Review of Mark Mazower, Salonica: City of Ghosts (Harper Perennial, pap. edition, London and New York: 2005).

Today is the anniversary of the first train from Salonika to Auschwitz, the start of a process which ended with the murder of 90% of the 45 000 Jewisn inhabitants of the northern Greek city Thessasalonica. The atrocity is well covered in Mark Mazower's history of the city. I reviewed this book eight years ago, and am posting it here today (16/3/13) in memory of the victims of that atrocity.

 

Visitors to Greece who venture to the second biggest city and northern ‘capital’, Thessalonica, will discover a architecturally extremely modern, if not modernist, and thoroughly Hellenic city. A city moreover which proclaims its Greek antiquity through monuments and myriad displays of ancient stonework. A prominent memorial to the supposed founder Alexander the Great (actually it was his sister and he never visited) can be seen in the central plaza.

 

A discerning visitor who looks carefully will find a holocaust museum which documents the in murder of the local Jewish community by German invaders. The visitor will also find, after much very careful searching, some traces of Muslim Turkish remains. These traces in turn contextualise the second big equestrian statue in the city – that of Prince Constantine who delivered this ancient Greek city of Christians from the infidel yoke in 1912.

 

Mention of Greek Christianity illuminates the other pole of the modernist ideology of Hellenism – the heritage of Byzantium. Medieval Byzantine churches are prominent in Thessalonica, as are other Byzantine ruins and fragments. The cursory visitor thus is left with a clear impression – this is a Greek city, and a Christian city, and it always has been, even when occupied by infidel Turks. And this Hellenism and Christianity, proudly touted as legacies, are wrapped in a modern and modernist package, showing that Greece is a European, not an Oriental, country; it belongs to the West, not the East. As most of modern Thessalonica was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s a clear Cold War text is also present. The east to which Greece did not belong included not only the ‘past east’ of ‘oriental’ Islam, but the ‘present east’ of Slavic anti-Christian communism. Reinforcement for these messages will be found in elaborate public monuments to the 1922 refugees from Turkey and the 1949 expellees from the Crimea, Bessarabia and southern Ukraine. For modern Thessalonica is the place where modern Greece gathered in the descendants of Greek communities more ancient than the polieis of the Peloponnesus – the remnants of the Archaean immigration to the Black Sea and Asia Minor of the seventh century BC - reversed by the ethnic cleansing nationalism of the twentieth century.

 

Mark Mazower, historian of Greece under Nazi occupation, the modern Balkans and of a very insightful history of twentieth century Europe, has turned his eye to one city; a city he first encountered as student backpacker in the 1980s when, turning away from the obvious tourist signposts he found the remains of a different Greece to that constructed by modern Hellenism. As he puts it, this was a Greece “less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures”. What Mazower proceeds to do is to bring this forgotten city, this ‘city of ghosts’ to life.

 

At a recent conference, this reviewer heard a suggestion that history was generally written forwards, to account for and underwrite the emergence and existence of modern identities. What was needed it was suggested, was to write history backwards, to find the identities that have been submerged or lost, written out of history. Mazower has done this with regard to the city to which he refers by the old name, Salonica, for the period from the Turkish conquest in1430 to 1950.

 

As Mazower starts his story, Salonica was under siege. Indeed the city had been occupied previously by Turkish forces, and found the experience on the whole unexceptional. The population were in favour of surrender, the bishop not; and in the inevitable three day sack that followed the population paid the price. After 1430, the population was reduced to a third, living among ruins. The rebirth of Salonica occurred two generations later. Reconstruction had been one of the goals of Sultan Murad from the start, but protection of surviving Christains, their churches and community structure, as well as settlement with Muslims and the foundation of mosques and vakfs (religious, charitable and educational property trusts) had done little to reverse the drastic consequences of conquest. Repopulation, and with it the economic ability of the city to play its appointed role in the Ottoman imperial economy, came after 1492. In that momentous year, Jews were expelled from Spain and Spanish possessions in Italy. (The King of Portugal followed suit about ten years later). Iberian Jews found protection and welcome in Islamic lands (in contrast to the current assumption of eternal hostility between the Abrahamic faith communities). Many were resettled in Salonica, and from the sixteenth century until 1943, Salonica was the largest Jewish city in all of Europe. Indeed in early nineteenth century censuses, Jews accounted for half the population, with Christians in third place. The character of old Salonica was thus irrevocably diverse, with three faiths co-existing. Linguistically it was even more diverse – most Jews were actually Spanish speaking (or Ladino, a dialect of medieval Spanish), although some spoke Portuguese or Italian. About half of the Christians at any one time were Slav speaking, immigrants from the countryside of Thrace and Macedonia. They became Greek speaking after a generation or two of urbanisation. Among Muslims actual Turks were a minority; there were many Albanians, some Slav speakers, (proto Bulgarians mainly, Bosnians came after the Austrian occupation of Bosnia in 1908), Arabs, Circassians, Berbers from North Africa. Black and white slaves were found, as were Armenian and Georgian Christians. Salonica thus looked like a pre modern ‘oriental’ city – religiously, culturally and linguistically diverse – ‘multi-cultural’ in modern parlance.

 

It has become a popular commonplace in current political commentary that multiculturalism breeds hostility and conflict. It is Mazower’s main purpose to prove the opposite by concrete historical example. Occurrences of inter communal violence and hostility were rare. Communities were largely self administering under the Ottoman system and while suspicion and prejudice were present, they rarely boiled over. The administration protected each religion equally, ensuring their places of worship were inviolate, their holy days and festivals licensed, making conversion and intermarriage effectively illegal. Conversion to Islam was always protected, but active proselytisation was frowned upon. Rabbis, imams and priests attended the major festivals of each religion, and called on each other and the Turkish governors to show respect and tolerance. Christians and Jews had responsibility for the upkeep of portions of the walls, and for manning the fortifications in the event of war (which never happened – Salonica’s longest period of peace was 1430 to 1912). Where some churches were converted to mosques, Christians still retained visiting rights to saints’ graves and other holy places, which were generally guarded and maintained by Muslim caretakers, often Sufis.

 

Hidden in this narrative, and subtly communicated with great skill, is Mazower’s account of the downfall of the Ottoman tradition over the nineteenth century. Key aspects here are the invention of a Greek identity attached to the late eighteenth century emergence of a Greek commercial elite, pirates as much as traders. Western intervention in the Greek war of independence led to a privileged position for western powers in Ottoman Turkey, with consuls at Salonica becoming in many ways an alternative administration. The arrival of western capital with shipping lines once the pirates were cleared and the railway built from central Europe, led to commercial prosperity as Salonica became the outlet for the agricultural produce of the Thracian and Macedonian plains. Soon local industry emerged, and old divisions within the religious communities and among them, became transformed into class divisions. While Jews were prominent among the commercial and industrial elite, so were Christians, and the working class remained predominantly Jewish. Muslims were found among the officials and the landowning classes, with the peasantry divided between Muslim and Christian. Against this backdrop nations were invented and the residents of Salonica found themselves wooed by Greek or Bulgarian or Macedonian nationalists, while the Ottoman state sought painfully, in an era of nationalism, to modernise itself into a multinational modern state. Theoretically educated readers will see in this narrative a local study of the incorporation of an old style world-empire into the modern world-system with the consequent peripheralisation that process entailed.

 

Another theme deals with the response of west Europeans to Salonica, both in travel literature and in novels. Here we see a disdain for both medieval Byzantine survivals and anything Turkish. Travellers sought Greek and Christian antiquity (St Paul had founded the church in Salonica, according to Scripture). The actual reality of the city was disdained as dirty, unsanitary, corrupt and at best, picturesque. By the end of the nineteenth century, Salonica was a setting for exotic and erotic novels dealing with love affairs between harem women and western men. The Turk in this literature was transformed from the once feared martial conqueror into a passive, effete, depraved and corrupt figure; only capable of rule by brutal cruelty and too weak to even protect his harem against the charms of western seducers. Mazower does not use the term ‘orientalism’ but readers of Said while see here a confirmation of his analyses of the stereotype, and readers of Bernal will find some interesting examples of the essentially western and racially inspired creation of Hellenism.

 

Old Salonica died in the twentieth century. Readers familiar with east European history will know that the real past of eastern European is one of multiculturalism. That world was destroyed by the invention of nations. The process of nation state building in south east Europe in particular involved war, massacre, terror and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. In the region of Salonica this tragic history began with the operations of the world’s first modern terrorist group, IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, with its campaign of terror against Muslim peasants in the 1870s, which led directly to the infamous “Bulgarian massacres” of 1876 and the 1878 Russo-Turkish war. A partial reprieve for the Ottoman Empire came with the victory of the Young Turk movement in 1908, a modernising, parliamentary movement which sought to build a transnational identity from all groups.[i] Founded in Salonica and supported by people from all communities, the aftermath of the 1908 coup initially brought great enthusiasm for reform; but soon the junta itself fell to the forces of nationalism, this time Turkish. The Balkan war of 1912 saw the occupation of Salonica by Greece. The chaos of the First World War, whose dire impact on Greek politics is well documented by Mazower followed, leaving Salonic under allied occupation. The great fire of 1917 destroyed much of the old town, particularly the Jewish quarter, which allowed for the first spate of modernist rebuilding. The Greek war with Turkey in 1922 led to the first great round of ethnic cleansing with the Muslim population generally classified as Turks (even when they were not) and expelled and the Christian population of Turkey classified as Greeks and resettled in Salonica. Paradoxically the use of the Turkish language, and the survival of Turkish music (in the form of zembetiko) and of food ways, increased after the population exchange, as many so called Greek refugees were Turkish speaking Christians.

 

Greek politics between the wars resembled a state of nearly constant simmering civil war and Mazower is on sure ground in guiding the reader through this maze. He illustrates the rise of extreme right wing politics in Greece in this time, with fascist and anti –Semitic tendencies. These elements were keen to co-operate when the Nazis arrived, and local collaboration, particularly the desire to reappropriate the enormous Jewish cemetery for urban development (it is now the location of the university), played into the hands of Nazi racial policies. Over a matter of a few weeks in 1943 the entire Jewish population – more than 40,000 people - was dispossessed, classified and transported to Auschwitz and to death. Barely 5% of Salonica’s Jews survived the war, compared to 50% in Athens, where the Archbishop specifically spoke out against Nazi policies. Salonica elites by contrast remained silent. Mazower also documents the shameless grab for Jewish businesses, properties and possessions pursued by Greek businessmen and civil servants during and after the war.

 

Mazower achieves four worthwhile objectives in this fine book. He shows that multicultural societies have as much chance of producing civil peace as any other; that the root of many modern tragedies lies in the invention of nationalism; that the Hellenist façade of Thessalonica (and by extension, modern Greece) is built over buried identities for whose demise the current state has some responsibility; and that the old Ottoman empire on the scale of human values, was not such bad place after all.[ii] At a methodological level, the book is a fine of illustration of the ability of a micro scale study to illuminate macro themes. This is an excellent example of a complex story well written, a story worth reading and pondering for its lessons; a fine exemplar of history ‘written backwards’.

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[i] Indeed Salonica was rhe birthplace of Mustapha Kemal, later Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern secular Turkish republic.

[ii] The reviewer is of course fully aware of the Turkish complicity in the 1876 Bulgarian massacres and the massacres of Armenians from 1908 on, culminating in the 1915 genocide. The reference here is to the older tradition.