Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (54 page)

Seeing conspiracy everywhere, the search for secret agents began. The
mufti
was arrested and so was the former mayor. Muslim villagers in the countryside were believed to be celebrating the Turkish victory, and were said to be waiting for the Kemalist army to liberate them too: how, after all, could Mustafa Kemal resist the chance of marching to free Salonica, his own birthplace? There were stories of a Kemalist underground in Salonica itself, collecting money to buy arms. A rising could not be ruled out, nor even a replay of the old Macedonian
Struggle, this time with the Turks as the underdogs. Agents reported that “fanatical Kemalists,” mostly drawn from the
Ma’min
community, had made contact with royalist anti-Venizelists. Others indicated that Muslims—directed from Istanbul—were cooperating with prominent Jews and with Bulgarian
komitadjis.
By December 1922, Salonica’s chief of police was at his wits’ end: the city’s population had swollen to 350,000, among them “all the worst elements, common criminals and propagandists.”
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The Venizelists now decided to rule out any chance of a repetition of their 1920 defeat. They cordoned off the Muslims and Jews in separate electoral colleges so that national minorities could never again become arbiters of the country’s political fortunes. Then they took advantage of a botched royalist counter-coup to arrest and exile scores of their opponents. Greek politics was now set for another round of the interminable struggle between royalists and republicans, but this no longer mattered to Salonica’s Muslims. For at the end of 1922 Greek and Turkish delegates meeting in Lausanne had negotiated an end to the war and agreed at the same time to a comprehensive exchange of populations. There had been voluntary exchanges before but for the first time in history this one was to be compulsory and sanctioned by international law. Norwegian diplomat Fridtjof Nansen, who had been entrusted by the League of Nations with organizing refugee relief, probably made the original suggestion but both Venizelos and Ataturk were already thinking on similar lines. The two leaders were seeking to build nation-states on the ruins of the Ottoman empire and both were supervising a policy of national and religious homogenization. Venizelos himself had been born in Ottoman Crete; Ataturk had grown up in Hamidian Salonica. But for both, the world of their childhood had vanished, the time for fighting was over, and a new society and a new state now needed to be constructed, on national principles. With some minor exceptions, Greece would receive all the Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor, Turkey the Muslim population of Greece. A total of more than one and a half million lives were affected, the Muslims of Salonica among them.
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T
HE
E
XCHANGE OF
P
OPULATIONS

I
N
A
PRIL 1914
, following the Balkan Wars, the French ambassador in Constantinople had already seen the writing on the wall.
Minorities were a source of conflict, he instructed Paris, and since they could not live together in peace, they must be eradicated by being moved to their proper homelands:

The Balkan peninsula in its entirety is at this moment the theatre of horrors comparable to those which accompany the great migrations of peoples; these horrors are the logical consequence of recent events, and, sad to say, perhaps the only means of putting an end once and for all to disorder and anarchy, to the murders and depredations which ravage European Turkey lies in redistributing the Balkan populations by nationality among each of the states among whom European Turkey was divided at Bucharest. It is a sad but definitive liquidation of a situation which neither Turkey nor Europe has found a remedy for in more than a century.
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A limited population exchange, affecting villages along the new Turco-Bulgarian border, had been agreed by the two governments in November 1913. The following spring, after the Ottoman authorities had attempted to clear part of the Asia Minor coastline, by expelling and deporting Greek residents, diplomats discussed the idea of a partial population exchange, covering the Muslims from Macedonia and the Greeks from around Izmir. The initial idea was for a compulsory agreement, though the Greek side watered this down and the discussions ended with the outbreak of the First World War. Venizelos was evidently struck by the concept because the following year he sketched out a plan for a reciprocal scheme with Bulgaria. But even at the time many resisted the logic of exchange and saw it as a capitulation to mankind’s worst instincts. When news of the Greco-Turkish talks reached Archbishop Chrysostomos of Izmir—eight years later he would be among the first of the thousands of Greeks to be killed in the sack of his city—he angrily denounced the very idea of this “counting and exchange of human beings—incomprehensible, unheard-of and unprecedented in the chronicles of History—as is done by animal dealers with horses, livestock and cattle.” And many of those affected later—both Muslim and Christian—shared his sentiments: a large refugee meeting in Salonica in January 1923 reacted to news of the Lausanne agreement by protesting the decision as “a disgraceful bartering of bodies to the detriment of modern civilization.”
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But at the end of 1922 Venizelos was in no mood to listen. The
truth was that more than one million refugees had already arrived in Greece from Asia Minor by the time the agreement was signed, and there was no earthly chance they could ever return to their homes. The imperative for the Greek side was to find ways to house them, and in his mind this meant expelling the country’s remaining Muslims so that their property could be utilized. That suited the new regime in Turkey too: not only would their control of the much larger quantity of Christian property in Anatolia be thereby legitimated; but they would also need Muslim immigrants to resettle the land and help cushion the huge economic disruption which the loss of so many Christians must cause. As a Turkish deputy put it to the Ankara assembly: “The arrival of every individual is a source of richness for us; and the departure of every individual is a blessing for us!” For both sides, it was evident that if Greece’s Muslims would not go by themselves, they must be forced to leave.
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For Salonica, therefore, the 1923 population exchange completed what 1912 had begun—the dispossession and disappearance of the group which had dominated its life over the preceding five centuries. Although the city was by this point predominantly—and increasingly—Greek, as of July 1923 there still remained a Muslim community of at least eighteen thousand people. They were deeply attached to their birthplace and according to the local Greek authorities, only a “few fanatics” among them actually wanted to depart. The sisters of the departing mayor were said to be “inconsolable” at having to leave their home. “When our people asked those caught up in the exchange if they were happy to be going to Turkey,” remembered Kostas Tomanas, “they replied sorrowfully, ‘We don’t know.’ ”
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Yet there were all-too-evident incentives to pack. By 1923, Muslim peasants in the villages were being required to supply newly arrived Christian refugees with everything from food to bedding. Their fields and oxen were confiscated and some refugees broke into mosques to steal the carpets. Destitute and bitter at their own treatment in Anatolia, others made Muslim peasants fetch water, firewood or stones for them. As a result, many of the Turkish-speaking peasants were said to be “longing to leave Greece.”

In the city the authorities kept a closer eye on things, but the pressure of the tens of thousands of new arrivals was irresistible. In the neighbourhood of Mes’ud Hasan, on the eastern side of the Upper Town, for example, where the religious properties administered by the
mufti
amounted to one-third of all real estate, most of this was immediately occupied by refugees. Property-owners hired guards to stop
the attacks but the numbers were overwhelming: The boyhood home of Reshad Tesal, son of a Muslim politician, was attacked one afternoon by fifty refugees who burst in and began to allocate the rooms among themselves. His father protested to the governor-general himself who sent a dozen Greek soldiers to evict the squatters, but the remedy was only temporary and the family had to share the house after another break-in, using the newcomers as a protection against further incursions. “We had to accept these people to prevent further attacks,” recalls Tesal. “We were lucky that these were very decent people. They spoke Turkish and respected our customs and way of life. We lived together with this family at peace until we left Salonica.” If this was the situation which confronted a former MP in the Greek parliament, we can guess how less well-connected Muslims fared. “Houses which the Muslims departing for Turkey are leaving and which have been occupied illegally and without the permission of the authority must be vacated,” ran an announcement in January 1924. It had little effect.
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While refugees took matters into their own hands, the bureaucracy established under the population exchange agreement began to function. The end of 1924 was set as the terminal date for Muslims to leave the country and mixed committees of Greek, Turkish and international bureaucrats supervised the process of emigration in as orderly a fashion as they could. Valuation committees received property declarations from departing house-owners, and trains from western Macedonia began arriving in the city with hundreds of peasants at a time, carrying an estimated twelve tons of luggage per train before the Turkish government announced a weight limit for what emigrants could bring with them. From November 1923, steamers began to ship out the 350,000 Muslims affected—first peasants and then city-dwellers.

At the port there were chaotic scenes: one minute, Muslim householders were being told they were not allowed to sell those goods they could not take with them—then that they could. The agreement was clearly intended to be definitive, but the Turkish consul was making fiery speeches at the dockside telling the emigrants that “in two months they would be back in their homes.” Fraudsters took advantage of the emigrants’ anxieties and there was a flourishing market in fake travel documents. Among the thousands who arrived at the docks there were numerous Yugoslav Muslims, who had sold their homes and were hoping to obtain lands in Anatolia left behind by the departing Greeks. In the end, there were so many of these that the Turkish government ordered captains not to admit them on board. Meanwhile the
schedule of departures was delayed as the Kemalist government tried to find Turkish ships to carry out the embarkations.
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Salonica itself saw relatively little violence, though the threat hung in the air; on the other hand, amid the desperation, acute poverty, political uncertainty and urban disorder, criminal gangs flourished. Greek refugees broke into a Turkish-owned dairy and stole some large cheeses, leaving behind an apologetic note: “It isn’t death that frightens us, only hunger/and our children, who are starving too.” After other refugees bought cows from a Muslim householder—for in these days, farmers still sold fresh milk within the city walls—the seller boasted too loudly in the local taverna of the high price he had got, and the following night he and his wife were killed in their beds.
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Such killings were rare and even today elderly Muslims from Greece remember the exodus as a largely peaceful matter. Mixed Greco-Turkish commissions did try to protect emigrants, allowing them to sell off property prior to departure, and to record their valuations of what they were leaving behind. Indeed, many of the Greek refugees in the city reacted angrily to this, for the violent turmoil of their own hasty exodus from Anatolia had not permitted such an orderly winding-up of their affairs. “When we see the Turks of Salonica leaving the country, music playing and carrying all their possessions, money and preferred objects,” one refugee group protested, “we don’t understand the reasons for this difference in treatment.” Others complained that the departing Muslims were allowed “to bring their donkeys and even their dogs, the doors and windows of their houses and in general everything they can carry away with them.” In their minds, the exchange agreement had made the stock of Muslim housing in the city theirs: anything subtracted from it meant less for Greeks. Their own organizations put the local authorities under pressure to speed up the Muslims’ departure, and they threatened the members of the committee which regulated the exodus that if they took too long a summer holiday they might find the refugees taking matters into their own hands. “Let the Turks be gone,” they demanded in August. “Every delay of the exchange is a heavy blow to the refugees and all Greeks. We should not have to pass a third winter in such misery.” In fact the steamers were embarking 7,000 weekly and 111,000 had left Salonica by the end of December. Arriving in Izmir or Istanbul, they were greeted with “tea and cakes, speeches and flags” before being sent up-country. Ataturk’s government tried to plan for their coming, assigning them places of settlement and providing loans for the poorest. Even so,
disappointment often awaited them and they found “they had neither houses, food, money nor any means of procuring the necessaries of life.”
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Desperate to stay, some “exchangeables” (as they were termed) tried to take advantage of Greek contacts they had built up over the years of the Macedonian Struggle. One bey vainly solicited the help of a former Greek band leader whom he had helped hide from the Ottoman authorities years earlier: the latter tells in his memoirs how he sought to obtain his friend’s exemption only to find he had already been embarked for Turkey. Other Muslims emphasized their anti-Kemalist credentials, for things were happening in Turkey itself that many of them disapproved of, including the abolition of the empire and the exiling of the last sultan. (The last Ottoman
sheykh-ül-Islam
, an outspoken anti-Kemalist, actually fled
into
Greece.) For these “old Turks,” the term “Ottoman” was much more than merely a synonym for Muslim, and they did not like the look of Ataturk’s new secular republic. Under the pressure of their impending departure, bitter rows broke out between “old” and “Young Turks.” In the Hamza Bey mosque Kemalists were angered by the
mufti
’s Ottomanist sympathies—praying for the deposed sultan—and accused him of being a Greek puppet and against what they called “the Ottoman republic.”
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