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In the 1930s, the spirit of the Sufi holy man Mousa Baba was occasionally seen wandering near his tomb in the upper town. Even today house-owners sometimes dream that beneath their cellars lie Turkish janissaries and Byzantine necropolises. One reads stories of hidden Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea. One hears rumours of buried Jewish treasure guarded by spirits which have outwitted the exorcists and proved themselves too strong for Mossad agents, former Nazis and anyone else who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they protect.
But Salonica’s ghosts emerge in other ways too, through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city’s multifarious past has not been for lack of sources. Sixteenth-century rabbis adjudicate on long-forgotten marital rows, business wrangles and the tribulations of a noisy, malodorous crowded town. The diary of a Ukrainian political exile depicts unruly Jewish servants drunk in the mud, gluttonous clerics, a whirl of social engagements, riots and plague. Travellers – drawn in ever-increasing numbers by the city’s antiquities, by the partridge and rabbits in the plains outside, by business, art or sheer love of adventure – penned their impressions of a magical landscape of minarets, cypresses and whitewashed walls climbing high above the Aegean. From the late nineteenth century – though no earlier – there are newspapers, more and more of them, in half a dozen languages, and even that rarity in the Ottoman lands – maps. As for the archives, they are endless – Ottoman, Venetian, Greek, Austrian, French, English, American – compiled conscientiously by generations of long-departed foreign consuls. Drawing on such materials, I begin with the city’s conquest by Sultan Murad II in 1430, delineate its daily life under his successors, and trace its passage from the multi-confessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman world – as late as the First World War, Salonican boot-blacks commanded a working knowledge of six or seven languages – to its role as an ethnically and linguistically homogenised bastion of the twentieth-century nation-state in which by 1950, more than ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants were, by any definition, Greek.
The old empires collapsed and nations fought their way into being, identities changed and people were labelled in new ways: Muslims turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks. Although in Salonica it was the Greeks who eventually got their state, and Bulgarians, Muslims and Jews who in different ways lost out, it is worth remembering that elsewhere Greeks too lost out – in Istanbul, for example, or Trabzon, Alexandria and Izmir, where thousands died during the expulsions of 1922. Cities, after all, are places of both eviction and sanctuary, and many of the Greek refugees who made a new home for themselves in Salonica had been forced from their old ones elsewhere.
Similar transformations occurred in cities across a wide swathe of the globe – in Lviv, for instance, Wroslaw, Vilna and Tiflis, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Lahore. Each of these endured its own moments of trauma caused by the intense violence that has accompanied the emergence of nation-states. Was the function of the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property after 1948, for example, handing out Arab properties to new Jewish owners, very different from that of the Greek Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property founded in Salonica five years earlier? Both systematized the violence of dispossession and sought to give it a more lasting bureaucratic form. Thanks to their activities, the remnants of former cities may also be traced through the trajectories of the refugees who left them. A retiree clipping her roses in a Sussex country garden, an elderly merchant in an Istanbul suburb and an Auschwitz survivor in Indianapolis are among those who helped me by reviving their memories of a city that is long gone.
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By 1950, when this book concludes, Salonica’s Muslims had been resettled in Turkey, and the Jews had been deported by the Germans and most of them killed. The Greek civil war had just ended in the triumph of the anti-communist Right, and the city was set for the rapid and entirely unexpected pell-mell postwar expansion which saw its population double and treble within thirty or forty years. A forest of densely-packed apartment blocks and giant advertising billboards sprouted where in living memory there had been cypresses and minarets, stables, owls and storks. Its transformation continues, and today Russian computer whiz-kids, Ghanaian doctors, Albanian stonemasons, Georgian labourers, Ukrainian nannies and Chinese street pedlars are entering Salonica’s bloodstream. Many of them quickly learn to speak fluent Greek, for the city’s position within the modern nation-state is unquestioned: the story of its passage from Ottoman to Greek hands has become ancient history.
PART 1 The Rose of Sultan Murad (#ulink_97f13e39-4f2e-5eb8-a54c-7aaa8c6552b6)
1 Conquest, 1430 (#ulink_384c3a03-e77e-5680-8231-69080cea6729)
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.
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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 B C 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.
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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.
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‘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.
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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, where it bubbles to the surface. Archaeologists have traced the remains of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman water-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. 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.
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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. Its character was defined by its cultural synthesis of the traditions of Greece, Rome and Christianity, and Salonica was one of its bastions.
Invaders
‘Guarded by God, greatly surpassing every city in Thrace and in all of Illyricum as to variety of wealth’, the city was superbly protected by its towering walls, by its fortress perched commandingly above the bay and even by the spit of land which guarded the entrance to the gulf itself. It needed all the divine protection it could get, however, for through the centuries its riches and location seemed to attract one invader after another. In the sea raid of 904 an assault by Sudanese, Arab and Egyptian soldiers, led by Byzantine converts to Islam, left the city strewn with corpses and thousands of its inhabitants were sold into slavery. But that remained an isolated event, for Macedonia was far from the centre of the long-running Byzantine-Arab land war, and in eastern Europe – unlike in Syria and Anatolia – the men of Christ had almost a thousand more years to proselytize before confronting a serious rival in Islam.
Infinitely more important in the long run than the booty-hunters were the nomadic tribes who found Salonica on their path as they migrated from the central Asian steppes to the verdant lands of Europe. Some passed through before veering off to the north and settling elsewhere. But starting in the mid-sixth century, Byzantine military experts became aware of a new threat – the Slavs. According to the court historian, Procopius, they lived in miserable huts, were often on the move, and went to war mostly on foot and armed only with small shields and javelins.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet despite their poverty and their crude weaponry the Slavs had numbers on their side, and quickly became a serious threat to Byzantine rule. In the late sixth century, they reached the walls of Salonica for the first time, and a huge army gathered on the plains outside the walls.
(#litres_trial_promo) Only Saint Dimitrios saved the day: thanks to his inspiration, the defenders suspended curtains below the ramparts to blunt the shock of the missiles hitting the walls, while armed sorties frightened the attackers into retreat. Again and again the Slavs laid siege to the city; each time, Saint Dimitrios, it was said, kept them at bay in a series of miracles which were collected, written down, and re-told over centuries.
The Slav tribes did not disappear. They settled as farmers and traders in villages across Greece and down into the Peloponnese, and the fundamental ethnographic balance between Salonica and its hinterland over the next fourteen hundred years was henceforth established: a predominantly Slavic peasantry cultivated the soil and was kept under the political and economic control of non-Slav elites based in the city.
(#litres_trial_promo) But frontiers are places of interaction, and few frontiers were more permeable or symbiotic than that between the Slavs and the Greeks. The former trickled into Salonica, drawn by the seductive power of a Hellenic education and the upward mobility this bought. Only nineteenth-century romantic nationalism turned the permeable boundaries between Slav and Greek into rigidly patrolled national cages.
Moreover, the city did not only take in the Slavs, but it reached out to them too, and converted them, through the Church, into members of its own civilization. It was two brothers from Salonica, Constantine [better known to posterity by his later name, Kyrill] and Methodius, themselves possibly of Slavic descent, who drew up a new alphabet, adapted from Greek, translated the Christian liturgy into Slavic and spread Christ’s message across eastern Europe. The extent of their success was matched only by that with which others were spreading the word of Mohammed in the Middle East. The seeds of their mission were planted in Dalmatia, Hungary, Moravia and Poland; by the end of the ninth century the pagan Bulgars too had been converted. As a result, a version of the Cyrillic alphabet first devised by these two sons of a Byzantine officer from Salonica is taught today in schools from the Adriatic to Siberia.
The Coming of the Ottomans
Over the next six hundred years, the city became a centre of humanistic learning and theological debate. Many new churches were established, turning it into a treasure-house of late Byzantine art. Monasticism spread to the Balkans from Egypt and Syria, and the great foundations of Mount Athos attracted pilgrims, scholars and benefactors to the city as they made the journey to the Holy Mountain just to its east.
Yet amid this cultural ferment, the Byzantine emperors were staggering from crisis to crisis. Ambitious Bulgarian and Serb rulers were – despite their shared Christianity – more of a threat than they were allies. In 1185 Salonica was pillaged by Norman invaders. In 1204, Catholic crusaders – Franks, as they were contemptuously known in the Orthodox world – sacked Constantinople itself and carved up its possessions. In the east, Byzantine power was largely spent. Turkish tribes had moved in from central Asia, and the rise and fall of the Seljuk sultans turned Anatolia into a battleground between competing emirates. That the empire survived at all was owing to the weakness of its enemies, and the judicious bribery of foreign allies.
In the early fourteenth century, however, as Catalan mercenaries, Genoese, Venetians, Serbs and others fought for mastery in the eastern Mediterranean, an entirely new power began the remarkable ascent which would turn it within two hundred years into the greatest force in the world. Osman Ghazi, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, initially ruled a small emirate on the frontier with Byzantine territory in Anatolia. To his east lay more powerful Muslim emirs, and behind them the mightiest state of all, that of the Mongol khans. By comparison, fighting the fading Greeks was easy. In 1302 Osman defeated a mercenary army sent out by the emperor and by the time of his death in 1326 he had established his capital in the former Byzantine city of Bursa. Feuding between the Byzantine Palaeologues and Cantacuzenes gave his successors their chance in Europe. In 1354 his son Orhan won a foothold at Gallipoli and less than twenty years later the Byzantine emperor Jean V Palaeologue made his submission to his successor Murad I. By the end of the century, Murad’s successor Bayazid I – the Thunderbolt – was styling himself Sultan.
Thanks to the distortive effects of both sixteenth-century Ottoman ideology (when the empire’s rulers were keen to demonstrate the purity of their Sunni credentials, following the conquest of the Arab provinces) and nineteenth-century Balkan nationalism, the character of the early Ottoman state remains poorly understood. The Ottomans were Muslims, but their empire was built as much in Europe as it was in Asia. In fact before the sixteenth century they probably ruled over more Christians than they did Muslims. Their form of Islam was a kind of border religion spread both by warriors dedicated to Holy War, and through religious fraternities which took over Christian shrines, espousing a surprisingly open attitude to Christianity itself. They were in many ways heirs to central Asian Turkic versions of Islam, like that embraced by the Grand Khan Mongha, for whom the religions of his empire ‘are like the five fingers of the same hand’. They followed the Hanafi school of Sunni law, the most tolerant and flexible in relation to non-Muslims, their rulers married Serbian and Greek princesses – which meant that many Ottoman sultans had Christian mothers – and their key advisers and generals were often converts recruited from Byzantine service.
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One historian has recently argued that before the fifteenth century, the empire was actually what he terms a ‘raiding confederacy’, in which the Ottomans joined with several other great families in the search for land and plunder. Ghazi [frontier warrior] Evrenos Bey, the leader of the most feared squad of raiders, was a former Byzantine military commander who converted to Islam. Evrenos acted in a way which suggested he was virtually a junior partner with the Ottoman emirs, and when he spearheaded the Ottoman assault on northern Greece the value of his support was recognized by them with huge grants of land. The fiefdoms his family won in the vicinity of Salonica made them among the largest land-owners in the empire and a dominant force in the city well into the twentieth century. His descendants included Ottoman pashas and Young Turks, and his magnificent tomb was a place of pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims alike.
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The Turks’ attitude to religion came as a pleasant relief to many Orthodox Christians. Held captive by the Ottomans in 1355, the distinguished archbishop of Salonica, Gregory Palamas, was surprised to find the Orthodox Church recognized and even flourishing in the lands under the emir. Prominent Turks were eager to discuss the relationship of the two faiths with him and the emir organized a debate between him and Christian converts to Islam. ‘We believe in your prophet, why don’t you believe in ours?’ Muslims asked him more than once. Palamas himself observed an imam conducting a funeral and later took the opportunity to joust over theology with him. When the discussion threatened to overheat, Palamas calmed it down by saying politely: ‘Had we been able to agree in debate we might as well have been of one faith.’ To which he received the revealing reply: ‘There will be a time when we shall all agree.’
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As Byzantine power waned, more and more Orthodox Christians felt caught between two masters. Faced with an apparent choice between the reviled Catholics (their sack of Constantinople in 1204 never to be forgotten) and the Muslim Turks, many opted for the latter. Written off as an embarrassment by later Greek commentators, the pro-Turkish current in late Byzantine politics was in fact a powerful one for the Ottomans could be seen as protectors of Orthodoxy against the Catholics. The hope for political stability, the desire for wealth and status in a meritocratic and open ruling system, admiration for the governing capacities of the Ottomans, and their evident willingness to make use of Christians as well as Muslims explain why administrators, nobles, peasants and monks felt the allure of the sultans and why many senior Byzantine noble families entered their service. Murad II’s grand viziers were well known for their pro-Christian sympathies; Murad himself was influenced by dervish orders which preached a similarly open-minded stance, and the family sheykh of the Evrenos family was reputed to be a protector of Christians. In the circumstances, it is not surprising why surrender seemed far more sensible an option than futile resistance against overwhelming odds, and why the inhabitants of Salonica themselves were known, according to at least one Byzantine chronicler, as ‘friends of the Sultan’.
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In the second half of the fourteenth century, one Balkan town after another yielded to the fast-moving Ottoman armies; the Via Egnatia fell into their hands, and even the canny monks of Mount Athos submitted. Salonica itself was blockaded for the first time in 1383, and in April 1387, surrendered without a fight. On this occasion, all that happened was that a small Turkish garrison manned the Acropolis. The town’s ruler Manuel Palaeologue had wanted to resist, but he was shouted down by the inhabitants, and forced to leave the city so that they could hand themselves over. Manuel himself paid homage to the emir Murad, and even fought for his new sovereign before being crowned emperor.
Had the city remained uninterruptedly under Ottoman control from this point on, its subsequent history would have been very different, and the continuity with Byzantine life not so decisively broken. Having given in peacefully, Salonica was not greatly altered by the change of regime, its municipal privileges were respected by the new rulers, and its great monastic foundations weathered the storm. The small Turkish garrison converted a church into a mosque for their own use, and the devshirme child levy was imposed – at intervals Turkish soldiers carried off Christian children to be brought up as Muslims – which must have caused distress. But returning in 1393, Archbishop Isidoros described the situation as better than he had anticipated, while the Russian monk Ignatius of Smolensk who visited in 1401 was still amazed by its ‘wondrous’ monasteries. Christians asked the Sultan to intervene in ecclesiastical disputes, bishops relied on the Turks to confirm them in office, and one ‘said openly to anyone who asked that he had the Turks for patriarchs, emperors and protectors.’
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Unfortunately for Salonica, the Byzantine emperor Manuel could not resist taking advantage of the Ottomans’ own difficulties to try to wrest the city back for himself. For in 1402, the Ottoman army suffered the most crushing defeat of its entire history at the hands of the Mongol khan Tamurlane. Sultan Bayazid died in captivity and his defeat led directly to a vicious Ottoman civil war which lasted nearly twenty years. Exploiting the dynasty’s moment of weakness, Manuel got one of the claimants, Suleyman, to marry his daughter, and to agree at the same time to return Salonica to Byzantine rule. Local ghazis like Evrenos Bey were not pleased, but apart from delaying the withdrawal of the Ottoman garrison they could do nothing. But in 1421 a new ruler, the youthful Murad II, fought his way to the throne, and determined to put an end to the confusion and internecine bloodletting which had divided the empire.
The Siege
In 1430 Sultan Murad II was ‘a little, short, thick man, with the physiognomy of a Tartar – a broad and brown face, high cheek bones, a round beard, a great and crooked nose, with little eyes.’ Only twenty-six, he had already established his place in history by restoring the authority of the Osmanlis after the defeat by the Mongols. Hard-living, harddrinking and a keen hunter, he enjoyed the affection of his soldiers and the respect of diplomats and statesmen who encountered him. He was a brilliant warrior, who spent much of his reign building up Ottoman power in the Balkans and Anatolia, but he preferred a life of spiritual contemplation, tried twice to withdraw from the throne, and was eventually buried in the mausoleum he had designed himself at Bursa, a building of austere beauty, with an earth-covered grave open to the skies. The much-travelled Spaniard, Pero Tafur, described him as ‘a discreet person, grave in his looks, and … so handsomely attended that I never saw the like’.
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According to an Ottoman legend, the sultan was asleep in his palace one night when God came to him in a dream and gave him a beautiful, sweet-smelling rose to sniff. When Murad asked if he could keep it, God told him that the rose was Salonica and that he had decreed it should be his.
In fact Murad had set his heart on the city from the start. So far as he was concerned, it was not only a vital Mediterranean port, but belonged to him by right since it had fallen under Ottoman control previously. After 1422 his troops besieged it, and with the hinterland also under his control, there was little the Byzantine emperors could do but watch. The empire itself was dying. The city’s inhabitants invited the Venetians in, thinking they at least would bolster the defences, but the situation went from bad to worse. By 1429, urban life had virtually collapsed, three-quarters of the inhabitants had already fled – many into Ottoman-controlled territories – and only ten thousand remained. Despite occasional Venetian grain convoys, food was scarce. Defenders let themselves down by ropes to join the Turks. Others passed messages saying they wished to surrender: the pro-Ottoman faction within the walls was as powerful as it had ever been, its numbers swelled by Murad’s promises of good treatment if the city gave in.
To the aged Archbishop Symeon, the defeatism of his flock came as a shock. ‘They actually declared they were bent on handing over the city to the infidel,’ he wrote. ‘Now that for me was something more difficult to stomach than ten thousand deaths.’ But angry crowds demonstrated against him. When he invoked the miraculous powers of their patron Saint Dimitrios, and talked about a giant warrior on horseback coming to their aid, they heard nothing but empty promises. God had preserved the city over the centuries, he told them, ‘as an acropolis and guardian of the surrounding countryside’. But the Turks were outside the walls, and the villages and towns beyond were in their hands. Their control of the hinterland had turned the fortified city into a giant prison. Resistance meant certain enslavement. In 1429 Archbishop Symeon died, but the Venetians brought in mercenaries to prevent the defenders capitulating and the siege dragged on until in March 1430 Murad determined to end it. He left his hunting leopards, falcons and goshawks and joined his army before the city.
Combining levies from Europe and Anatolia, his troops gathered outside the walls, while camel-trains brought up siege engines, stone-throwers, bombards and scaling ladders. The sultan took up a position on high ground which overlooked the citadel, and sent a last group of Christian messengers to urge surrender. These got no more favourable response than before. Prompted by the sight of a Venetian vessel sailing into the Gulf, and fearing the garrison was about to be reinforced, Murad ordered the attack to begin.
For two or three days the desperate defenders managed to hold out against the assault troops and sappers. But then Murad galvanized his men. ‘I will give you whatever the city possesses,’ he pledged them. ‘Men, women, children, silver and gold: only the city itself you will leave to me.’ At dawn on 29 March, a hail of arrows ‘like snow’ forced the defenders back from the parapets. Crowds of ghazi fighters, spurred on by the sultan’s words, attacked the walls ‘like wild animals’. Within a few hours, one had scaled the blind side of the Trigonion tower, cut off the head of a wounded Venetian soldier and tossed it down. His fellow ghazis quickly followed him up and threw open the main gates.
The Venetian contingent fought their way to the port and boarded the waiting galleys. Behind them the victorious Turks – ‘shouting and thirsting for our blood’ according to the survivor Ioannis Anagnostes – ransacked churches, homes and public buildings, looking for hidden valuables behind icons and inside tombs: ‘They gathered up men, women, children, people of all ages, bound like animals, and marched them all to the camp outside the city. Nor do I speak of those who fell and were not counted in the fortress and in the alleyways and did not merit a burial,’ continues Anagnostes. ‘Every soldier, with the mass of captives he had taken, hurried to get them outside quickly to hand them over to his comrades, lest someone stronger seize them from him, so that any slave who as he saw from old age or some illness perhaps could not keep up with the others, he cut his head off on the spot and reckoned it a loss. Then for the first time they separated parents from their children, wives from their husbands, friends and relatives from each other … And the city itself was filled with wailing and despair.’
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As ever, Murad followed the customary laws of war. By refusing to surrender peacefully, after they had been given the chance, Salonica’s inhabitants had – as they knew well – laid themselves open to enslavement and plunder. Had they been allowed to follow the path of non-resistance that most of them wanted, the city’s fate might have been less traumatic. A few months later, Ottoman troops went on to besiege the city of Jannina, and their commander, Sinan Pasha, advised the Greek archbishop to surrender peacefully ‘otherwise I will destroy the place to its foundations as I did in Salonica.’ ‘I swear to you on the God of Heaven and Earth and the Prophet Mohammed,’ he went on, ‘not to have any fear, neither of being enslaved nor seized.’ The clergy and the nobility would keep their estates and privileges, ‘rather than as we did in Salonica ruining the churches, and emptying and destroying everything.’ Jannina obeyed and remained an important centre of Hellenic learning throughout the Ottoman period: indeed one of Murad’s generals actually founded a Christian monastery there. Salonica’s fate was very different: ruined and eerily quiet, its streets and buildings lay empty.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the Acheiropoietos church the sultan held a victory thanksgiving service. Then he had the building turned into a mosque, and ordered a laconic inscription to be chiselled into a marble column in the north colonnade of the nave. There it survives to this day, and if your eyesight is good enough, you can still make out in the elegant Arabic script: ‘Sultan Murad Khan took Thessaloniki in the year 833 [=1430]’.
2 Mosques and Hamams (#ulink_06e6258c-4762-536a-825c-3603c866e2ce)
The Mightiest War
CENTRES OF TRADE, learning, religious piety and administrative control, cities were essential for the prosperity of the Ottoman lands. Yet as the sultans knew, it is one thing to conquer a city, another to restore it to life. In 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror called the task of reviving Constantinople after its conquest the ‘mightiest war’ compared with which the business of taking it had been merely one of the ‘lesser wars.’ Twenty years earlier his father, Murad, had viewed Salonica in a similar light. The man who for all his military genius was reputed ‘not to love war’, now pondered how to return it to its former glory. No other city in his domain matched its imposing fortifications or its commercial possibilities. It was the key to the Balkans, and the Balkans were fast on their way to becoming the economic powerhouse of his empire. According to Anagnostes: ‘When he saw a city so large, and in such a situation, next to the sea and suitable for everything, then he grieved and wanted to reconstruct it.”
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The first thing he did was to chase out the looters, camp-followers and squatters. ‘The money and slaves which you gained should be enough,’ he told his troops, T want to have the city itself and for this I made many days’ march and tired myself, as you know.’ He began by repairing the damaged walls and ordered the new garrison commander to modernize the fortress. Less than one year later, an inscription above the entrance to the newly built main tower marked the swift completion of the work. ‘This Acropolis,’ it runs, ‘was conquered and captured by force, from the hands of infidels and Franks, with the help of God, by Sultan Murad, son of Sultan Mehmed, whose banner God does not cease to make victorious. And he slaughtered and took prisoner some of their sons, and took their property.’
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Murad’s initial thought was ‘to return the city to its inhabitants and to restore it just as it had been before.’ Anagnostes tells us that he would have liberated all the captives had not one of his senior commanders prevented him. As it was, he personally ransomed members of some of the city’s notable Byzantine families (as was his custom after a siege), and his vassal, the Serbian despot George Brankovich – whose daughter Mara he married a few years later – paid for others. In all, about a thousand Greek ex-prisoners were thus rescued from slavery and returned to their homes. They were joined by refugees who had fled the siege earlier and were now ordered back. Shocked by the scenes of devastation that greeted them, they blamed Archbishop Symeon for having blocked a peaceful outcome to the siege, and some even questioned the powers of St Dimitrios himself. Gradually, the Byzantine caravanseray, public baths, old manufactories, tanneries and textile workshops were brought back to life. The Venetians patched up their relations with the sultan and were allowed to set up a consulate one year after the conquest. But the city was a shadow of its former self, a mere vestige of the flourishing metropolis of forty thousand inhabitants which had existed a decade earlier.
Once Murad realized the extent of its depopulation, he changed his mind and decided to bring in Muslim settlers as well. He handed over many properties to senior officials at his court, and craftsmen, attracted by tax breaks, were resettled from the nearby town of Yannitsa and from Anatolia. Their arrival injected new blood into the urban economy. But it was a major blow to the city’s Christian identity and the Greek survivors were shocked. Salonica, wrote Anagnostes, ‘wore this ugliness like a mourning garment … The hymns to God and the choirs have fallen silent. In their place one hears nothing but alalagmoi [the sounds of Allah] and the noise of the godless who make Satan rejoice. And yet no sign of divine anger has appeared to punish the unbelievers who defiled the churches, made families and houses vanish, looted and destroyed churches and the city.’
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Thousands of the city’s former inhabitants were still enslaved. ‘On numerous occasions we saw Christians – boys as well as unmarried girls, and masses of married women of every description – paraded pitiably by the Turks in long lines throughout the cities of Thrace and Macedonia,’ wrote the Italian merchant-antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona. They were ‘bound by iron chains and lashed by whips, and in the end put up for sale in villages and markets … an unspeakably shameful and obscene sight, like a cattle market.’ (Cyriac’s sorrow did not prevent him buying a young Greek slave and sending her home to his mother’s household). Some converted to Islam in the hope of better treatment; others, yoked to one another by the neck, could be seen begging for alms in the streets of the capital, Edirne, where they were brought to be sold off, or entered the imperial service.
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Yet the Sultan certainly did not intend to wipe out Christianity from the city. It was not only that this would have been economically harmful; it would also have been contrary to Ottoman practice and his own beliefs. In fact, he quickly appointed a new archbishop, Gregorios, and his Serbian Orthodox wife, Mara, herself became a notable benefactor. Churches and monasteries were reconfirmed in their possessions (in one case perhaps, as a malicious fifteenth-century chronicler alleged, because the monks had helped the Turks conquer the town). In keeping with the Muslim custom in cases where towns had been won by force, a few churches were converted into mosques, looted for building materials, turned into private homes or abandoned. But how many were taken over at the start is hard to say. Anagnostes claims that only four remained in Christian hands: yet even after Murad began to bring in Muslims in 1432 many ecclesiastical foundations continued to collect substantial revenues from their estates. After all, there was no point converting churches into mosques if there were not the congregations to use them: the wave of conversion thus followed the slow expansion of the Muslim population. Of the city’s noblest buildings, Ayios Dimitrios was converted into a mosque only in 1491, Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda a century later.
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The real problem for the Christian survivors was not so much the expropriation of places of worship – for scores of them had lain within the walls before the conquest, and enough survived even after 1430 to serve the city’s sharply reduced population – as the lack of priests to run them. Many had fled or were still enslaved. Laymen were still having to chant the hymns in the church of Ayia Paraskevi twenty years after the conquest since, as one local Christian sadly noted, ‘the majority of the clergy and of the others were then still in captivity and this condition prevails up to today.’ Orthodoxy – though recognized by the Ottoman authorities – was scarcely flourishing. ‘One can hear only from the more elderly people,’ wrote Anagnostes after his return from captivity, ‘that such and such a church was here, another one was there, and what the beauty and charms of each had been.’
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As it spread into Europe, Ottoman conquest brought the Islamicization of urban life. The centre of gravity of Balkan Christianity shifted into the rural areas where monasteries, especially in Mount Athos, prospered. The cities were more deeply altered. With the newcomers came their faith, their places of worship and characteristic institutions of their way of life. A few Christians converted to Islam, both before and after the conquest, but it was chiefly through the settlers from Anatolia that Salonica was transformed – in the words of the chronicler Ashikpashazadé – from a ‘domain of idolatry’ to a ‘domain of Islam’. The sounds of Christian worship – the bells, processionals and Easter fireworks – were replaced by the cry of the muezzin, the triumphant processions which celebrated a new conversion, and (later) the firing of guns at Bairam. At Ramadan, the bustle of the markets subsided, and even non-Muslims avoided eating in public, and waited for the sound of the fortress cannon at dusk to mark the onset of the nightly street feasts, parties and Karaghöz shadow puppet shows whose obscenity shocked later travellers. Minarets – spiralling, pointed, multi-coloured or unadorned – dominated the skyline and became landmarks for visitors, lit up during holidays and imperial celebrations. In 1853 the Oxford geographer Henry Tozer saw them each ‘circled by a ring of glittering lamps’; as he sailed away by night ‘they formed a delicate bright cluster, like a swarm of fire-flies on the horizon.’
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Murad’s use of the Ottoman colonization technique of forced resettlement kick-started Salonica’s economy and more than doubled its population within a few years. The first extant Ottoman records, from 1478, show that unlike the Christian population, who were almost entirely descended from pre-conquest families, the Muslims were new arrivals. They were grouped in communities, each with their own place of worship. With a total of twenty-six imams, they had one religious leader for each 166 Muslims, compared with an average of one priest to every 667 Christians. Islam, newly established though it was, was thus far better served than Orthodoxy. If the urban grid – the course of the walls, the main roads, the location of markets – remained recognizably Greco-Roman, the demands of Ottoman power and the Islamic faith were nevertheless changing Salonica’s physiognomy.
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An imperial decree of 14 December 1479 appointing a teacher to a city medrese informs us about the spread of Muslim learning. The appointee, mevlana Qivam ed-Din, was granted a salary of 20 aspers daily and instructed to pray ‘for the continuity of the State’. He was to teach ‘sciences related to religion, to resolve the difficulties of the branches of religious law, the subtleties of the tradition and the truths of the exegesis of the Quran.’ He was not only to give lessons to students, but also to look after their welfare and ensure they were properly fed ‘so that religion finds its glory and learning its splendour and the position of ulema attains the highest degree.’
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Despite the existence of this and other schools, however, Salonica never became a major centre of Muslim piety or learning. It seems to have lacked sufficiently illustrious historical, religious or emotional associations. Its medresas remained relatively small and undistinguished, its mosques never rivalled the soaring masterpieces of Edirne, Bursa and Istanbul – the three imperial capitals – and its mufti [chief religious adviser] was ranked only in the fourth class of the hierarchy, below his colleagues in the empire’s eight leading cities. Was it the vast nearby estates of the Evrenos family which reminded the Ottoman sultans uncomfortably of their early years in partnership, and led them to bestow their favour and money elsewhere? Its Balkan location probably did not help either, since Muslims there felt the presence of an alien Christian hinterland even when they controlled the towns. Mehmed the Conqueror had to remind the Muslims of Rumeli to pray five times a day – an indication that the climate of observance in the Balkans was rather different from that in Anatolia. But elsewhere in the Balkans, the towns themselves at least were emphatically Muslim – 90% of Larissa’s population by 1530, for instance, 61% in Serres, 75% in Monastir and Skopje, 66% in Sofia. In Salonica, on the other hand, Muslims never dominated the city numerically, and slipped from just under 50% to 25% of the population between the mid-fifteenth century and 1530. At the time of the first census of modern times – in 1831 – Salonica had the smallest Muslim population of any major Ottoman city. Yet to outsiders, its Islamic character was immediately evident. The city acquired a sheykh of the ruling Hanafi school of Islamic law, who acted as the chief mufti of the town, and, after the empire expanded into the Arab lands in the sixteenth century, jurists from the other three main schools as well. There were soon more mosques than there were churches, and tekkes [monasteries] were eventually established by the main mystical Sufi orders, nearly one for every neighbourhood. To the seventeenth century geographer Hadji Chalfa, the city was ‘a little piece of Istanbul’.
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Mosques and Vakfs
In modern Salonica, where classical and Byzantine monuments have been shorn of the houses that surrounded them to make them stand out more prominently, one has to search for remains of the early Ottoman years. Most mosques perished in the great fire of 1917 and the surviving minarets were torn down shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, at the busy central junction of Egnatia and Venizelos streets, small shops, a disused cinema, and tourist boutiques still cling to the sides of an elegantly domed mosque, one of the last in the city. Hamza Bey was one of Murad’s military commanders, and his daughter built a small neighbourhood prayer hall in his memory in 1468. But as the city expanded and prospered, Hamza Bey’s mosque grew too: it acquired a minaret [now gone] and a spacious columned courtyard.
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One other fifteenth-century mosque survives, similarly impressive in scale, though in better condition. This is the Aladja Imaret, which peeps out of a gap between rows of concrete apartment blocks above the bus stop on Kassandrou Street. The Aladja complex served as school, prayer-hall and soup-kitchen for the poor and illustrates the way older Muslim architectural forms were reworked by Ottoman builders in territories which lacked any tradition of Islamic architecture. In the original Arabic-Persian type of medrese, or religious school, students and teachers took their lessons in rooms arranged around an open-air courtyard. The Seljuk Turks adapted this model for the harsher conditions of central Anatolia by covering the courtyard with a dome, often adding a small prayer room at the back. Over time, the domed prayer-hall became larger still and was integrated into the main body of the building – the shape chosen by the unknown architect of the Aladja Imaret. A large airy portico runs the length of the façade, and once sheltered refugees and beggars, though it is now abandoned and covered with graffiti. The multi-coloured minaret, ornamented with stones in a diamond pattern, which gave the whole building its name [Aladja = coloured] has long gone, though visitors to the nearby town of Verroia will find a very similar one, half-ruined, in a side-street off the main road. This style of minaret was a last faint Balkan echo of the polychromatic glories of central Asian and Persian Islam whose influence, as the historian Machiel Kiel points out, extended from the towns of Macedonia in the west to the north Indian plains and the Silk Road to the east.
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Fifteenth-century records identify other newly founded mosques by the names of local notables – Sinan Bey, the fisheries owner Mehmed, the teacher Burhan, Mustafa from Karaferiye, the pilgrims Mehmed, Hasan, Ismail, Kemal, Ahmed and the judge Abdullah. Their neighbourhood mosques or mescids must have been relatively humble sites, and the main Friday services for the city were held in ‘Old Friday’ – the name given to the mosque founded by Sultan Murad in the Acheiropoietos Church where he had held his victory service. More substantial foundations, like the Aladja Imaret, usually required the kind of financing affordable only by notables. In this case the benefactor was another of Murad’s commanders, Inegöllü Ishak Pasha, whose illustrious career ended as governor of Salonica. Ishak Pasha spent his fortune on many noble edifices including several mosques, a hamam, a bridge over the Struma river, fountains and a dervish tekke. He was not alone. Koca Kasim Pasha, who started life as slave of an Egyptian scholar, before rising in the imperial civil service to become grand vizier, founded another mosque-imaret in the city. Yakub Pasha, a Bosnian-born vizier renowned both for his poetry and for his victories against the Austrians and Hungarians on the Croat border, endowed a mosque named after himself.
What is striking about these large-scale building projects – especially when compared with western Europe – is the speed of their construction. Often only a few years were necessary for their completion. Such efficiency implied not only plentiful skilled labour and highly developed architectural traditions, but the means to accumulate and concentrate funds for such purposes much more quickly than most European states could manage at this time. The highly centralized nature of Ottoman authority helped, but the real vehicle of urban renewal was the pious charitable foundation known as the vakf.
The vakf was a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a vakf relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands involved, vakf status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from the often burdensome irregular state taxes, vakf properties thrived and contributed to the city’s prosperity. For the donor, turning his [or her – the donors included many wealthy women] possessions into a vakf was also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of the foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running of their institutions down to the smallest details – saffron rice and honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school regularly.
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The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old capital Bursa and the great mosque he was building in Edirne, commissioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well as the great hamam complex on Egnatia. He also repaired the city’s old Roman and Byzantine aqueduct system and settled colonists to look after it. His son, Mehmed the Conqueror, although hostile to the vakf idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new six-domed stone bezesten [market building], for the storage of valuable goods. Still in use across the road from the Hamza Bey mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commercial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling perfumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and also used the income to support the mosque he created when he ordered the church of Ayios Dimitrios to be turned over to the faithful in 1492.
