Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (48 page)

Building up a modern bureaucracy would take time, however. There was no direct rail link between Salonica and Old Greece (it only arrived in 1916), and the post which should have taken no more than a day sometimes took weeks or even months. Raktivan remained in ignorance of the negotiations taking place in London and even lacked
the drachmas with which to pay his civil servants. Turkish currency, law, weights and measures continued to be used alongside the Greek for several more years, and it was not until 1915 that the International Financial Control, which had supervised Greek money issue since the bankruptcy of 1897, permitted the National Bank of Greece to issue drachmas to the New Lands in the north. The capitulations were abolished but the “Company”—as the Belgian firm which ran the gas and tram concessions was known—retained its powerful position in the town. The new governor of the northern territories was getting a first frustrating taste of what rule from Athens—by a state at once centralizing and distant—really implied: it was a problem with which his successors, and the inhabitants of the city, would quickly become familiar.

Some elements of Salonica’s Ottoman legacy were easily targeted. War was waged on the fez (though less than a century earlier it had been seen in Ottoman society as a dangerous sign of modernity), and the local authorities instructed railway, tram and electricity managers to dismiss employees who wore it to work. Those who refused Greek citizenship were fired: many Muslims, choosing to remain Ottoman subjects, quit; most Jewish workers conformed. Greek became the language of administration, and Greek customs tariffs replaced the Ottoman. Meanwhile boats arrived daily from Piraeus bringing a new ruling class of policemen, gendarmes, judges and lawyers—the first wave of Greek officialdom. Some came from Athens, many more from Crete and the Peloponnese. Their new posting—hardly a plum—was regarded as tantamount to being “exiled to Bulgaria.” Even so, many settled and put down roots. Eighty years later, Elias Petropoulos noted that “in practice Salonica has been ruled for decades by the Pan-Cretan Brotherhood and the Union of Peloponnesians.”
¹⁷

Changed street names now testified, as an observer ironically put it, to “all the most beautiful glories of Hellenism.” Aristotle, Alexander and the city’s favourite Byzantine emperor—Basil the Bulgar Slayer—were inscribed on the small French-style enamelled plaques. The Hamidié, the main thoroughfare from the earlier phase of Ottoman modernization, and home to most of the city’s consulates and administrative headquarters, was named Union Avenue, then Prince Constantine, then King Constantine, National Defence (twice) and Queen Sofia. Shops signs were re-painted with prominent Greek characters, often in blue and white—indeed many patriotic shopkeepers and householders painted their entire shop-fronts and even the pavement so that the city itself seemed to some “an unreal landscape.” But for
the next few years, more substantial plans for urban renewal remained on paper, building work “started and ended with the baptism of streets” and the roads were paved “with good intentions.” Rainstorms still made it impossible to cross what was now known as Rue Salamina, except on the back of a Jewish porter. The nightwatchmen continued, as in Ottoman times, to make their rounds, and the fire service was still manned by volunteers. Moving from the devolved—even uninvolved—state apparatus that had served the city for centuries to the Prussian-style bureaucracy that liberals like Raktivan believed was appropriate would not be achieved any time soon. The completion of a small new pleasure garden around the White Tower was the most visible fruit of municipal activity. Writing in 1914, an Italian journalist summed up the changes that had taken place in the preceding two years: “There are no more Bulgarians, the
donmehs
have disappeared into their lanes and the cafés of the Upper Town, the Jews have adapted themselves to the new authority, the colonies of remaining Europeans—Italians, French, Germans, keep to themselves … The capitulations have been abolished, and what is worse, so have the foreign mails of the city.”
¹⁸

One important matter
was
quickly seen to, however. Since one could scarcely govern a city whilst remaining in ignorance of its composition and size, Raktivan organized a census, the first of any accuracy since the sixteenth century. Although there had been two more recent Ottoman efforts, no one familiar with the procedures they had employed placed much confidence in their results. The Greek governor created local subcommittees to visit householders, and groups of literate Jews, Muslims and Greeks patrolled their neighbourhoods, knocking on doors (rather than inviting householders to come to them, as had been done in the past). The aims behind the operation were lofty. “As is well known,” wrote the organizers, “the first concern of every civilized State aiming at its overall progress, is to ascertain its population in all its varied aspects.”
¹⁹

In fact, though never published, and soon rendered out of date by huge wartime shifts of population, the 1913 census gives us a first reasonably accurate snapshot of the modern city’s ethnographic composition and a last view of the Ottoman confessional balance which was to vanish in the months and years that followed. The overall population came to 157,889, of whom just under 40,000 were listed as Greeks, 45,867 as “Ottomans,” in other words Muslims, and 61,439 as Jews. The Greek population probably included those street-traders, refugees and others who had entered the city since the previous October,
from Old Greece, Egypt or the Ottoman empire, as well as some who had previously been registered as “Bulgarians.” Among those categorized as “Ottoman” must also have been several thousand refugees from the countryside. The predominance of the Jews is thus strikingly confirmed: there were more Jews in the city than in the whole of Serbia, Bulgaria or Istanbul. “Even today,” wrote an Italian journalist in 1914, “when for three years Greece as master has left no means neglected for Hellenizing Salonica … when 1908 seems so remote in the city’s history, she still at certain moments, almost everywhere gives one the impression of being a strange Jerusalem, very modern, very Macedonian, a little international, but Jerusalem to be sure, because of the great quantity of Jews who inundate her, so much so that they make all the other nationalities of secondary importance.”
²⁰

At this point, more than two-thirds of the inhabitants lived within the old walls; suburbanization was in its infancy. The Upper Town remained, even after 1912, largely Muslim, while much of the lower town nearest the sea was between 60% and 90% Jewish, and the Greeks lived mostly in their traditional quarters on its eastern and western sides. But perhaps more striking and unexpected was the high degree of residential mixing the figures revealed. There were no ghettoes in Salonica and few neighbourhoods belonged exclusively to one religion or another: in fact less than one-third of the city’s inhabitants lived in such quarters (defined as more than 80% of one faith). The tendency to stick together was most pronounced among Muslims, but even so, under half of them lived in exclusively Muslim areas. In short, the census shows how intermingled the religious communities of the late Ottoman city were. Thanks to the remarkable performance of her armies, Greece had required less than three weeks to bring Ottoman rule in Salonica to an end. But after nearly five centuries under the sultans the city would need longer than that to become truly Greek.

15
The First World War

Is she Greek yet, in these days, Salonica? On the new maps, sure; in the colours of the houses and the street signs, yes. But anywhere else? At its heart, the city is not and has never been Greek … This is an international city, par excellence. Or, rather, a denationalized city. Even after its annexation to Greece, the Greeks of Salonica are but a fraction, and not even the largest, of its inhabitants.

A. F
RACCAROLI
(1916)
¹

T
HE
N
ATIONAL
S
CHISM

I
N THE 1940S
a statue of Prince Constantine on horseback was put up on the shady side of Vardar Square. Today buses flash past as they carry passengers from the train station into town. The commander-in-chief of the Greek army is riding in from the western suburbs along the route he led his troops when they made their triumphant entry in 1912. Perhaps half a mile away along the central thoroughfare, not one hundred yards from Sultan Murad II’s
hamam
, stands another statue, this time of the charismatic Greek prime minister Venizelos. The man who started out as a rebel leader in Ottoman Crete, and then became Greece’s most visionary and controversial statesman, the architect of both its domestic modernization and external expansion, bestrides the main square in the heart of the city, stepping forward confidently and looking down towards the sea. The distance between the two men is not accidental. Constantine and Venizelos acted in partnership as Greece’s military and diplomatic leaders during the Balkan Wars and continued to do so when Constantine became king in 1913 after
his father’s assassination. But the outbreak of the First World War the following year led to an irreparable breach between them. King Constantine was convinced of the superiority of German arms and wanted Greece to remain neutral; Venizelos, equally convinced that the Entente would triumph, argued for intervention alongside the British and French. Their clash threw into question the constitutional position of the Greek monarchy and plunged the country into the worst political crisis of its history. Eventually the Entente powers intervened with little regard for the niceties of international law, and in 1917 Constantine was forced into exile. Salonica itself played no small part in these events for in 1916 Venizelos formed his own provisional government there, and the city’s rivalry with Athens took on a deadly new meaning.

B
RITAIN AND FRANCE
had done their bit to contribute to the imbroglio. When the Ottoman empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, they sent their own forces into the Aegean. In early 1915, they tried to attack Istanbul by sea, and when that failed, by land, via the Gallipoli peninsula. Nearly a year later, they were still confined to their beach-heads as Ottoman troops, led by Mustafa Kemal, blocked the way. Seeking to extricate their forces without abandoning their entire position in the eastern Mediterranean, officials in London and Paris debated the strategic merits of Salonica. Here, some argued, was a convenient port at which to disembark the troops from Gallipoli: from there they could bring aid to their hard-pressed Serbian allies, who had already rebuffed two Habsburg attacks. A waste of time and lives, rejoined those for whom it was axiomatic that the war would be decided on the Western Front. While they dithered, Germany and Austria decided to eliminate Serbia as a military threat, and signed a secret agreement with Bulgaria. At the end of September 1915, the Bulgarians mobilized their forces for the impending joint offensive.

Facing disaster, the Entente decided to compromise and land a small force at Salonica to march north to help the Serbs. Venizelos welcomed the plan. On 3 October he confidentially told the British and French ambassadors they could use Salonica, even though Greece was still formally neutral. At the same time, confusingly, he covered himself against his domestic opponents by issuing a formal protest. The king was not taken in and on 5 October, as the first contingent of Allied troops sailed into the harbour, forced his prime minister to resign. Brigadier-General Hamilton, commander of the advance party of
the British Salonika Force, was understandably baffled by events. Sitting amid his baggage in the Hotel de Rome, he tried to work out what to do next. “Damn. What the devil have they sent us here for?,” he muttered to a fellow-officer. “Here I am—and not a word of instructions. What the devil do they want me to do?”
²

Constantine’s sympathies were certainly not with the Entente. Greek officials gave the Entente troops a frosty welcome, and allowed them to camp on a patch of marshy ground several miles outside the city along the Langada road. Later they ceded the use of the port, and grudgingly made the post, telegraph and railways available. But it was a tense and anomalous situation: the Greeks felt they were being forced into the war against their will, and the consuls of the Central Powers remained at liberty within the city. Much of the population was more sympathetic to them than to the Entente and an army of spies monitored every movement of the British and French troops.

Barely two months later, things got even worse: in the winter of 1915 the Serb army was pushed back over the snow-bound mountains of Montenegro to the Adriatic sea, Serbia was occupied by the Central Powers and the original reason for sending British and French soldiers to Salonica vanished. The units that had gone north returned, and relations between them and the Greek authorities deteriorated. Once Bulgarian troops had invaded Yugoslav Macedonia, nothing seemed to prevent them descending on Salonica too. They were only six days from the city and could probably have taken it had the Germans not vetoed the idea. Berlin knew that both the Bulgarians and the Austrians coveted Salonica, and they had no intention of allowing their allies in the Balkans to quarrel with each other over it.
³

The British dithered, but the French were determined to stay. Christmas 1915 saw all the remaining troops at the Dardanelles evacuated to Salonica, and within a fortnight one hundred and fifty thousand men had landed there. Outside the city they built up a proper ring of defences; inside, General Maurice Sarrail, the French commander, decided to throw international protocol to the winds. Following a Zeppelin attack, he arrested the consuls of the enemy powers and shut their agents and spies in the mouldering dungeons of the old fortress; these were acts appropriate to a colonial or occupying force rather than an uninvited guest in a neutral state. Next he seized the fort that guarded the entrance to the bay.