Salonica: City of Ghosts. By Mark Mazower. Vintage $16.95 By Adam…

Salonica: City of Ghosts. By Mark Mazower. Vintage $16.95
By Adam LeBor

The Great European Project is running into the sand nowadays. Even the Franco-
German axis, its central bastion, is crumbling under the pressure of resurgent
nationalism. The unruly French are threatening to vote no in the May 29
referendum on whether or not to ratify the European Constitution, which will
form the basis of the continent-wide superstate. Britain and the Czech Republic
are likely soon to follow. Germany complains ever louder about the cost of
supporting the Polish and Slovak economies as these countries race ahead,
attracting a torrent of foreign investment. The nation-state, it seems, remains
robust.

But at a sometimes high price. Its imposition in the former Yugoslavia has been
disastrous, helping trigger the wars of the early 1990s and feeding simmering
ethnic conflicts that could erupt again in Kosovo and Macedonia. Yet fighting
and dying over faiths and flags in the Balkans is a comparatively new
development, as Mark Mazower's timely, magnificent and sometimes
unbearably poignant chronicle of Salonica shows. His account of the (now)
northern Greek port city brings alive a lost world, one with much to teach
contemporary Europe about the nature of identity and nationality. Home for
centuries to Christians, Muslims and Jews, Salonica was a cosmopolitan world
where people of various cultures and religions lived side by side under the
tolerance of Ottoman rule. Even the shoeshine boys spoke half a dozen
languages, from Greek and Turkish to Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). The Sublime
Porte was better grounded in the reality of statehood than its contemporary
Christian rivals. It was easier and more beneficial to let minorities prosper than
persecute them. When in 1492 Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
expelled the Jews, Sultan Bayezid II looked on in wonder: "They tell me that
Ferdinand of Spain is a wise man but he is a fool, for he takes his treasure and
sends it all to me." With the Sultan's blessings, Spain's Jews poured into the
Ottoman lands and soon flourished under Muslim rule. It was a wise as well as
humane decision, for they brought expertise in medicine, science and technology
that helped to revitalize the empire and to fuel the great Ottoman expansions of
the sixteenth century.

Of all the towns in the empire, writes Mazower, Salonica benefited the most. By
1520 more than half of the city's 30,000-strong population was Jewish, and it was
one of the most important ports of the eastern Mediterranean. Under a Muslim
administration and largely Jewish labor force, the city prospered. For the

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Sephardim, Salonica truly was a new Jerusalem. They simply transported
medieval Spain across the waters and re-created it, preserving its dialects, foods
and customs, and worshiping in synagogues named for the lost lands of Aragon
and Catalonia; Mazower has deftly mined local archives and records to bring
forth a rich haul of colorful details about everyday life. Salonica's Jews did not, it
seems, always practice the tolerance they sought. One group of Greeks appealed
to the Ottoman authorities to stop their Jewish neighbors from emptying their
rubbish into the churchyard and mocking them from their windows.

Neighborly spats aside, the city was also a fertile ground for heterodox beliefs
that almost seemed to merge all three faiths. There were Marranos, Jews who
had converted to Catholicism but secretly practiced their ancestral faith at home;
new Christians, who were Jewish by descent but practicing Catholics, both liable
to be dubbed "ships with two rudders" by their contemporaries. In the
seventeenth century Salonica's Jews descended into a kind of collective madness
over their adoration of the false Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, who had preached in the
Marranos' synagogue, at least until he changed his name to Aziz Mehmed Efendi
and converted to Islam. Hundreds of his followers also became Muslims, and
blended the two faiths in a community they called the Ma'min, or faithful. By
1900 Salonica's Judeo-Muslim Ma'min community was 10,000 strong, one of the
most extraordinary footnotes in Ottoman history.

The close proximity of all three faiths made for an atmosphere of religious and
spiritual devotion. Salonica was "covered in a dense grid of holy places," writes
Mazower. The Sufi orders, which helped spread Islam through the Balkans, had
more than twenty shrines and monasteries in Salonica. Their liberal attitudes
toward alcohol, opium and tobacco often brought them into conflict with more
orthodox Muslim clerics. The city's indigenous Greeks fared less well. Salonica's
spiritual guardian, St. Dimitrios, had not saved the city from enslavement by the
Turks. The Christian community was small, impoverished and almost powerless.
The great Byzantine families had mostly left. Salonica was a backwater in
comparison with Athens or Mount Athos. The church was authoritarian,
fractious and disorganized. Many of Salonica's Christians were not even Greeks
but Slavs. Still, the port's growing prosperity made it a magnet for economic
migrants from across the Balkans. Bulgarians and Macedonians, Slavs and
Albanians, flocked to the city. The warlike Albanians were recruited into the
pashas' private militias, raised to counter the threat from the mutinous
Janissaries, the empire's standing army. The Albanians "brought with them an
aggressively uncomplicated approach to life," notes Mazower dryly. Albanian
salutations included: "Eat shit," "I'll fuck your mother," "I'll fuck your wife" and

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even "I'll fart in your nose."

Salonica's pashas, though, had sown dragon's teeth. The Albanians soon turned
on their former masters. When the authorities tried to arrest one troublemaker
called Alizotoglou in 1793, they discovered his house was less a dwelling place
than a military garrison, home to 150 Albanians, all well supplied with food and
arms. Alizotoglou left only after his house was bombarded by cannon fire and
then took hostages with him. The story is eerily prescient of the Kosovo war of
the late 1990s, when Kosovo Liberation Army leaders such as Adem Jashari
operated from walled family compounds in their home villages. Serb forces
attacked the Jashari compound in early March 1998, like their Ottoman
predecessors, bombarding it with artillery. By the end of the day fifty-eight
members of the Jashari clan lay dead, including twenty-eight women and
children.

Salonica, City of Ghosts is peppered with mini-vignettes of fascinating
characters, such as the Ukrainian exile Pylyp Orlyk and a corrupt moneylender
with the unlikely name of John "Jackie" Abbot. Orlyk spent twelve years in
Salonica, and his diary provides a vivid and tantalizing glimpse of life in the
eighteenth-century Ottoman city. Orlyk lived well, hunting partridges, hogs and
hares, and drinking vast amounts with his interpreter and servant, who was
often found sprawled in the gutter after a heavy night. Thus the joys of Salonican
life. The minor perils included indigestion from overindulging, bribery to keep
officials happy and stepping around the dirt and dung that covered the streets.
More serious were the gunfights between the Janissaries and random armed
gangs. Sultan Mahmud II finally solved the problem of the janissaries in 1826 by
massacring them all. Scribes recorded the slaughter as "the auspicious event."

As for Jackie Abbot, he was "Greek by religion, [but] British by nationality."
Abbot was a sort of Salonican Tony Soprano, living in the city's grandest villa,
with a fountain that shot water twenty meters into the air. He started out as a
leech trader, an apt metaphor. Abbot's friends were bribed with diamond-
studded pipes and vast sums of money, his enemies thrown in prison. When in
the mid-nineteenth century Sultan Abdul Mecid visited Salonica, Abbot had the
entire six-mile road to his house covered with carpets, insuring that the imperial
carriage would not have to suffer bumps. Abbot's stove was brought for coffee,
the flames fed by bank notes. But as the Sultan was about to step down onto the
carpet, the skies clouded over and there was a clap of thunder.

The days of the Abbot family, like those of the empire itself, were numbered.

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Ravaged by the Balkan wars of the early twentieth century, the crumbling
Ottoman Empire ceded Salonica to Greece in 1912. The city was renamed
Thessaloniki, and the Muslim exodus began. It was finished in 1923, when
Turkey and Greece "exchanged," or in reality expelled, their Christian and
Muslim populations. Hundreds of thousands of lives were upended in
conditions of great cruelty in the disastrous pursuit of ethnic homogeneity. By
the end of January 1925 there were just ninety-seven Muslims left in the city,
most of them foreign nationals. The Muslims at least made new lives in Kemal
Ataturk's new state of Turkey. Salonica's Jews stayed on under their new Greek
masters--until, in April 1941, the Nazis arrived.

Mazower is a professor of history at both Columbia University and Birkbeck
College, London, whose previous works include the prizewinning Dark
Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century and Inside Hitler's Greece: The
Experience of Occupation 1941-1944. His account of the end of Salonica's Jews
makes for grim reading. He quotes from a heartbreaking series of letters, sent by
a woman called Neama to her sons in Athens as the Holocaust unfolded.
Salonica's Jews were enduring scenes that they had previously seen only in the
cinema and history books, she explained. "For two nights we sat on the bed,
dressed, waiting for the knock on the door to wake us and take us away.
Everyone is selling things in the streets to buy food... The cries, moans and
tragedy cannot be described." While some individuals helped save and shelter
Jews, officialdom stood aside. Most depressing of all was the reaction of
Salonica's commercial classes, whose families had traded with the city's Jews for
centuries but who turned their backs in the Jews' hour of need. In contrast to
Athens, where the Archbishop Damaskinos--and the city's professional
associations--protested against the deportations, the Metropolitan of Salonica,
Gennadios, stayed quiescent. About 45,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, most of
whom were killed soon after their arrival. A unique part of Europe's heritage, a
450-year-old time capsule of medieval Spain, vanished in the smokestacks and
crematoriums. A few hundred survivors returned after the war, to find, as
Mazower notes, a city "transformed and unrecognizable." Yehuda Perahia, a
tobacco merchant, wrote:

      How into rusty iron pure gold has been transmuted!
      How what was ours has been changed into a foreign symbol!...
      I walk through the streets of this blessed city.
      Despite the sun, it seems to stand in darkness.

The Salonica that entranced visitors with its mosques and synagogues, churches

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and dervish tombs, is gone forever. The medieval synagogues named for Spanish
provinces and cities were destroyed in the fire of 1917. Almost all Salonica
mosques and tekkes (Muslim monasteries) were demolished soon after Greece
assumed sovereignty. The Jewish cemetery was flattened, and is now the site of
the university. The Marranos and the Ma'min have vanished. As for Salonica's
Albanians and Bulgarians, its Vlachs and Slavs, who now remembers them? A
dreary modernization has reduced one of the wonders of the world to a drab
seaside metropolis, studded with a few historic monuments. In 1992 the city was
the center of the hysterical state-sponsored campaign to deny recognition to the
former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, which had declared independence.
Greece forced the new state to be known by the cumbersome title of "Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia," or FYROM, to distinguish itself from the
Greek province of Macedonia. Furious arguments erupted over the origin of
Salonica's most famous son: Alexander the Great, son of Philip II of Macedon,
who founded the city in the fourth century BC. Was he Greek or Macedonian?

Does it matter? Not really. Yet the campaign highlighted how uneasily the
modern Salonica sits with its past, like an errant son who destroyed the historic
family home and replaced it with a shopping mall. Today, the Hamza Bey
mosque "stands forlornly in the centre of town like an unwanted guest." The
seafront cafes look out on a wide, traffic-filled avenue that reeks of exhaust
fumes. When, after years of lobbying by the Jewish community, a Holocaust
memorial was finally erected in 1997, it was built not in the city center square
where the Jews were rounded up but on the road to the airport. Ironically, as
Mazower points out, now that the city fathers have wiped out most of Salonica's
architectural gems, there is a new manic drive to preserve what little has
survived. But even a cursory visit, and a stroll along the wide and utterly
unremarkable shopping avenues of the downtown city, show that it is too late.
Only in the upper town, in the Kastra quarter, where winding lanes of gabled
Ottoman houses open onto shady, hidden squares, does something of Salonica's
spirit linger. Kastra has been rediscovered by Salonica's professional classes. Its
houses are being restored, its steep lanes cleaned up. Here the ghost of the Sufi
holy man Mousa Baba is still sometimes seen wandering. For Salonica's dead
outnumber the living, and ghosts are all that is left.




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