Mark Mazower - Salonica, City of Ghosts - Christians, Muslims and Jews

Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2004

Copyright © Mark Mazower 2004

Mark Mazower asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007120222

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007383665

Version: 2016-08-24

To Marwa

COVER

TITLE PAGE SALONICA CITY OF GHOSTS Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430–1950

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

LIST OF MAPS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: The Rose of Sultan Murad

1 Conquest, 1430

2 Mosques and Hamams

3 The Arrival of the Sefardim

4 Messiahs, Martyrs and Miracles

5 Janissaries and Other Plagues

6 Commerce and the Greeks

7 Pashas, Beys and Money-lenders

8 Religion in the Age of Reform

PART TWO: In the Shadow of Europe

9 Travellers and the European Imagination

10 The Possibilities of a Past

11 In the Frankish Style

12 The Macedonia Question, 1878–1908

13 The Young Turk Revolution

PART THREE: Making the City Greek

14 The Return of St Dimitrios

15 The First World War

16 The Great Fire

17 The Muslim Exodus

18 City of Refugees

19 Workers and the State

20 Dressing for the Tango

21 Greeks and Jews

22 Genocide

23 Aftermath

CONCLUSION: The Memory of the Dad

GLOSSARY

INDEX

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

The topography of the Balkans.

Inside the Ottoman city.

The first map of the Ottoman city, 1882, showing the new sea frontage.

The late Ottoman city and its surroundings, c.1910.

Area destroyed by the 1917 fire.

After the fire: the 1918 Plan.

The Balkans after 1918.

The 1929 Municipal City Plan.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.

ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities 1

THE FIRST TIME I visited Salonica, one summer more than twenty years ago, I stepped off the Athens train, shouldered my rucksack, and left the station in search of the town. Down a petrol-choked road, I passed a string of seedy hotels, and arrived at a busy crossroads: beyond lay the city centre. The unremitting heat, and the din of the traffic reminded me of what I had left several hours away in Athens but despite this I knew I had been transported into another world. A mere hour or so to the north lay Tito’s Yugoslavia and the checkpoints at Gevgeli or Florina; to the east were the Rhodope forests barring the way to Bulgaria, the forgotten Muslim towns and villages of Thrace, and the border with Turkey. From the moment I crossed the hectic confusion of Vardar Square – ‘Piccadilly Circus’ for British soldiers in the First World War – ignoring the signposts that urged me out of the city in the direction of the Iron Curtain, I sensed the presence of a different Greece, less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures.

The crowded alleys of the market offered shade as I pushed past carts piled high with figs, nuts, bootleg Fifth Avenue shirts and pirated cassettes. Tsitsanis’s bouzouki strained the vendors’ tinny speakers, but it was no competition for the clarino and drum with which gypsy boys were deafening diners in the packed ouzeris of the Modiano food market. Round the tables of Myrovolos Smyrni [Sweet-smelling Smyrna], its very name an evocation of the glories and disasters of Hellenism’s Anatolian past, tsipouro and mezedes were smoothing the passage from work to siesta. There were fewer back-packers in evidence here than in the tourist dives around the Acropolis, more housewives, porters and farmers on their weekly trip into town. Did I really see a dancing bear performing for onlookers in the meat market? I certainly did not miss the flower-stalls clustered around the Louloudadika hamam (known also according to the guidebooks as the Market Baths, the Women’s Baths, or the Yahudi Hamam , The Bath of the Jews), the decrepit spice warehouses on Odos Egyptou [Egypt Street], the dealers still installed in the old fifteenth-century multi-domed bezesten. This vigorous commercialism put even Athens to shame: here was a city which had remained much closer to the values of the bazaar and the souk than anything to be seen further south.