Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (46 page)

One way out was emigration. Large numbers of peasants were flooding into the city. But tens of thousands more were going straight on overseas, and more and more of the city’s workers were following them. Reliable statistics do not exist, but the numbers were considerable enough at the turn of the century to start affecting wage levels inside and outside the city. In the early 1900s as wages began to rise, the first successful strikes took place—by tobacco and textile workers, shoe-makers, and workers in the Allatini brickyards. Even so,
few would have predicted the pent-up anger and fierce activism of the labour force which erupted as soon as the Hamidian autocracy was overthrown.
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It was as if the revolution in the summer of 1908 had unleashed the genie of mass political mobilization and brought the city to a standstill. Even before any kind of political movement had been formed, a series of strikes and work stoppages disrupted the summer months: first the port, then the telegraph, the tobacco factories, brewery workers, brick-makers, shop assistants, tailors, carpenters, ironmongers, the railways—one strike followed another. “The strikers rule the city,” noted the French consul.
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Transforming this ferment of grievances into an organized force was complicated by the novelty of the very idea of political mobilization. As was noted in 1910, “there is no public opinion in Turkey, and the indifference of the popular masses to economic and social questions of the greatest importance is the reason for the limited impact of local protests.” Within Bulgarian circles, Russian Marxist and anarchist thought had long been intensively discussed. But leftist discussions spilled over into the Jewish community too. A young Bulgarian Jewish printer and schoolmaster called Avraam Benaroya founded a group called the Sephardic Circle of Socialist Studies which was connected to one of the Bulgarian socialist factions in the city. The fewer the members, the greater the in-fighting: groups coalesced and splintered, denunciations followed proclamations.

The key question of whether workers should be organized on national lines rather than in a single unified movement—exactly the same question which preoccupied socialists in the Habsburg and Russian empires at the same time—caused violent disagreement. Greek workers in the city kept mostly to themselves. The Bulgarian Narrows were ardent internationalists: they stuck to
their
reading of Marx and attacked any recognition of the principle of nationality among workers or any dilution of the coherence of a revolutionary vanguard party. In the middle were Benaroya and his Jewish followers who believed that the idea of federating like-minded activists of different national groups was better suited to the conditions of the empire. “The Ottoman nation is composed of different nationalities living in the same territory and each having its own language, culture, literature, habits and character,” they later explained. “For these ethnic and philological reasons we believed it best to form an organization to which all the nationalities can adhere without having to abandon their language or culture.”
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Events seemed to justify Benaroya’s tactics. His largely Jewish workers’ circle first met above an Albanian taverna and attracted a
membership of thirty activists. But its impact on the city was quickly magnified after a large demonstration of workers took place on 1 May 1909. When the Ottoman government declared that it planned to limit the right to strike and curb trade-union activity, the movement grew. That summer Benaroya’s association held a “great international workers’ fair” in the Beshchinar gardens and sold thousands of tickets to raise money for a newspaper which appeared in Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian and Judeo-Spanish versions on 15 August: the
Amele gazetesi
, the
Efimeris tou ergatou
, the
Rabotniceski vestnik
and the
Journal do laborador
bore eloquent witness to the ethnic complexities of worker politics in Ottoman society.

By now the group had a name—the Workers’ Solidarity Federation. The Ottoman authorities had passed a law banning organizations established on a national basis, but allowed the Federation because it was loyal to the empire and professed cross-confessional unity. However, Greek, Muslim and Armenian workers were gravitating towards their own communal organizations instead. Soon the Greek and Turkish language editions of Benaroya’s paper folded, leaving just the Judeo-Spanish and Bulgarian. Despite the activism of Bulgarian intellectuals, the vast majority of the rank-and-file membership of the Federation were Jews. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that worker internationalism became one of the main political expressions of early twentieth-century Salonica Jewry.
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Initially the movement’s leaders shared in the general enthusiasm for the Young Turks: Vlahov, the Bulgarian, had stood on the CUP list and served in the Ottoman parliament as a deputy until 1912; Benaroya was among the volunteers who marched on Istanbul with the “Army of Freedom” to quash the counter-revolution in 1909. But the amazing success of the workers’ movement, and the display of its power to disrupt the city and force concessions from employers and state alike, soon alarmed the government. It issued a battery of anti-labour decrees, banning popular demonstrations, establishing press censorship (the Hamidian censorship had been scrapped months earlier), and prohibiting strikes in publicly sensitive sectors. As a result, the workers distanced themselves from the CUP. The latter imprisoned Benaroya, and passed a raft of anti-socialist measures and arrests, mostly directed against left-wing Muslim journalists and political activists in the capital.
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On the other hand, the thousands of Jewish workers in the city constituted a social base from which the WSF could not easily be dislodged. And their staunch Ottomanism too was not easy for
the authorities to disavow or ignore. In 1911 when news of the Italian war in Tripolitania arrived, it was the WSF which successfully organized the largest demonstrations in support of the empire: six thousand people attended the first, ten thousand the second. The workers of Salonica heard speeches in favour of the fraternity of working peoples throughout the Balkans, and arguments for confederation as a means of bringing peace to the region. In the summer of 1912, on the eve of the First Balkan War, socialist groups in the region issued a pacifist manifesto. The wars of territorial expansion planned by the empire’s hostile neighbours would “simply change the names of our masters and the degree of oppression.” Only socialist internationalism, they insisted, would respect cultural difference and allow all nations to express themselves. But this vision of an empire ruled in the name of socialism was overtaken by events and eventually forgotten by all except a few scholars of Balkan history. Instead, the defeat of the Ottoman armies in the First Balkan War of 1912–13 meant the triumph of the principle of nationality in southeastern Europe.
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Afterwards, the key figures in Salonica’s political awakening scattered far and wide. In 1913, the CUP assumed power directly in Istanbul: Talaat and Enver led the Ottoman empire into war, presided over the loss of its Arab provinces, and helped organize the Armenian genocide before themselves meeting a violent end. Finance Minister Djavid Bey was hanged in 1926 for his part in a supposed conspiracy to assassinate Ataturk while Emmanuel Carasso, another key CUP member from Salonica, emigrated to Trieste where he died a rich man in 1934. Of the city’s socialists, the former IMRO activist Dimitar Vlahov published articles on Balkan federation from exile in Weimar Germany, while Sefik Hüsnü became the head of the Turkish Communist Party. Benaroya for his part became one of the architects of Greek socialism, instrumental in founding the Greek Socialist Party and the General Trades Union Federation. He remained an influential labour organizer in interwar Salonica, survived German occupation and imprisonment in the Greek civil war, before being exiled to Israel where the old anti-Zionist ran a newspaper kiosk until his death in 1973. Even for Benaroya, a man whose political vision at the start of the century had extended across confessions, languages and states, the forces of nationalism had proved too strong. But the stakes had been clear from the start. “Each of these groups which one calls today ‘Nations’ keeps well away from the others, as if fearing contagion,” the worker’s newspaper he edited had written in 1911. “Is this a good thing or not? This can never be good!”
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P
ART
III
Making the City Greek

14
The Return of Saint Dimitrios

T
HE
B
ALKAN
W
ARS

Come my friends and sit around
And listen to my new song
,
A poem pious and well-composed
Festooned with the flowers of 1912.
Of our Thessaloniki I shall sing
What happened there I’ll set before you
How our Thessaloniki was enslaved
And returned thereafter to her mother’s arms.
It was God’s will, the intervention of the Saints
Which put the Beast so miserably to flight.
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O
NLY A FEW YEARS AGO
, a Greek folk-song collector recorded this lengthy oral epic about the defeat of the Turks. Chanting into the tape-recorder, a couple of women sang how the night before the Greek advance into Ottoman Macedonia during the First Balkan War, the city’s patron saint Dimitrios came to the Greek commander-in-chief, Prince Constantine, in a dream to give him “a lion-heart and courage, and superhuman strategic insight.” Five hundred years earlier the saint had been so disappointed with the sinful behaviour of the city’s Christians that he had abandoned them. Now he was returning, terrifying the enemy with his threats and giving his divine assistance to the Greek army so that it could enter the city in triumph, led by its “new Alexander,” the Prince.

For the Ottoman empire the First Balkan War was an unimaginable disaster. In just six weeks in the autumn and winter of 1912 a coordinated offensive by the Balkan states resulted in the loss of almost all its
European territories, most of which it had held for five hundred years, and brought invading armies to the very edge of the capital itself. But to many Greeks, the incredible string of victories their forces enjoyed—Salonica, the Aegean islands, Epiros—seemed little short of miraculous. “It was unhoped-for in the year 1912,” wrote a pro-Greek band leader from Macedonia in his memoirs, “that there would be a war with Turkey and that we would win.”
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That spring and summer, events had moved very fast. Parts of Ottoman Macedonia seemed about to fall into the hands either of Italy (which had gone to war with the empire over Tripolitania) or of Albanian rebels who were demanding a state of their own. This was perhaps the one threat capable of bringing the Balkan states together, and in a whirlwind of diplomacy, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece signed a series of bilateral treaties and decided upon an autumn offensive against the Ottomans. In September they demanded radical reforms in Macedonia—the appointment of a Christian governor, the creation of a locally recruited militia and a provincial legislature. When to no one’s surprise they failed to get their way, they ignored the Great Powers, who insisted that they should not fight, and declared war.

What no one had anticipated was the extent of their success. The Ottoman forces were beaten back on all fronts. The Bulgarian army invaded Thrace, laying siege to Edirne and threatening the imperial capital itself. The Serbs pushed south into Kosovo and Skopje, reaching as far as Lake Ohrid and Monastir, and then, together with the Montenegrins, besieged Durazzo on the Albanian coast. The Greek navy controlled the Aegean. A few daring Greek aviators flew their “Blériot machines” over Olympos. As for the Greek army, it laid siege to Jannina and, after overwhelming Turkish resistance at Yannitsa, marched unopposed into Salonica just in time to celebrate Saint Dimitrios’s Day.

“It is not a dream. Salonica is truly Greek,” wrote a philhellenic French journalist who had accompanied the army on its march across the Vardar. “Byzantium is awakening once more!” His disbelief was matched by that of many Greeks themselves. After living with humiliation and failure, they now had to adjust to success. “I like this city enormously. I can’t believe it is ours!” was the reaction of one prominent Athens politician, visiting for the first time. Yet as the conquerors awoke from their dreams of Byzantine revival, the challenges ahead sobered them. “The unhoped-for happiness did not cause me the joy I might have expected,” recollected Alexandros Mazarakis-Ainian, one
of the first into the city. “We were hemmed in by uncertainty and wondered what the occupation of the city held in store for us and what the destiny of the Macedonian provinces would be.” The place made some Athenians positively uneasy. Writing home to his wife, a well-connected staff officer called Hippocrates Papavasileiou confessed that “Salonica doesn’t excite me” despite its “beautiful park by the sea with a cinema, music,
café chantant
and restaurant.” Soon his tone became more bitter: “14 May 1913: I am totally fed up. I’d prefer a thousand times to be under canvas on some mountain than here in this gaudy city with all the tribes of Israel. I swear there is no less agreeable spot.” “19 May: How can one like a city with this cosmopolitan society, nine-tenths of it Jews. It has nothing Greek about it, nor European. It has nothing at all.”
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