Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (56 page)

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Dear Papa. Here is another of Salonica’s curiosities, one of the rare Turkish cemeteries. In the background is the mosque of the whirling dervishes, of whom only one is left. On the other hand, Muslim refugee families are camped out there …

18
City of Refugees

W
ITH JUSTICE
the writer Giorgos Ioannou once called Salonica “the capital of refugees.” In the late nineteenth century alone, it had welcomed Russian Jews, Tatars, Circassians and Muslims from the lost Ottoman provinces of Thessaly, Bosnia and Crete. Armenians found shelter from both Bolsheviks and Turks, and remnants of General Wrangel’s White Russian army squatted in abandoned First World War barracks until the 1960s. Today a new generation of Greeks from the former Soviet Union have also made their home there, as well as Georgians and Kurds. No group of refugees, however, has had an impact—either on the city, or on the country itself—remotely comparable to the huge, panic-stricken immigration of over one million Orthodox Christians who arrived during the final death-throes of the Ottoman empire. In Greece this event is still known simply as the Catastrophe. At its height, in 1922 and 1923, boats docked daily, unloading thousands of starving homeless passengers. It was, by any standards, an overwhelming humanitarian disaster. But in the longer run, it was also the means by which the New Lands and their capital, Salonica, finally became Greek. The refugees fled an empire, and helped build a nation-state.
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C
ATASTROPHE

E
VEN IN 1912–13
, Muslims (and Bulgarians) leaving Greek territory were outnumbered by the Greeks coming in. Every army, and every state, was driving out civilians. At least forty thousand Greeks fled the Bulgarians, while the Turks expelled about one hundred thousand
from eastern Thrace, and by 1916 the demographic balance in Salonica had been fundamentally changed.

The Balkans after 1918

Soon there were many more. In 1920–21, another 20,000 fled fierce fighting in the Caucasus. In their tented encampment on Cape Karaburnu, typhus was rife, and there was little water, fuel or shelter from the harsh winter winds and rain. Amid the stench of human waste and dying children, American Red Cross workers battled to avert a “natural disaster.”
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Yet almost immediately they were engulfed in the human tidal wave which followed the Greek defeat in Asia Minor as nearly one million refugees, at least half of them in need of urgent assistance, clogged the roads and ports heading west. “In a never-ending, staggering march, the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, reporting for the
Toronto Star
in October 1922. “The main column crossing the Maritza river at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water-buffalo, with exhausted staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.” The height of the panic followed the final evacuation of the Greek army from Smyrna, when the city was burned to the ground and Kemalist forces massacred 30,000 Greek and Armenian civilians in cold blood, while an estimated quarter of a million terrified refugees crowded the waterfront. By May 1923, the date when the Greco-Turkish exchange agreement was supposed to come into force, another 200,000 had fled as well and only 150,000 were left, in effect hostages for the proper treatment of Greece’s Muslims.
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The Greeks had at least escaped the fate of the Armenians—hundreds of thousands of whom had been killed since 1915. But they had their own grim stories of forced marches, starvation, imprisonment and massacre; women and children had faced the threat of forced conversion and rape. The refugee camps outside Istanbul—if they succeeded in reaching them—were death-traps of typhus and cholera; the rains poured down, there was little to eat. They packed themselves into the ships carrying them across the Aegean to safety, but many did not make it alive. When one ten-year-old boy, whose father had already died, crossed from Prince’s Island (outside Istanbul), his journey to Salonica took eleven days: “We starved. The boat stopped in Cavala for water only. Older people and younger ones, about four or five of them, died. Their bodies were thrown into the sea.”
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An American diplomat despairingly watched a steamer
carrying seven thousand dock at Salonica—“a squirming writhing mass of human misery.” It was November, and the refugees had spent four days at sea, many on the open deck, without space to lie down, or food, or toilet facilities. “They came ashore in rags,” he noted in shock, “hungry, sick, covered with vermin, hollow-eyed, exhaling the horrible odor of human filth.” Interviewed many years later, another woman was so overcome by her memories of that journey she could not describe how she had got to Greece; before leaving Turkey she had buried two of her children in the camp near Istanbul, and the journey itself was too distressing to recall. “We landed at Salonica. Some people were lucky to get homes to stay in. We didn’t. We stayed in a yard. We put down some handmade carpets and sat down on them. For three or four weeks we stayed there. Some people would give us food to eat. Then we registered for the villages we wanted to settle down … We were sent to a village where we really didn’t want to go. However we had no choice.”
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Refugees ended up in every part of the country. But the departing Muslims had left properties in northern Greece, and this was where their demographic impact was greatest. More than a quarter of a million people passed through the quarantines and tented encampments of Salonica before being transported into the countryside to be settled in agricultural colonies. The demographic dominance of Greeks in Greek Macedonia was thus finally achieved through what one observer at the time called a process of “contemporary colonization”—something close to what the Young Turks had envisaged in 1910, only now with Christians not Muslims.
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Neat new village settlements with orderly straight streets and whitewashed red-tiled single-storey homes stamped the impress of Hellenism on Macedonia’s erstwhile ethnographic kaleidoscope. “What a miracle!” wrote a French scholar, “The country round Salonica, which was formerly pasture for sheep … is now transformed into orchards and vineyards.” Salonica itself was affected deeply too, for as many as 92,000 refugees eventually made it their home.
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The refugees themselves were not a homogeneous group, however, and only their suffering united them. They had originated from all over the Greek world—from the Asia Minor seaboard, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and eastern Thrace—places where their communities had existed, in many cases, since antiquity: the “Greece” that now called itself their homeland was generally unknown to them. Some were from prosperous urban backgrounds, merchants from Izmir who looked on in astonishment at the primitive ways of the Macedonian villager; others were Anatolian peasants themselves, who found it hard to adjust
to the life of the city. They brought strange clothes and unfamiliar customs, harsh dialects and even, ironically, the Turkish language, which many of them spoke much more fluently than Greek. In fact, many still only understood Turkish, and thought of themselves as “Anatolian Christians,” or “Christians from the East” rather than “Greeks.” Political appeals to the refugees often had to be printed in Turkish as well as Greek. Salonica’s Muslims were astonished. “They didn’t know Greek and spoke Turkish,” recalled the young Reshad Tesal in surprise. “[They] sang in Turkish in our
makams
[musical scales].” With their arrival, the market for Turkish records quickly expanded and Greek cinemas screened Turkish melodramas well into the 1950s. They had insults hurled at them by Greeks from the Peloponnese or the islands—they were “Turkish-seed” and “the yoghurt-baptized”—for to the existing population of Old Greece they scarcely seemed Greek at all. In fact the population exchange was not about bringing a nation together so much as assembling the component parts from which one would emerge. Two or three generations passed before their descendants stopped referring to themselves as refugees, and felt more at ease in their new homeland.
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At the height of the influx—in the weeks and months which followed the fall of Smyrna—Salonica was stretched to breaking point. Relatives were separated, and the shortage of adult men was noticeable for many had been killed or were still in Turkish captivity. The city’s wealthier residents were invited to sponsor newcomers, or to adopt orphans, and notices requesting news of family members appeared frequently in the press. From 12 September 1922: “The husband of Anastasia Iliadakis from Niflis is sought, and their children, Constantinos, Ilias, Evangelos and Minas Iliadakis.” “Emmanuel Xydopoulos from Yiayiakoi seeks his father, Efstratios Xydopoulos, his mother and three brothers, Constantinos, Sotirios and Dimosthenes.” Pelagia Konstantinou, dwelling at 74 King George St., “seeks her sister Partheni Konstantinou, from the village of Atslaga near Samsun. Anyone in possession of information please contact her.” For years people wandered the country, still hoping to trace their loved ones.
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Evicted from their homes, many of them were penniless, with only what they had been able to carry. A journalist was appalled to see newly arrived old men and women dragging their belongings from the docks to the encampments. Another was furious when refugees were evicted from the church of Ayia Paraskevi because the archaeologists wanted the space for a museum: “Thus numerous destitute families are
thrown onto the pavement so that some stones of dubious archaeological value may be placed there.” As so often in the past, churches, mosques and schools were pressed into service, and refugees were crammed in “like sardines.” Local newspapers identified vacant houses to be taken over—“various public buildings on V. Olgas and V. Georgiou,” the Villa Kapanji, the Villa Ismail Pasha on Allatini Street. “7 October 1922: In the stoas of the harbour offices on Salamis street there are 15–20 refugee families who have been abandoned … lying on the cold cement without even bedding.” “26 October 1922: the refugees who remained in the open air, by the quay, fearing they might die of the cold and rain, managed yesterday to transfer themselves to the Ayios Dimitrios quarter, bursting into various Turkish and Greek houses and settling themselves in there. We are informed that with many cafés, churches and cinemas requisitioned, the temporary housing of refugees in them will begin.”
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But as they tried to make a more permanent home for themselves, the refugees found themselves in a bureaucratic labyrinth. They had left their homes so fast they generally lacked the necessary documents to claim compensation. Now they needed a certificate describing the property they had left behind, and they had to make the rounds—this committee, that directorate, tracking down notables from their village—to get their claim certified and declared eligible for some form of paltry remuneration. It was to help with such tasks that an incredible number of refugee associations, guilds and clubs sprang up, providing them with identity cards, property certificates, nationalization papers and—crucially—contacts with politicians. They formed associations—Refugees from the Region of Bursa, the Smyrneans—to stick together, against hostile natives (with whom fights were common, especially in the villages) and against the bureaucracy. In response to a law of July 1923, which decreed that land would only be distributed to legally constituted groups rather than individuals, the main refugee groupings—representing members from Asia Minor, Thrace, the Caucasus and the Black Sea—banded together to form a single umbrella organization, whose political weight was immediately demonstrated in elections, where the majority of the Venizelist candidates were refugees. For the rest of the interwar period and indeed afterwards, refugee votes shaped the city’s electoral profile. But rather like the first generation of Holocaust survivors after 1945, they did not talk much about what they had endured, and it was only much later that their sufferings were officially recognized. In 1986 the Greek government declared a national day
of mourning to commemorate the destruction of Smyrna, and from that point the old silence belatedly began to lift.
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R
ESETTLING THE
C
ITY

C
ONSCIOUS OF THE DANGER
that might be posed to social stability and political order by large numbers of impoverished refugees settling in the towns, the Greek authorities tried to direct the majority to the countryside. With the aid of the League of Nations, a Refugee Settlement Commission began constructing villages and farms, and so-called “refugee fathers” bargained with civil servants in the ministry of agriculture for the land they wanted. Those who came from mountain villages were settled in sensitive border areas, and given financial incentives to remain there. Urban reconstruction, with fewer resources behind it, was a less important consideration—especially for Salonica, which tended to take second place in politicians’ minds behind the more crucially located suburbs of Athens and Piraeus. Yet the demographic impact upon the northern city was far greater than it was around the capital. By 1928 the refugees made up more than one-third of its population. How could an impoverished government, already struggling to rebuild it in the aftermath of the fire, possibly find shelter for all the newcomers?
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