Posted on 05/07/2005 11:19:27 PM PDT by Destro
May 8, 2005
'Salonica, City of Ghosts': Edge City
By ROBERT D. KAPLAN
IN the 1980's, with cold war divisions having cut Greece off from its Communist neighbors, the northern city of Salonika was a sterile panorama of apartment buildings with tacky Greek signage -- so thoroughly monolingual that when I went there I saw no reference to its multiethnic past. The Jewish cemetery, torn up under the Nazis in 1942, lay beneath the Aristoteleion University without a marker to venerate it. As for the Muslim Turks and Orthodox Christian Bulgarians who once had lived there, if I or any other journalist mentioned their history in a dispatch, it brought a rebuke from the Greek Foreign Ministry. The building of a national consciousness in an ethnically riven region meant facts that could be admitted privately could not be stated publicly.
But with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the weakening of borders in the Balkans, the veil rose on Salonika's intercommunal heritage. In ''Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950,'' the Columbia University professor Mark Mazower attempts ''to see the experiences'' of competing ethnic groups ''within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative,'' that is to say, from no particular point of view except that of the empathetic observer. For Mazower, the author of a previous history of the Balkans, this project is part of a natural progression: for over half a millennium -- until the cold war -- Salonika was the ultimate urban melting pot, a place where Europe met the Middle East. Mazower has succeeded so well at his task that scholars of all nationalities and religions will refer to this book as their principal source on the city.
Salonika's initial character was Byzantine -- a synthesis of imperial Rome, the Greek language and the Orthodox Christian faith. In the late sixth century came an infusion of Slavs, who would later convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. The next big upheaval was the advance of the Ottoman Turks into the Balkans from Anatolia in the 14th century. But as Mazower observes, the Turks threatened the Greeks of Salonika less than did the longstanding enmity of Roman Catholic Europe. After all, the faith of these Ottoman warriors, he says, was a ''kind of border religion'' -- a variant of traditional Islam -- that was ''surprisingly open'' to Christianity, whereas the Catholic sacking of Constantinople in 1204 was so brutal as never to have been forgotten. In fact, when the Turks first captured Salonika in 1387, the transition was a peaceful one. Unfortunately for the Greeks, setbacks elsewhere forced the Turks to withdraw from the city and reconquer it in a more savage manner in 1430. Though the reconquest set the stage for a severe Islamization of Salonika, Mazower's recounting shows that if the circumstances had been slightly different -- if the Greeks had not allied themselves with the Venetians -- Greek-Turkish enmity might never have developed.
A further blow to Salonika's Greeks came in 1492, with the expulsion of the Jews from Catholic Spain, and the invitation offered them by the Turkish sultanate to settle in its domain. While there were no Jews on the population register in 1478, by the early 1500's they were Salonika's largest religious group. Mazower writes of Salonika's Greeks that ''it cannot have been easy living as a minority in the city they regarded as theirs. Jewish children laughed at the Orthodox priests.'' This is typical of Mazower's style, which is dry, at times academic, but never without compassion. He makes one see things through the eyes of a Greek on one page, a Jew or Turk on another. This can be said to be the book's triumph: by the time the reader is about to embrace the suffering of one group, Mazower advances the narrative to the viewpoint of another.
It was the Ottomans' lazy imperial manner -- their very lack of concern with ''policing people's private beliefs'' -- that provided enough communal autonomy for what Mazower calls a ''dense grid of holy places.'' Yet this freedom came at a cost: rampant criminality, caused particularly by Albanian brigands and Turkish janizaries.
In the early 19th century Salonika's messy dynamism started to slow down -- as the multiethnic Ottoman Empire began to give way to a world of monoethnic nation-states. This decline provides Mazower with the heart of his message; that political modernization, as necessary and inevitable as it was, bore distinctly mixed and bloody results in the Balkans, where suddenly each national group had to battle over who owned what, and where.
Indeed, as the narrative progresses, the tragedies increase. The Greek War of Independence from Turkey, fought mainly to the south in the Peloponnesus, led in 1821 to grisly Turkish massacres of Greeks in Salonika. Toward the end of the 19th century came the struggle over the fate of Macedonia, an ill-defined region with Salonika as its main port; the issue split the Orthodox Christian community into competing national groups of Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. The departure of the Turks after World War I, coupled with a fire in Salonika's urban core in 1917, led to a spate of rebuilding that hastened the re-Hellenization of the once-Greek city. Hellenization became so extreme, Mazower tells us, that the city's minarets were leveled. And then, with the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-23, the remnant of Salonika's Turkish population fled to Turkey, while Greek refugees from Anatolia arrived daily in what became an enormous exchange of refugees. Mazower says that the departure of the city's Muslims in the 1920's presaged the murderous ethnic cleansings of the 1990's.
Finally, there were Salonika's Jews. The Nazis deported them en masse in the first half of 1943, and within a few hours of their arrival at Auschwitz, 450 years of Judeo-Spanish civilization in Salonika came to an end. Thus was born the paved-over city I found in the 1980's, which Mazower, with the thoroughness of an archaeologist, digs up in his text.
Near the end of the book, he recounts the story of a Jewish survivor who returned to Salonika. Sitting on his hotel balcony looking out over the sea, he smokes cigarette after cigarette to hold back the tears. A Greek Orthodox friend finds him near midnight and says, ''I understand you, Jacques, you don't really know anymore where to go in Salonika, the city where you once knew every stone.''
And yet history never ends in Salonika. Both refugees and international relief workers poured in during the Balkan cataclysms of the 90's, at more or less the same time that the city's Greek businessmen were sweeping through the former Communist nations to the north. Because of its geographical proximity to other countries, Salonika can't help becoming more cosmopolitan. In this way, it could be a metaphor for what may yet unfold throughout the entire Middle East, where the crackup of cold-war-era dictatorships could unleash forces that both weaken states and accelerate the movement of people and ideas. Brutal central control would no longer issue from Damascus and Baghdad, even as old caravan cities like Aleppo in northern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq re-established links with towns in neighboring states. Likewise, Hellenic culture could seep back into the Balkans. Simultaneously, the frontier city of Salonika could increasingly differentiate itself from purely Greek Athens. The past is dead. Long live the past.
Robert D. Kaplan, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of ''Balkan Ghosts'' and ''Mediterranean Winter.''
First Chapter
'Salonica, City of Ghosts'
By MARK MAZOWER
Published: May 8, 2005
Conquest, 1430 Beginnings
Before the city fell in 1430, it had already enjoyed seventeen hundred years of life as a Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine metropolis. Sometimes it had flourished, at others it was sacked and looted. Foreigners had seized it and moved on. Throughout it remained a city whose inhabitants spoke Greek. But of this Greek past, only traces survived the Ottoman conquest. A few Christian survivors returned and saw their great churches turned into mosques. The Hippodrome, forum and imperial palace fell into ruins which gradually disintegrated and slipped beneath the slowly rising topsoil, leaving an invisible substratum of catacombs, crypts and secret passages. In a very different era, far in the future, archaeologists would assign new values to the statues, columns and sarcophagi they found, and new rulers-after the Ottomans had been defeated in their turn-would use them to reshape and redefine the city once more. One thing, however, always survived as a reminder of its Greek origins, however badly it was battered and butchered by time and strangers, and that was its name.
Salonicco, Selanik, Solun? Salonicha or Salonique? There are at least thirteen medieval variants alone; the city is an indexer's nightmare and a linguist's delight. "Is there really a correct pronunciation of Salonika?" wrote an English ex-serviceman in 1941. "At any rate nearly all of us now spell it with a 'k.'" His presumption stirred up a hornet's nest. "Why Saloneeka, when every man in the last war knew it as Salonika?" responded a certain Mr. Pole from Totteridge. "I disagree with W. Pole," wrote Captain Vance from Edgware, Middlesex. "Every man in the last war did not know it as Salonika." Mr. Wilks of Newbury tried to calm matters by helpfully pointing out that in 1937 "by Greek royal decree, Salonika reverted to Thessaloniki." In fact it had been officially known by the Greek form since the Ottomans were defeated in 1912.
It is only foreigners who make things difficult for themselves, for the Greek etymology is perfectly straightforward. The daughter of a local ruler, Philip of Macedon, was called Thessaloniki, and the city was named after her: both daughter and city commemorated the triumph (niki) of her father over the people of Thessaly as he extended Macedonian power throughout Greece. Later of course, his son, Alexander, conquered much more distant lands which took him to the limits of the known world. There were prehistoric settlements in the area, but the city itself is a creation of the fourth-century BC Macedonian state.
Today the association between the city and the dynasty is as close as it has ever been. If one walks from the White Tower along the wide seafront promenade which winds southeast along the bay, one quickly encounters a huge statue of Megas Alexandros-Alexander the Great. Mounted on horseback, sword in hand, he looks down along the five-lane highway (also named after him) out of town, towards the airport, the beaches and the weekend resorts of the Chalkidiki peninsula. The statue rises heroically above the acrobatic skateboarders skimming around the pedestal, the toddlers, the stray dogs and the partygoers queuing up for the brightly lit floating discos and bars which now circumnavigate the bay by night. It is a magnet for the hundreds who stroll here in the summer evenings, escaping the stuffy backstreets for the refreshment of the sea breeze as the sun dips behind the mountains.
But in 1992, after the collapse of Yugoslavia led the neighbouring republic of Macedonia to declare its independence, Alexander's Greek defenders took to the streets in a very different mood. Flags proliferated in shop-windows, and car stickers and airport banners proclaimed that "Macedonia has been, and will always be, Greek." Greeks and Slavs did battle over the legacy of the Macedonian kings, and Salonica was the centre of the agitation. In the main square, hundreds of thousands of angry protestors were urged on by their Metropolitan, Panayiotatos (His Most Holy) Panteleimon (known to some journalists as His Wildness [Panagriotatos] for the extremism of his language). The twentieth century was ending as it had begun, with an argument over Macedonia, and names themselves had become a political issue in a way which few outside Greece understood.
The irony was that Alexander himself never knew the city named after his half-sister, for it was founded during the succession struggle precipitated by his death. He had a general called Cassander, who was married to Thessaloniki. Cassander hoped to succeed to the Macedonian throne and having murdered Alexander's mother to get there, he founded a number of cities to re-establish his credentials as a statesman. The one he immodestly named after himself has vanished from the pages of history. But that given his wife's name in 315 BC came to join Alexandria itself in the network of new Mediterranean ports that would link the Greek world with the trading routes to Asia, India and Africa.
As events would prove, Cassander chose his spot well. Built on the slope running down to the sea from the hills in the shadow of Mount Hortiatis, the city gave its inhabitants an easy and comforting sense of orientation: from earliest times, they could see the Gulf before them with Mount Olympos across the bay in the distance, the forested hills and mountains rising behind them, the well-rivered plains stretching away to the west. Less arid than Athens, less hemmed in than Trieste, the new city blended with its surroundings, marking the point where mountains, rivers and sea met. It guarded the most accessible land route from the Mediterranean up into the Balkans and central Europe, down which came Slavs (in the sixth century), and Germans (in 1941) while traders and NATO convoys (on their way into Kosovo in 1999) went in the other direction. Its crucial position between East and West was also later exploited by the Romans, whose seven-hundred-kilometre lifeline between Italy and Anatolia, the Via Egnatia, it straddled.
Poised between Europe and Asia, the Mediterranean and the Balkans, the interface of two climatic zones brings Salonica highly changeable air pressure throughout the year. Driving winter rains and fogs subdue the spirits, and helped inspire a generation of melancholic modernists in the 1930s. The vicious north wind which blows for days down the Vardar valley has done more damage to the city over the centuries than humans ever managed, whipping up fires and turning them into catastrophes. A bad year can also bring heavy falls of snow, even the occasional ice in the Gulf: freezing temperatures in February 1770 left "many poor lying in the streets dead of cold"; in the 1960s, snowdrifts blocked all traffic between the Upper Town and the streets below. Yet the city also enjoys Mediterranean summers-with relatively little wind, little rain and high daytime temperatures, only slightly softened by the afternoon breeze off the bay.
This combination of winter rains and summer sunshine makes for intensive cultivation. Apricots, chestnuts and mulberries grow well here, as do grains, potatoes, cucumbers and melons. Fringed now by the Athens motorway, vegetable gardens still flourish in the alluvial plains-"our California," a farmer once happily told me. "There is excellent shooting in the neighbourhood," noted John Murray's Handbook in 1854, "including pheasants, woodcocks, wildfowl etc." Cutting wide loops through the fields the Vardar river to the west runs low in summer, sinuous and fast in the winter months, too powerful to be easily navigable, debouching finally into the miles of thick reedy insect-plagued marshes which line its mouth. All swamp and water, the Vardar plain in December reminded John Morritt at the end of the eighteenth century of nothing so much as "the dear country from Cambridge to Ely." For hundreds of years it emanated "putrid fevers," noxious exhalations and agues which drove horses mad, and manifested themselves-before the age of pesticide-in the "sallow cheeks and bloodless lips" of the city's inhabitants.
"From water comes everything" runs the inscription on an Ottoman fountain still preserved in the Upper Town. Fed by rivers and rains and moisture rising from the bay, water bathes the city and its surroundings in a hazy light quite different from that of parched Attica, softer, stranger and less harsh, shading the western mountains in grey, brown and violet. After days of cloudy and stormy weather, the Reverend Henry Fanshawe Tozer realized "what I had never felt before-the pleasure of pale colours." Artesian wells are dug easily down to the water table which sits just below the surface of the earth, and there are plentiful springs in the nearby hills. Winter rains have etched beds deep into the soil on either side of the town, torrents so quick to flood that well into the nineteenth century they would carry away a horse and rider, or sluice out the poorly buried bones of the dead in the cemeteries beyond the walls.
From earliest times, too, fresh water has been channelled through fountains, aqueducts and underground pipes, attracting the rich and the holy, plane trees, acacias and monasteries, wherever it bubbles to the surface. Archaeologists have traced the remains of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman mills which dotted the water-courses leading down into the city's reservoirs. Until the 1930s, villagers on nearby Mount Hortiatis produced ice from water-bearing rocks in the thickly forested slopes above the town, kept it in small pits cut into the hillside and brought it down by donkey into the city each summer. With nearby salteries vital for preserving cod and meat, abundant fish in the bay, partridge, hare, rabbits and tortoises in the nearby plain, and oaks, beech and maple in the hills above, it is not surprising that the city flourished.
Romans
A Hellenistic dynasty gave Salonica birth but it was under the Romans that it prospered. Shrines to Macedonian and Roman rulers intermingled with temples to Egyptian gods, sphinxes and the city's own special tutelary deities, the mysterious Samothracian Kabirii. They were probably worshipped in the Rotonda, the oldest building still in use in the city, whose holy space has since attracted saints, dervishes and devotees of modern art and jazz. Even before the birth of Christ Salonica was a provincial capital with substantial municipal privileges. Later it became the base of Emperor Galerius himself. By the side of the main road running through town the carved pillars of a massive triumphal arch still commemorate Galerius's defeat of the troublesome Persians. His own urban ambitions, influenced by Syrian and Persian models, were extensive. Today students sun themselves on the walkways above where his now vanished portico once connected the triumphal arch with an enormous palace and hippodrome. Meanwhile, in what is still the commercial heart of the city, archaeologists have uncovered a vast forum, a tribute to Greco-Roman consumerism, with a double colonnade of shops, a square paved in marble, a library and a large brothel, complete with sex toys, private baths and dining-rooms for favoured clients.
This was, in short, a flourishing settlement of key strategic significance for Roman power in the East. We may find it puzzling that Greeks even today will call themselves Romioi (Romans). But there is nothing strange about it. The Roman empire existed here too, among the speakers of Greek, and continued to exert its spell long after it had collapsed in the West. Yet we need to be careful, for when Greeks use the term Romios, they do not exactly mean that they are "Roman." Hiding inside the word is the one ingredient which has shaped the city's complex cultural mix more strongly than any other-the Christian faith. The Ottomans understood the term this way as well: when they talked about the "community of Romans" (Rum millet) they meant Orthodox Christians, not necessarily Greeks; Rum was Byzantine Anatolia; Rumeli the Orthodox Christian Balkans. Until the age of ethnic nationalism, to be "Greek" was, for most people in the Ottoman world, synonymous with belief in the Orthodox Christian faith.
With this Christianization of the Roman Greek world few cities are as closely identified as Salonica. In the days when the Apostle Paul passed through, Christians were merely a deviant Jewish sect, and members of the two faiths were buried side by side. By the late fourth century, however, Christianity had triumphed on its own terms and turned itself into a new religion: the Rotonda had been converted from pagan use, and chapels, shrines and Christian graveyards were spreading with astonishing speed across the city.
The figure who came to symbolize Christ's triumph in Salonica, eventually outshining even the Apostle himself, was a Roman officer called Dimitrios who was martyred in the late third century AD. A small shrine to him was built alongside the many other healing shrines which studded the area around the forum. After a grateful Roman prefect was cured by his miraculous powers, he built a five-aisled basilica to the saint, which quickly became the centre of a major cult, attracting Jews as well as Christians and pagans. The adoration of Dimitrios swept the city, and by the early nineteenth century-the first time we have a name-by-name census of its inhabitants-one in ten Christians there were named after him.
Like the other major early Christian shrines-the massive, low-sunk Panayia Acheiropoietos (the Virgin's Church Unmade by Mortal Hands), the grand Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda itself-Dimitrios's church shows how deeply the city's Greco-Roman culture had been impregnated with Christian rituals and doctrines. Although the fire of 1917 caused irreparable damage to the priceless mosaics that line its colonnades, enough has remained following its restoration to illuminate the imperial-Christian synthesis: the saint is shown heralded by toga-clad angelic trumpeters, receiving children, or casting his arms around the shoulders of the church's founders. Another saint, Sergios, is depicted in a purple chiton with military insignia around his neck. The city's devoted inhabitants are Christians, but they are also recognisably Romans. Incorporated into the church's structure is part of the original baths, the place of the saint's martyrdom, which became a site of pilgrimage in the following centuries. And crowning the pillars which line the nave are marble capitals whose writhing volutes and acanthus leaves, doves, rams and eagles, sometimes taken from earlier buildings, sometimes carved specially for the church, cover the entire range of Roman design in the centuries when Christianity began to take hold of the empire. Byzantium is the name we have given to a civilization which regarded itself, and was regarded by those around it, as the heir to the glories of imperial Rome. . . .
Very interesting. Thanks for posting this.
Thanks for posting this.
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