Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (49 page)

The French and British governments protested they had no intention of restricting Greece’s sovereignty, but this was only because
they still hoped to persuade Constantine to come over to their side. Yet there was little chance of this happening, and the king had even threatened that if their troops did not leave Salonica, he would order the Greek army to allow the Bulgarians in. Here he over-reached himself, for this turned his constitutional dispute with Venizelos into a question of Greece’s territorial integrity and national honour. Rolling back the victories of 1912–13 was something not even loyal Greek officers could easily accept and voices of dissent were soon heard in the ranks. In January 1916, anti-royalist posters appeared on the streets. And in March, the Cretan gendarmerie—traditionally loyal to their fellow-Cretan Venizelos—declared themselves ready to support an insurrection against the king.

With the arrival of spring, the conflict came to a head. Constantine—who had stood firm against Bulgarian pressure in 1912–13—actually carried out his threat and Bulgarian and German troops were allowed to take over Greek border fortifications without a fight, enabling them to occupy eastern Macedonia. Most of the Greek Fourth Army Corps was taken prisoner. But would the Bulgarians stop there, or were all the New Lands gained for Greece four years earlier now at risk? In Salonica, rumours ran riot—the Germans were coming down from Monastir; another three days and they would wipe out the Franco-British force. Outraged at Constantine’s action, the Entente demanded the immediate demobilization of the Greek army.

On 3 June 1916, Constantine’s birthday, Sarrail declared martial law in Salonica. French troops trained their machine guns on the town hall and took over the main government buildings. What price Greek sovereignty now? Barely four years after the ending of Ottoman rule, the city was once again effectively under military occupation. Noticing a Greek sentry missing outside the White Tower, a member of Sarrail’s staff wrote that he saw “vanishing thus simply one of the last vestiges of Greek sovereignty in Macedonia … just as one had seen so many go before it.” “Whatever happens,” confided one official to a journalist, “we will not see Salonica in Greek hands any more.” “It is a city with a great future,” wrote an experienced British commentator at this time. “But no one knows what that future will be.”
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It was this alarming prospect that impelled Venizelos’s supporters to act. There had been demonstrations as the Bulgarians’ entry through the Rupel Pass became known, denunciations of the government’s policies and cries of “Long Live Venizelos!” In the summer, news reached Salonica of the way the Fourth Army Corps, known for its
Venizelist sympathies, had been abandoned to its fate. Following angry speeches in the gardens by the White Tower, a committee of army officers raised a volunteer force, made up mostly of Cretan gendarmes and Greek refugees from Asia Minor, and soon claimed a strength of 1400–1500 men. On 30 August 1916, the pro-Entente “revolution” finally broke out and Macedonia was declared “independent” of the Athens government. Token resistance by royalist officers in the city was easily crushed. Several thousand men who had fled Cavalla to escape the Bulgarians joined the ranks of the self-styled new Venizelist Army of National Defence. In early October, Venizelos himself arrived in the city—having journeyed by sea to raise support in Crete and the eastern Aegean—and he immediately established a provisional government of National Defence to control the city and its hinterland. More troops arrived and a Greek battalion was established and left for the Struma front. Ministers were appointed, and political opponents thrown into prison. By the end of 1916, Greece had two governments and two armies: the “Greece of Salonica” faced the “Greece of Constantine.”
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T
HE
C
ITY AND THE
R
EVOLUTION

B
UT THESE FRACTIOUS TWISTS
and turns left much of the city’s population unmoved. Antoine Scheikevitch, a French intelligence officer serving Sarrail, was struck by the locals’ passivity: “Nothing in the attitude of the Salonican population allowed one to suppose that it was capable of the slightest gesture which could do violence to the fatal course of History.” The Jewish community at this stage was largely for the Central Powers, Muslim residents tended secretly to support the Ottoman empire, and many Greeks remained loyal to the king, whom they still thanked for the glorious victory of 1912. People generally were tired of war.

Watching the brief stand-off between the Venizelists and their opponents, a British war correspondent was perplexed to see “how little attention the ordinary population of Salonica paid to these happenings. They went streaming past on foot and in trams along the street at the bottom of the parade-ground, hardly turning their heads to notice the blue-coated revolutionaries and the khaki-coated royalists facing each other with arms in their hands at the side of the street. A population,” he concluded, “that has seen so many uprisings and disorders within the last few years could hardly be expected to give great attention to so haphazard a bickering as this.”
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Sometimes it all seemed rather like a scene from an operetta. At the party he attended to celebrate the success of the revolution, in the Beau Rivage restaurant, Scheikevitch noted the portraits of King Constantine and Queen Sofia turned to the wall, and pictures of Venizelos, cut out of the local newspapers, pasted on the back. The writer William McFee thought the whole affair resembled a “soap opera.” Venizelos himself could see the humorous side. “Well, Mr. Wratislaw, here I am again; in revolt as usual,” he remarked wrily to the British consul, an old friend, who had known him since his days as an insurgent in Crete fighting against the Turks.
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Yet the stakes were high. By providing a diplomatic fig-leaf for the Entente presence in Greece, Venizelos aimed to give his country a voice when the spoils of war were eventually divided up. And there was appreciable military assistance too: his provisional government eventually sent two hundred thousand recruits to the front. From this point of view, Scheikevitch, for all his sneering dislike of “the immense buffoonery” of “the Venizelist masquerade,” surely hit the nail on the head. Criticizing his fellow-Frenchmen for feeling the need to take sides between Venizelos and the King, he pointed out that both men “sought the same goal—the realization of a Greater Greece. The Venizelist revolt was necessary to preserve Greek control over a Macedonia which threatened to escape them”; the “Army of M. Venizelos is destined much less to fight than to permit the servants of the “Great Idea” to count in the decisions of the arbiters of the peace.” Initially merely tolerated by the Entente powers, and scarcely encouraged even to build on his position, Venizelos’s patience was eventually rewarded by full international recognition at the start of January 1917. Six months later, King Constantine was forced to abdicate and Venizelos left the Macedonian capital for Athens again. With the “union of the two Greeces,” Salonica’s “short heyday” in the political limelight came to an end. But the political consequences for Greece were lasting, and the so-called “national schism” divided royalists and republicans for many years.
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T
HE
A
RMY OF THE
O
RIENT

T
HE ARRIVAL OF THE ARMY
of the Orient—or as the British termed them back home, the “Gardeners of Salonica”—transformed the city into “one of the busiest hives of humanity in the world.” “A magic wand,” wrote a local journalist, “seemed to have awakened from its sleep this city which had enjoyed calm and a perfect tranquillity.”
Between 1912 and 1916, an influx of Greek refugees, officials, street-traders and businessmen had already lifted the population to close to 170,000. With several hundred thousand soldiers soon camped in and around it, Salonica’s population more than doubled in just over a year. In this period of “feverish activity,” wrote a British journalist, “the great transports that came into the splendid bay discharged troops or munitions daily. There were docks, camps, offices, transport, telephones, dumps, hospitals.” By the summer of 1916, it struck him as “probably the most crowded city in the universe.” Demetra Vaka, a Greek writer who knew the city well from prewar visits, could scarcely recognize it in its new incarnation: “The amount of traffic was incredible to me, who had last seen the city and the bay when it seemed to have been left over, asleep from the Middle Ages. It was now a new city, in which I was completely lost and in which nothing looked familiar.”
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The war accelerated the growth and expansion of settlements where ten years before there had been estuarial marshlands, abandoned fields and swamp. A French officer arriving by sea in 1917 was startled to discern—on either side of the minarets and city walls of the old town—“Allied camps which extend along the horizon into infinity … thousands and thousands of marabouts and tents which look like white points under the burning sun.” To the west, on the edges of the Vardar plain, the troops were housed in wooden barracks and yellow-brown canvas tents. A new “Avenue de la Base” was cut from the quays directly to the Vardar Gate, where the unprecedented traffic was controlled by British military policemen. Beyond lay fair stalls, cafés and military canteens, then a settlement of Serb refugees, another straggling row of small shops, the Italian camp and the original encampment of Zeitenlik itself—“an entire city of wood and canvas.” “The immense undulating district between Zeitenlick and Salonika is peopled with an army,” a doctor wrote home. “Formerly it was a desert. Now there are fantastically long lines and groups of tents—towns under canvas; there are masses of munitions, a conglomeration of motor cars of every model and form, a hundred motor-ambulances in a line, rows of wagons thirty or forty deep.” To the east, beyond the cemeteries and the villas and tree-lined boulevards of Kalamaria, lay the aerodromes, the military hospitals, the Anzac camps amid the woods by the shoreline and the British staff headquarters in the Depot and on the slopes of Mount Hortiatis. By night, their lanterns shone upon what one described as “the Lilliputian, ephemeral and powerful city of an army.”
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To an already multi-lingual town, the newcomers added numerous new shades and tongues. Even today visitors to the military cemetery at Zeitenlik—now hard to locate amid the urban sprawl of postwar tenements—will find the remains of the hundreds of French Senegalese troops who died there of malaria. Both the British and French armies included colonial units drawn from Africa, Asia and the Dominions. Vietnamese tents were pitched just behind the White Tower, and the red-fezzed Senegalese lodged in the suburb of Karagatsia. There were Italians, Russians—fifteen thousand of whom landed in 1916, just before revolutionary slogans started circulating among them—Albanians and the remnants of the Serb army, led by the ageing King Peter. Off-duty, they crowded together in the narrow streets by the waterfront. Weaving their way amid the street-sellers, they shopped for trinkets, or muscled their way to a table at Floca’s, Roma or the Bristol. On the Rue Venizelos—formerly Sabri Pasha—in the early evening where “the agitated fever among the main cafés was so intense that one could not move”—one discerned “many hundreds of warriors gathered festively round those little tables. French, Russians and Cossacks, Italians, British, Serbian, French colonials, Senegalese, Zouaves, and men from Madagascar—Indians, Annanese, Albanians, Macedonians and Greeks” in a kaleidoscope of bemedalled uniforms.
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The city itself bemused the soldiers with its ambiguities and its sheer commercialism. One saw it as a “coquette” surrounded by cemeteries. “She babbles all the tongues of Europe and speaks none of them aright,” wrote the novelist William McFee. “She has nothing to give but death, yet the nations fling themselves upon her.” Other, less literary types, were not so melodramatic. In the best-selling epic parody of
Hiawatha
—“Tiadatha”—which an officer in the 6th Wiltshires wrote while there:

Tiadatha thought of Kipling
,
Wondered if he’s ever been there
Thought: “At least in Rue Egnatia
East and West are met together.”
There were trams and Turkish beggars
,
Mosques and minarets and churches
,
Turkish baths and dirty cafés
,
Picture palaces and kan-kans:
Daimler cars and Leyland lorries
Barging into buffalo wagons
,
French and English private soldiers
Jostling seedy Eastern brigands.
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And, for the majority of working-class recruits, war provided their first opportunity to travel. “From the boat deck, the rising of the morning was a very lovely sight,” wrote Ned Casey, an Irish working-class boy from Canning Town, six decades later, “so different to the Albert Dock.” The contrast with the “cold hard world” of East London hit him at once, as he caught sight of

a great big bearded man, his legs scraping along the ground, riding a very small Donkey, while his woman with a bit of rope over her shoulder seem[ed] to drag the old [thing] along. I had pictures in my prayer book that looked exactly like the people I saw in this Greek City. I knew that our Lord, who was a carpenter, had a donkey but he let his wife who was the Virgin Mary ride the Donkey. All my Mates remarked look at that lazy bugger, he ought to be ashamed of himself, treating a tart like that. Christ if that bloke did that along the Barking he would be pinched, and the Cockney Tarts would cut his love affair off. I was to see many such sights while stationed in Greece.
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