CITY SNAPSHOTS(1): SALONICA 1908

[This is one of a series describing great cities at a moment of apogee in their histories]

Salonica 1908.

Salonica was always an unusual place and Ottoman Salonica came to embody the easy-going tolerance of life under the latter-day Porte. To the ever-increasing numbers of Western visitors she epitomised the intriguing mysteries of the Levant overlaid on a famed classical past overlooked by nearby Mount Olympus. There was no dominant group. The Ottoman Sunni Muslims (about 25%) monopolised the civil service and the army and were the titular leaders of the city. The Christians, mainly Greek Orthodox but also feuding Bulgarians, (another 25%), once mere landless peasants, were commercially acute, enterprising and some were getting very rich. The largest minority was the Sephardic Jews (35%) descended from the large community which fled persecution in 15^th century Iberia and found a tolerant Ottoman haven. The Jews provided the dock workers and porters, the artisan classes and some very rich families. A unique Salonican group were the Ma’min, (about 5%) originally followers of the mystical Jewish pseudo-Messiah, Shabbatai Zevi, who converted to Islam in 1666. They were more influential than their numbers. Albanians, Serbs, Arabs, Dervishes and Armenians made up the balance.

The city (population 150,000) was remarkably polyglot. The Muslims spoke Turkish and Arabic, the Christians Greek or Slavonic dialects, while the Jews conversed in Judeo-Spanish, mainly derived from Catalan and inaccurately known as Ladino, which strictly was its religious version. They used a Hebrew script. Polite society often spoke French.

Into this rich stew Western influences intruded. Steamships plied their trade with the accessible port and in 1888 the railway at last connected Salonica with Paris. The region’s roads were deplorable, but tobacco factories and textile mills prospered. Western ideas were admired and a revolutionary fervour gripped the Ottoman politicians and army officers. In July 1908, the suspended liberal constitution of 1875 was re-instated and the absolutist powers of the Sultan curtailed.

Sultan Abdul Hamid goes to prayers in the Salonica Mosque in 1908, a finale to his pomp

This constitutional revolution was the work of the Young Turks, many based in the city, including its leader, civil servant Enver Pasha. In the background, a more junior army officer gave his support – Mustapha Kemal, born in Salonica and later founder of modern Turkey.

Imagine the scene in July 1908. The new Constitution was proclaimed and symbolically the Greek Archbishop, the Bulgarian leader and the Mufti embraced on a balcony and called on the populace to do the same in the name of Fraternity. There was in the words of a French officer “indescribable delirium” as the streets filled with flag-waving crowds. A few days later Enver Pasha himself orated on the virtues of cross-confessional Ottoman unity: Citizens! Today the arbitrary ruler is gone, bad government no longer exists. We are all brothers. There are no longer Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, Jews, Muslims – under the same blue sky we are all equal, we are all proud to be Ottomans! A new dawn was apparently breaking.

But the dream was short-lived. The bubbling forces of nationalism could not be contained and the military weakness of the Ottomans attracted the cupidity of the new Balkan states. In 1912 Greece seized Epirus, Crete, the Aegean Islands and most remarkably Salonica itself, without a fight. The Bulgarian army arrived 24 hours later, but earned no great spoils, having to be content with Thrace. The Salonicans, apart from the Greek Orthodox, were not enthusiastic. The Jewish community was much larger and jealous of its privileges, the Bulgarians were discontented and the Muslims feared Christian discrimination. Disastrously in 1914 the Young Turks entered WW1 on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The Ottomans descended into genocide, on the pretext of border security. In 1915-16 some 1.5m Armenians were foully murdered en masse. The Turks fell upon the Pontic and Anatolian Greeks resulting in 1.2m deaths by 1922 and a massive exchange of population between Greece and Turkey under the aegis of the League of Nations. Thousands of Greek refugees moved to Salonica and the demographics finally moved towards the creation of a Greek city. The Muslims were forced to sail to Kemal’s truncated new Turkey, the Ottoman Arab lands lost forever after 1918.

Salonica’s famous Jewish population did not fare well. In 1917 an enormous conflagration destroyed three-quarters of the city, after a French soldier’s camp-fire was upset. The old Jewish quarter was razed, and although eventually rebuilt, many Sephardim saw their future in Paris, New York and a few settled in Palestine. There were still almost 50,000 Jews in Salonica in 1942 – to be rounded up by the Nazi Germans and Austrians and tragically gassed at Auschwitz in 1943; only 1,000 survived, an unspeakable crime.

We are well aware of the difficulty of holding together cities or states of complex ethnicity. Salonica (known as Thessaloniki) with a population of 954,000, is now a handsome city of wide boulevards and sea-side promenades, with important Byzantine remains. Yet she has lost her heady, idealistic flavour of 1908. Greece has won a fine second city but Europe has lost a uniquely balanced civilisation.

SMD

02.06.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016