Jerusalem on the Aegean
Philip Manse!
SALONICA: THE CITY OF GHOSTS by Mark Mazower HarperCollins, £25, pp. 525, ISBN 0007120230 ct £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 _For an age of globalisation, the history of cosmopolitan cities can he more instructive than the history of nation states. As Mark Mazower says in this masterly history of Salonica, the first in English, 'different futures require different pasts'. The history of Ottoman cities like Salonica may be especially relevant, since over many centuries — in contrast to the overwhelmingly Christian cities
of the West Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together there, in nearly equal proportions.
Mazower begins his history of Salonica with its sack by the Ottomans in 1430. Thereafter Greeks inhabitants were sold into slavery 'like cattle'; churches sprouted minarets; Muslims moved into the best areas. Jews, however, rather than Muslims, soon dominated the city. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, they had flocked to the Ottoman empire. By 1520 more than half Salonica's 30,000 inhabitants were Jewish. They were the city's 'glory and splendour' — and its most successful merchants. Until the mid-20th century they continued to speak the Spanish of mediaeval Toledo, which was known locally as judezmo, or Jewish. Since Muslims and Christians needed it to do business, they too learnt judezmo. The docks of this Aegean Jerusalem fell silent on Saturday, not Friday or Sunday.
After the prosperity of the 16th century, life in the Ottoman city, Mazower shows, was punctuated by plagues and riots. In 1762 20 per cent of the population died from plague. During Albanian depredations in 1789, the Venetian consul called Salonica 'not a city but a battlefield'. By publicly preaching against Islam in order to oblige Ottoman authorities to execute them, Greek 'witnesses for Christ' sought martyrdom as eagerly as modern suicide bombers. During the Greek revolt of 1821, Muslim notables retaliated by decorating their houses with Greek heads.
The following 90 years, however, were Salonica's golden age, marked by an 'emerging hybrid spirit', a 'happy rapprochement between the races'. Not only servants and employees but also wetnurses and spouses might come from another faith. Christians and Muslims made pilgrimages to the tombs of each other's holy men. There were no exclusively Muslim, Christian or Jewish quarters. French, the language of educated Europe, became the fourth language of the city, after Turkish, Greek and Spanish. During his visit in 1859, it was used by Sultan Abdulmecid I to speak to the city's Jewish and Levantine notables. Both tension and symbiosis marked life in the city's quays and alleys. In 1876, when her relations tried to stop a Greek girl's conversion to Islam, as symbols of Christian power the French and German consuls were murdered by a mob of 'mad wolves'. A few months later, however, the entire city rejoiced in the accession of the liberal Sultan Murad V.
While the rest of the Balkans succumbed to nationalism, and Greek and Bulgarian brigands tried to terrorise local peasants into adopting their nationality, Salonica remained a cosmopolitan island. Coveted by Austria, Bulgaria and Greece, it enchanted the young Ben Gurion — and many other visitors. Dismayed by its lack of enthusiasm for Zionism, however, he soon felt ill at ease and left. When trams were installed in 1893, their Belgian manager remarked that he would not have bought horses to pull them if he had known how cheap manpower was in Salonica. Inevitably the city became a centre of strikes and socialism.
In October 1912 the Greek conquest of Thessalonike, as Salonica now became, was followed by years of strident nationalism. The strange death of the city state meant that, though some in Salonica yearned for one, popular support was weak. Few means of hellenisation were neglected: street names and shop fronts were changed; sometimes people talking French in the streets were assaulted for doing so. After their school was looted, the Bulgarians were the first to flee. In 1917 a fire which destroyed the centre of the Ottoman city was called by the Greek nationalist leader Venizelos 'almost a gift of divine providence'. In 1923 those Muslims who had not already fled were compulsorily exchanged with, and their properties allotted to, Greeks from Anatolia; Salonicans' protest against 'a disgraceful bartering of bodies to the detriment of modern civilisation' had no effect. Once the defining feature of the skyline, in 1925 26 minarets were pulled down by the Greek authorities as symbols of 'frightful slavery'. Greeks were 24 per cent of the population in 1914, 75 per cent in 1928.
In addition to its unfathomable human cost, national homogenisation, as elsewhere, merely replaced one set of problems with another: after 1924 gangs of Anatolian Greek refugees terrorised the city in ways unknown to former minorities. A new kind of barbarism was the deportation of 43,000 Jews to Auschwitz by Salonica's German occupiers in 1943. In the streets of Salonica eye-witnesses saw people fall on each other in order to steal, 'like hyenas on a dead horse'. In contrast to the courageous protests made in Athens, in Salonica the Greek elite was, in Mazower's words, 'frostily detached'. The municipality seized and destroyed the long-coveted Jewish cemetery, one of the oldest and largest in Europe: it is now the site of Thessalonike university. Jewish shops and offices were pillaged. Cut off from its past, although no longer from its hinterland, modern Thessalonike is a city of ghosts, refugees and immigrants.
Author of books on Europe in the 20th century, Hitler's Greece and the Balkans, Professor of History in Columbia and London, Mark Mazower is a convincing, dispassionate narrator, drawing on many new sources: the diary of a Ukrainian refugee in the 1720s; consuls' despatches; the files of the Jewish Museum of Greece. Perhaps more could have been written on the city's role in Ottoman politics. Mustafa Kernal remains its most illustrious son; in 1908-12 it was the driving force of Young Turk coups, congresses and revolutions. Murad V had no 'coronation', nor did his brother Abdulhamid II die on an island in the sea of Marmara. Otherwise this is a brilliant and timely reminder that cities have played as important a role as states in the lives of their inhabitants.
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