Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (55 page)

Historians have had little to say about those Muslims who mourned the passing of the empire and opposed the founding of the new Turkish state. The extraordinary lengths to which the anti-Kemalist opposition could go is illustrated by the case of Ali Sami Bey, a fifty-year-old former colonel, court photographer and adjutant to Sultan Abdul Hamid. Sami Bey had apparently followed his exiled sultan to Salonica, and stayed there after 1912, publishing a newspaper called
Justice
which proclaimed itself during the war to be “the supporter of the Entente and protector of Islam and the Greeks.” During the Asia Minor campaign, he actually fought for the Greeks and organized an underground anti-Kemalist resistance organization. Back in Salonica in October 1924 he resumed publication of his newspaper. That same month—with the deadline for final evacuation fast approaching—he approached the governor of the city to complain that the departing
mufti
planned to take with him the carpets of the Hamza Mosque: Sami Bey requested that they and the mosque itself should be kept in the city for the benefit of the “many Ottomans of foreign nationality, as well as anti-Kemalists, Circassians, Albanians and others” who would stay behind. But plans to appoint an Albanian
mufti
were squashed after Greek refugees protested that the mosque itself should count as “exchangeable
property”; it remained open for a little while after the last Muslims had been embarked but by June 1925 there was no one left to pray there, and it was turned into a telephone exchange. Sami Bey himself was one of the very few Muslims permitted to remain. He opened a photography studio—a photograph of a dervish with a needle through his cheek decorated the shop-window—and between 1925 and 1927 he took a remarkable series of panoramic photographs of the monasteries on Mount Athos. Shortly afterwards he appears to have left Salonica for good and moved to southern Greece.
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R
IGHT ON SCHEDULE
, the exodus was completed. “Excellency!” the governor-general of Macedonia was informed by the French official in charge. “We have the honour to bring to your attention that the last convoy of exchangeable Muslims from this city left for Turkey on 26 December and that the evacuation of the city of Salonica of all Muslims may be considered as completely terminated from said date.”
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All that was left was to count how many Muslims were still there. A little later, the local press announced:

Since the term for exchangeable Muslims to leave the city of Thessaloniki expired on 26 December, we are informed that there will be a detailed census of those remaining after that date … Those who do not have a special permit to remain for a specified period of time will be forced to leave quickly. Those in possession of passes are granted no more than 5–6 months.
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At the end of January 1925, the head of police summarized the results. Of the 97 names on his list, 78 were foreign nationals, chiefly Serbs who worked as food-sellers, and Albanians (mostly consular security men, or
cavasses
); 12 were liable for removal, and had been delayed for “unknown reasons,” and 7 were of unknown citizenship or making special cases for exemption—mostly rich land-owners or industrialists trying to obtain Albanian papers which would allow them residency in Greece. The question of who counted as Albanian tormented the Greek authorities, not least since a very high proportion of the Muslims in the city could legitimately have made such a claim. In the end it was decided that residence in Greece, the Muslim faith, a father born in Albania and lack of what was termed a “Turkish self-consciousness” were the key criteria. In this way a handful of notable
Ma’min
managed to wangle a reprieve, including Ahmed Kapanji, scion of one of the leading families of the late Ottoman city, whose magnificent fin-de-siècle villa was converted into the local NATO headquarters after the Second World War. Three months on, the police were still trying to chase up stray Muslims: Saki Abdoulah and Saim Ekrem were not exempt and were instructed to leave the city within ten days; Ali Terzi was away in Vodena, Fais Mustafa was in Athens, and Haki Bekir could not be found. Some had left for Albania. Two claimed to be “Circassians”—a category which left the police confused and asking for further instructions. But by this point virtually everyone else had departed for Turkey, where the new republic of Kemal Ataturk would turn them from Muslims, as most had once identified themselves, into Turks.
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T
HE
C
ITY
W
ITHOUT
M
USLIMS

U
NDER THE TERMS OF THE POPULATION EXCHANGE
, the properties they left behind—they had been forbidden to sell their homes privately since late 1922—were due to be taken over by the state for the benefit of the incoming Christian refugees. In the old city, this amounted to a very considerable collection of real estate since Muslims, despite their depleted numbers, possessed much more property than Greeks or Jews. At least one-third of the burned zone, for instance, had been owned by them. In the Upper Town, the proportion was much higher, and entire streets and neighbourhoods were emptied of the former owners. It is not surprising that for years after the Greek refugees had settled there, the ghosts of local dervishes and Muslim saints were reported around their old haunts, clustering in particular by old fountains, shrines and former mosques: exorcists were much in demand as new house-buyers moved in. From January 1925, the first formerly Muslim commercial properties were auctioned off in a
kafeneion
by the Syntrivani fountain: Rifaat Efendi’s shop on Markos Botsaris Street, and Ahmed Hussein’s on Army Avenue were the first to go under the hammer; by April, the new tenants of these properties had already formed an association to protect their interests.
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As if to erase any indication that there had ever been Muslims in the city, the municipality decided almost immediately to demolish the city’s minarets, which had been the defining feature of Salonica’s skyline, and invited building companies to bid for the work. “One after the other, the symbols of a barbarous religion fall crashing to the ground,”
wrote one journalist. “The forest of white minarets is thinning out … The red fezzes are leaving, the yashmaks vanish. What else remains? Nothing. Nothing after some months will remind us that the occupier swaggered through here, shamelessly raising emblems of his faith, sullying magnificent temples of Orthodoxy! … Their threatening height will no longer intimidate us, nor remind us of the former misfortunes of our race, the frightful slavery and the sufferings of their subjects. The voice of the muezzin will no longer bother our ears, and he and his voice will disappear in the depths of their new country … Nothing, nothing at all must remind us again of the epoch of slavery.”
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The demolitions followed the pattern set over the past century in Old Greece and elsewhere in the Balkans where the departure of Muslims was often followed swiftly by the destruction of their places of worship. But not everyone agreed: “I accept as correct and logical the demolition of the minarets of former Christian churches which had been turned into mosques,” declared the former prime minister, Alexander Papanastasiou, in a press interview. “But the demolition of the minarets of other mosques is a coarse act stemming from mindless chauvinism. Those issuing the decree imagined that they could thus make the traces of Turkish occupation disappear. But history is not written with the destruction of innocent monuments which beautified the city.” For Papanastasiou, the minarets too were a “national resource.” Typically, he argued that “the disappearance of the traces of the occupation should come about only through the elevation of our own civilization.” But his opinion came too late to affect the outcome, and anyway in the circumstances it was unlikely he would have been heard with sympathy.
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Even the few religious buildings that survived aroused angry attacks in the press. Leading the charge was Nikolaos Fardis, a journalist whose ardent nationalism would lead him down the path of collaboration in the Second World War:

Who can tell me why that disgusting Hamza mosque remains on the key corner of Venizelos and Egnatia streets? Architectural value? None! Historic value? Less than none! The square building is simply ugly … And the state uses part of this miserable mass of stones as … cabins of the telephone exchange where everyone goes when they want to call Athens! And yet around the mosque huge blocks have gone up, and the road, prepared for the double set of tram lines, with its luxurious lamps, looks almost European. As soon as we can we must tear down the Hamza mosque which someone paid two or more millions for.
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Fardis’s spite was turned equally against other such remnants—the “miserable baths” by the White Tower (which were eventually demolished), another old bath-house by the Stoa Modiano, and even the covered market, the
bezesten
, whose survival he attributed to a mania among the urban planners for “local colour.” Thanks to such attitudes, almost all the city’s
medreses
, mosques and
tekkes
disappeared and today only the hundred-foot-high minaret of the Rotonda survives out of the dozens which once punctuated the skyline.
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Outside the heart of the city, the story was slightly different. The old Turkish cemetery, beyond the city walls, was soon occupied as “exchangeable property” and gave birth to the shanty-town of Ayia Foteini. In the Upper Town, however, where most of the 4700 vacant private properties were to be found, less was destroyed. Its villas were large and often possessed spacious courtyards and grounds: refugee families built over the gardens and moved into the existing homes, many of which survived for decades with their characteristic overhanging storeyed
sachnisia
, wooden frames and shuttered windows. Tall Ottoman town houses, their façades faded in washes of pink, pale blue and ochre, preserved by their inhabitants’ poverty, still commanded the curving lanes of the Upper Town in the late 1970s. Today few are left; most have been torn down and replaced with modern versions in concrete and glass.

Ironically it was more or less as soon as the fire-affected centre was rebuilt in the new modern vein that the back-streets of the Upper Town came to seem repositories of a kind of authenticity. There one could find an urban landscape which by its popular and anonymous traditionalism, its simple charm, challenged the pretensions of modernist architects, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs. Stripped of their unwelcome political overtones, the “old days” acquired a new appeal. “[The Upper Town] shows us whatever remained standing from former times,” wrote a journalist in 1931. “There is rhythm and order there … Its streets are more poetic and the trees which flower among the square houses give a romantic tone to the spot.” In May 1935, the city’s new tourism office organized the first walking tour of the city which consisted almost entirely of the sights of the Upper Town. Even the names of its neighbourhoods—Chinar, Tsaous Monastir, Yedi Kulé, the Islachané—preserved the charm of bygone times. Yet the
romanticism offered by the Upper Town could not be separated from the fact that its creators and former occupants were no longer there. This was a romanticism of ruins, or at least of absence.
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I
N RECENT YEARS
, books, monuments, museums and conferences have contributed to a new interest in the deportation and extermination of the city’s Jews during the Second World War. After a lengthy silence, the subject emerged from the shadows to become a legitimate topic of discussion. As yet, however, no such debate has opened concerning the departure of Salonica’s Muslims. Their experiences are still overshadowed in the public mind by the simultaneous suffering of the Greek refugees who took their place. Yet their exodus was an event of the first importance for the city and its subsequent history for it marked the real break with the Ottoman past, the moment in which the twentieth century imposed its values and practices upon an older world.

In this process of nation-making through force there were two deadly novelties in operation. The first—visible during the Balkan Wars—was what a much later generation termed ethnic cleansing, that is to say, the use of war to alter the ethnographic balance of particular regions. Greeks, Turks, Serbs and Bulgarians had all—to one degree or another—seen the wars of 1912–18 in such terms. Yet ethnic cleansing was usually hesitant, partial, and incomplete, and the hatreds and bullying of soldiers, gendarmes and peasants were often counter-balanced by the very different priorities of political elites. In Salonica—and in the surrounding countryside—the majority of the Muslim inhabitants had not moved: they had withstood the threat of violence just as they had proved deaf to the calls of Turkish politicians and agents to uproot themselves for the good of the homeland.

To get them to leave in their totality required a diplomatic agreement drawn up between states in the aftermath of war, which forcibly uprooted these people for the sake of geopolitical stability and nationbuilding. This time—in 1923–24—they had to depart whether they wished to or not. Their nationality was of no relevance; their religion alone marked them out for removal. And it was just here that the awesome power and ambition of the twentieth-century state left its nineteenth-century Ottoman precursor in the shade. Populations could now be moved on an unprecedented scale, and every aspect of the operation—from the evaluation of properties to transportation and resettlement—was, at least on paper, the responsibility of the state. Under
such pressure, the Muslims of Salonica had no choice, and within a year and a half, Muslim life in the city came to an end. For the Greek authorities, keen to Hellenize the city and the northern new lands as a whole, their departure was a vital step forward in shifting the ethnographic balance and making properties available for the Christians flooding in from the East. The Muslims from Salonica settled in places like Izmir and Manisa and helped those towns become Turkish, while their old home-town for the first time in five centuries became predominantly Greek.