror among the Islamic population. Their one desire is to escape from Macedonia and to be again in a free land.

They arrive in Turkey with the memory of their slaughtered friends and relations fresh in their minds, they remember their own sufferings and the persecutions of which they have been victims, and finding themselves without means or resources, encouraged to some extent by their own government, they see no wrong in falling on the Greek Christians of Turkey and meting out to them the same treatment that they themselves have received from the Greek Christians of Macedonia.
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T
HE
M
USLIM
C
OMMUNITY
: T
HE
F
INAL
P
HASE

S
ALONICA REPRESENTED SAFETY
in comparison with the violent countryside, but life for Muslims there did not return to anything close to normality. Most Muslim residents in the city kept their Ottoman citizenship after 1912, and the new authorities followed the old Ottoman model by creating what they termed an “Ottoman community” to represent them, headed by a newly appointed
mufti.
Unfortunately, it was not always clear whether the rents on certain properties—the legacy of the old
vakf
system—belonged to the municipality as a whole, or specifically to the city’s Muslims. With the municipality laying claim to buildings and lands, revenues formerly dedicated to the upkeep of mosques,
tekkes
, schools and orphanages dried up. The presence of an Ottoman consul afforded some diplomatic protection. But the community remained very weak, and it was unable to get the local authorities—despite the fact that the mayor at this time was a Muslim, Osman Sait Bey—to protect them. Cemeteries were desecrated, and the
pattern of violence which had already driven villagers from their homes began to manifest itself in the city too.

Gangs of axe-wielding Greek refugees ransacked Muslim shops, and broke into houses. Following protests by Muslim community leaders and the local Turkish press, the governor-general tried to get the squatters to leave; but often the best the real owners could hope for was to obtain some form of rent from the new occupants. There were also constant humiliations. Cretan gendarmes assaulted non-Greeks for such petty infractions as speaking French instead of Greek. Fezzes were torn from people’s heads and in June 1914 the muezzin in the Mes’ud Hasan district was mocked whenever he made the call to prayer.
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In a couple of years, more than fifteen thousand Muslims left their homes. The mother, sister and cousin of Mustafa Kemal made their way to the refugee camps of the Turkish capital. Also departing was Nazim Pasha, the last governor of the city: he was a distinguished associate of the great reformer Midhat Pasha, a poet and a Mevlevi adept. His eleven-year-old grandson, who had grown up in the neighbourhood of the Aladja Imaret, wrote a poem lamenting the loss of the city; later he would become famous as Turkey’s best-known modern poet, Nazim Hikmet. “I was born in 1902/I never went back to my birthplace/I don’t like to turn back”—this from his poem
Autobiography
, which he wrote in East Berlin in 1961, shortly before his death—“Some people know all about plants, some about fish/I know separation.”

But at the highest levels of the Greek state, there was no desire to provoke a large-scale emigration, and had it not been for the pressure exerted by incoming Greek refugees, the persecution of Muslims in Greece would have subsided more quickly. As it was, experienced observers in Salonica in the spring of 1914 were impressed by the extent to which the Greek authorities were trying “not to offend the susceptibilities of their Moslem subjects” and predicted that “in time Greek rule may benefit them.” In 1915 national elections took place in which Muslims could vote. They were considerably freer than the 1912 elections to the Ottoman parliament had been, and sixteen Turkish MPs took their seats in Athens supporting the anti-Venizelist camp.
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I
N FACT, AS GREECE ENTERED THE WAR
on the Entente side, there were still some thirty thousand Muslims in Salonica, and more than ten times that number in the provinces. Their sympathies were mostly with the Central Powers of course. When a German
Zeppelin was shot down and its carcass was re-assembled and put on display by the White Tower, the local Turks mourned the loss of an ally. And in 1918, when Greeks celebrated the end of the war, Christian schoolboys mocked Muslims, by reminding them they had lost.
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For a time, it looked as if having picked the winning side, Greece would soon be governing Muslims in Asia Minor as well. Venizelos was one of the stars of the Paris Peace Conference and when he received the green light to occupy and administer the Izmir region, it seemed that his great gamble on the war had paid off. The great Cretan had brought his small country within sight of the “Greece of Five Seas”—the modern resurrection of the Byzantine empire—which Greek nationalists had been dreaming of for a century. Ottoman authority lay in tatters, and Mustafa Kemal was only beginning to reorganize the army on a new basis. In 1919 Greek troops disembarked in Izmir, and Salonica’s Muslims faced the greatest test of their loyalties so far.

But the following year Venizelos was ejected from office by a war-weary electorate. It was the biggest shock in Greek political history and Muslim and Jewish voters in northern Greece were crucial to the anti-Venizelists’ success. When the news reached Salonica, delighted Greek soldiers—for there were huge numbers of Greek anti-Venizelists too—swapped their caps for Muslim fezzes, and Turks and Jews joined in the celebrations.
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Although the formation of a royalist government in Athens did not lead to any radical change of policy in Asia Minor, for a year and a half Salonica’s Muslims enjoyed a more sympathetic and supportive administration. Under the presidency of a Muslim government deputy, a congress on the use of the Turkish language in education was convened in the city. New Turkish-language newspapers and satirical journals emerged, textbooks were imported from Allied-controlled Istanbul, and travel restrictions on Muslims were lifted. At Ramadan in 1921, the
iftar
and
sahur
cannonades were fired once more to mark the points between dusk and dawn when Muslims might break their fast: for the last time in Salonica’s history, they entertained their friends and relatives during these festive evenings.
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The Greek military debacle in Anatolia and the successful Turkish counter-attack brought this Indian summer to an end. When the Greek army rashly advanced hundreds of miles eastwards towards Ankara in a bid to crush the Kemalist forces, it suffered a decisive defeat in a bloody battle at the Sakarya River. Afterwards, the Turkish national assembly named the commander-in-chief, Mustafa Kemal, Field Marshal and
Ghazi:
it was a decisive step on his road to absolute power. The
Greek army fell back to new lines, but the following summer a successful Turkish offensive forced them towards Izmir and the coast. Retreat turned into a rout, as military discipline broke down and Turkish irregulars harassed their flanks. First the French and then the British withdrew their backing from the Greeks and sought terms with Turkey’s new leadership. The culmination of these dramatic events—which ended a Greek presence in Asia Minor dating back more than two thousand years—came in September 1922 when the city of Izmir went up in flames, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and an overwhelming mass of refugees fled before the advancing Turkish troops. Two months later, Ataturk proclaimed the abolition of the Ottoman empire.

Although Venizelos had begun the invasion of Asia Minor, it was the royalists that succeeded him who took the blame for defeat. In Athens, a group of patriotic young Venizelist army officers seized power in a military coup, deposed the anti-Venizelist government and after a show trial executed the prime minister and five others whom they held responsible for the catastrophe. Martial law was declared in Salonica, its Muslim mayor was ousted (having held the position on and off since 1908), and a leading supporter of the Revolutionary Committee was named governor. For the city’s Muslims, the prospects immediately darkened. Venizelists were again in power, but this time the military were in charge and the atmosphere was uglier than at any point in the past. Greece had just suffered the worst disaster in its history, and thousands of destitute refugees were arriving daily at the Salonica docks on a scale which dwarfed any previous influx. Bewildered, angry and frightened, the Revolutionary Committee and its supporters were in a paranoiac frame of mind. They purged the ranks of royalists and threw many into prison. But they still found it hard to explain the scale of the catastrophe that had befallen their country. “We wonder why and how we have so many enemies, we Greeks,” wrote the ardently Venizelist Penelope Delta. Izmir had been lost; was even Macedonia safe?
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