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 ~alonica,
City of Ghosts
Christians, Muslims
and]ews, 1430-1950

MARK MAZOWER

ALFRED A. KNOPF ~ NEW YORK 2 00 5

 THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright© 2004 by Mark Mazower ToMarwa

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by
Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers,

London, in 2004.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of

Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mazower, Mark.
Salonica, city of ghosts : Christians, Muslims and Jews,
I4J<r-I950 I MarkMazower.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-375-41298-0
I. Thessaloniki (Greece)---History. I. Title.

DF95I.T45MJ9 2005
949·5'65-dcll 2oo4o5769o
Manufactured in the United States of America
First American Edition
 Contents

Acknowledgement& 1X

List ofIllustrations X1

ListofMaps XV

Introduction 3

PART I I The Rose ofSultan Murad

I Conquest, 1430 I]
2 Mosques and Hamams 32
3 The Arrival of the Sefardim 46
4 Messiahs, Martyrs and Miracles 64
5 Janissaries and Other Plagues 94
6 Commerce and the Greeks II4
7 Pashas, Beys and Money-lenders 133
8 Religion in the Age of Reform !50

PART II I In the Shadow ofEurope

9 Travellers and the European Imagination 173
IO The Possibilities of a Past 192
II In the Frankish Style 209
!2 The Macedonia Question, r878-r9o8 238
I3 The Young Turk Revolution 255

PART III I Making the City Greek

14 The Return of Saint Dimitrios 275
I5 The First World War 286

vii
 Contents

16 The Great Fire 298

17 The Muslim Exodus 3II
18 City of Refugees 333
19 Workers and the State 347 Acknowledgements
20 Dressing for the Tango 359
21 Greeks and Jews 375
22 Genocide 39 2 IN THE TWENTY Y:SARS I have been working on this project, I have
23 Aftermath 412 been helped by so many people that I fear I may not remember them
all. To everyone who has discussed their experiences of the city with
Conclusion: The Memory of the Dead 429 me, provided me with documents, advice or support, I am deeply
indebted. In particular I would like to thank the following: Miko Alvo,
Georgios Angelopoulos, Albertos and Leon Arouch, Efi. Avdela, Rika
Notes 441 Benveniste, Moise Bourlas, Steve Bowman, Peter Brown, John Camp-
Glossary 469 bell, Jean Carasso, Richard Clogg, Erika Counio-Amariglio, the late
Index 473 Nancy Crawshaw, the late Mando Dalianis, Nicholas De Lange, Katy
Fleming, Ben Fortna, Norman Gilbertson, Eyal Ginio, Jacqueline
Golden, Dimitri Gondicas, Vasilis Gounaris, Ashbel Green, Eleni
Haidia, Bill Hamilton, Renee Hirschon, Elliott Horowitz, the late
Judith Humphrey, Sukru llicak, Cemal Kafadar, Mike Keeley, Nikos
Kokantzis, Toga Koker, John Koliopoulos, Basil Kontis, Kostas Kostis,
Antonis Liakos, Heath and Demet Lowry, Rena and Meir Molho,
Yannis Mourellos, Barbara Politi and Walter Lummerding, Maria
Seremetis, Nikos Stavroulakis, Charles Stewart, Alexandre Toumark-
ine, Karen van Dyck, Maria Vassilikou, Mike Vogel, Johanna Weber,
Maria Wojnicka, Andrew Wylie and Onur Yildirim.
Mike Fishwick has been from the outset a wonderfully enthusiastic
and supportive editor. Thanks to him, Vera Brice and Kate Hyde, I felt
in good hands. Maria Vassilikou, Bea Lewkowicz, Bernard Pierron,
Rena Molho, Dimitris Livanios and Iakovos Mihailidis were kind
enough to provide me with copies of their unpublished dissertations. In
Athens, Aegina and Tinos, Fay Zika, Haris Vlavianos and Katerina
Schina have made Greece a home from home. I must also acknowledge
a debt to the extraordinary array of devoted scholars-among them
Alexandra Karadimou-Yerolympou, Georgios Anastassiadis, Vasilis
Colonnas, Vasilis Dimitriades, Evangelos Hekimoglou, Rena Molho,
Albertos Nar, Sakis Serefas, and the late Kostas Tomanas-whose writ-
ings have done so much to bring the city to life.
I am grateful for their assistance to the librarians of the following

viii lX
 Acknowledgements

institutions: the Institute for Balkan Studies, the Centre for the History
of the City ofThessaloniki, the Newspaper Library in the Thessaloniki
Municipal Library, the Historical Archives of Macedonia; in Athens,
the Greek Literary and Historical Archives (ELlA), the Archive of
Contemporary Social History (ASKI), the Newspaper Library, the Illustrations
Gennadios Library, the Jewish Museum of Greece and the Central
Board of Jewish Communities of Greece; in London, the Public
Record Office, the School of Oriental and African Studies, Birkbeck
College London and the Wiener Library; in the USA, the American COLOUR
Joint Distribution Committee and the United Nations, as well as the
university librarians at Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard. Sixteenth-century icon of Saint Dimitrios and his city (8th Eforate of
My research was also supported by the Central Research Fund of the Byzantine Antiquities, Jannina)
University of London. Seventh-century mosaic from Church of Ayios Dimitrios
Among those who read drafts and gave me the benefit of their schol-
arly expertise, I would like to thank Fred Anscombe, Selim Deringil, Byzantine forces drive Bulgarian army away from the city in a minia-
Ben Fortna and Heath Lowry for helpful counsel on matters Ottoman ture from the chronicle of Ioannis Skylitzes, eleventh-twelfth cen-
and their patience with an interloper. Philip Carabott, Vasilis Gounaris tury AD
and Dimitris Livanios made many valuable comments, corrections and Ottoman miniature of child levy in a Balkan town (By permission of the
suggestions and helped me with their deep knowledge of the Balkan Topkapi Palace Museum)
context and contemporary Greece: I thank them for the time and atten- Portrait of Sultan Murad IT (By permission ofthe Topkapi Palace Museum)
tion they generously gave me. Nikos Stavroulakis gave me precious
AJewish merchant and doctor in Ottoman dress, Istanbul, I574 (Gen-
guidance on the complexities of Marrano and Ma'min identities, not to nadius Library, American School of Classical Studies at Athens)
mention food. My parents, Bill and Miriam Mazower, and my grand-
mother, Ruth Shaffer, read the early chapters closely for style and were Visitors arrive at the home of a Jewish merchant to examine Las Incan-
both critical and supportive. And I am hugely indebted, not for the first tadas. Sketch from I754
time, to Peter Mandler, for ploughing through the entire manuscript The Arch of Galerius at the end of the main street as drawn by Edward
and giving me the benefit of his encouragement, thoughtfulness and Lear, I 848 (Houghton Library, Harvard University)
invaluable critical eye. Above all, I would like to express my deep grati- Jewish singers and musicians, late nineteenth century
tude to Marwa Elshakry, who, despite living with the subject for much
Jewish marriage contract, I790
longer than anyone would consider reasonable, never betrayed impa-
tience at hearing yet another story about Salonica, being shown Watercolours of a Jewish wet-nurse and a Bulgarian peasant bride,
another document or driven down another side-street. Her challenging c.186o
suggestions and queries opened up exciting new perspectives for me. Panorama of Salonica, by Edward Lear, I 848 (Ashmolean j\yf.useum,
What is more, she went rigorously through the text line by line, and Oxford)
made innumerable scholarly and stylistic improvements. In this as in Prince Constantine takes the Ottoman surrender of the city in 1912
everything else, I owe her more than I can put into words. This book is
A backstreet near the Rotonda, 19I3 (M.usie Albert-Kahn, Dipartement
dedicated to her with the author's love.
des Hauts-de-Seine)

X XI
 Illustrations Illustrations

Yane Sandanski
BLACK AND WHITE Hilmi Pacha
Ioacheimill
The sea approach from the south-west, c. I86o
Albanian Ottoman irregulars
The sea approach from the south-east, c.I86o
Regular Ottoman infantry arrive in Macedonia
The eastern walls in the early twentieth century
Cretan gendarmes (Imperial War Museum)
A Muslim graveyard in open country outside the fortress in the early
twentieth century Venizelos arrives by ~ea to lead Greece into the First World War, 9
October I9I6 (Imperial War Museum)
Mosque and minaret in the Upper Town in the early twentieth cen-
tury
A German biplane attracts crowds along the front
The Aladja Imaret
A refugee camp inside the city, I 9 I 6 (Imperial War Museum)
An Ottoman tribunal in session
Devastation in the town centre following the I 9 I 7 fire (Imperial TVttr
Women collecting water from a street fountain in the Upper Town
Museum)
Sabbatai Zevi, I666
First meeting of the town planners, I9I7
Sabbatians performing penitential exercises
Ernest Hebrard leads a dig in the precinct of the Rotonda (Courtesy of
Ma'min boy in the robes of a Mevlevi oblate in the late nineteenth Mr. H. Yiakoumis and Editions Potamos)
century
The new city
The Yeni Djami
Huts of Asia Minor refugees beneath the old walls, c. I96o
The courtyard of the Mevlevi tekke, c. I 9 I 7
The Upper Town, c. I 960
Mevlevi dervishes, c. I 900
Rosa Eskenazi, Dimitrios Semsis and Tombol, c. I930
Young Jewish man, c. I9oo
An interwar dandy
Leading the mourners at a grave in the Jewish cemetery, c. I 9 I 6
The Hamza Bey mosque in its postwar incarnation as the Alcazar Cin-
ema, c.I96o
Ottoman cafe in the Upper Town The round-up of]ewish men by German troops, July I942
European officers witness the hanging of the alleged murderers of the University buildings going up on the site of the old Jewish cemetery,
two consuls following the disturbances of I876, by Pierre Loti I950S
Ottoman street life: hamal or porter, vendor oflemonade, and sellers of Salonica I9IO
leeches Salonica, fifty years later in I 960 (Reproduced from A. Karadimou-
The old konaki Yerolympou, I anoikodomisi tis Thessalonikis meta tin pyrkaia tou I 9 I 7,
The new konaki by permission of University Studio Press and the author)
The municipal hospital, built outside the eastern walls I 962 parades to mark half a century of Greek rule
A classroom in one of the city's new state schools The planned city centre: Plateia Aristotelous and the seafront (Repro-
duced from A. Karadimou-Yerolympou, I anoikodomisi tis Thessalonikis
The staff of the Greek consulate, I905
meta tin pyrkaia tou I 9 I 7, by permission of University Studio Press and the
Greek and Albanian band members, c. I904 author)
xii xiii
 Illustrations

ENDPAPERS: Salonica in I9I6

All reasonable efforts have been made by the author and the
publisher to trace copyright holders of the images featured in Maps
this book. In the event that the author or publisher is contacted
by any of the untraceable copyright holders after the publication
of this book, the author and the publisher will endeavour to rec-
tify the position accordingly. PAGE 4 The topography of the Balkans
9<r9I Salonica's sacred geographies
I76 Inside the Ottoman city
2IO The first map of the Ottoman city, I882, showing the new
sea frontage
2 q.-2 I 5 The late Ottoman city and its surroundings, c. I 9Io
24o-24I The late Ottoman Balkan peninsula
299 Area destroyed by the I9I7 fire
302-303 After the fire: the I9I8 plan
334 The Balkans after 19I8
344-345 The I929 municipal city plan

xiv XV
 Salonica,
City of Ghosts
 Introduction

Beware of saying to them that sometimes cities follow one

another on the same site and under the same name, born and
dying without knowing one another, without communicating
among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants
remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features
of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above
places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled
in their place.
hALO CALVINo, Invisible Cities1

THE FIRST TIME I visited Salonica, one summer more than twenty
years ago, I stepped off the Athens train, shouldered my rucksack, and
left the station in search of the town. Down a petrol-choked road, I
passed a string of seedy hotels, and arrived at a busy crossroads: ~eyond
lay the city centre. The unremitting heat and the din of the traffic
reminded me of what I had left several hours away in Athens but despite
this I knew I had been transported into another world. A mere hour or
so to the north lay Tito's Yugoslavia and the checkpoints at Gevgeli or
Florina; to the east were the Rhodope forests barring the way to Bul-
garia, the forgotten Muslim towns and villages of Thrace and the bor-
der with Turkey. From the moment I crossed the hectic confusion of
Vardar Square-"Piccadilly Circus" for British soldiers in the First
World War-ignoring the signposts that urged me out of the city in the
direction of the Iron Curtain, I sensed the presence of a different
Greece, less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to
neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures.
The crowded alleys of the market offered shade as I pushed past
carts piled high with figs, nuts, bootleg Fifth Avenue shirts and pirated
cassettes. Tsitsanis's bouzouki strained the vendors' tinny speakers, but
it was no competition for the clarino and drum with which gypsy boys
were deafening diners in the packed ouzeris of the Modiano food mar-

3
 Introduction

ket. Round the tables of Myrovolos Smyrni (Sweet-Smelling Smyrna), its

very name an evocation of the glories and disasters of Hellenism's Ana-
tolian past, tsipouro and· mezedes were smoothing the passage from
work to siesta. There were fewer back-packers in evidence here than in
the tourist dives around the Acropolis, more housewives, porters and
farmers on their weekly trip into town. Did I really see a dancing bear
performing for onlookers in the meat market? I certainly did not miss
the flower-stalls clustered around the Louloudadika hamam (known also
according to the guidebooks as the Market Baths, the Women's Baths,
Panonian -~ or the Yahudi Hamam, the Bath of the Jews), the decrepit spice ware-
Plain • ·, '\._/"-
_.,. . . .. J...,......... C" .... _....:,>_. . ~~ '~
houses on Odos Egyptou (Egypt Street), the dealers still installed in the
.,.-... ·''· . - old fifteenth-century multi-domed bezesten. This vigorous commercial-
..~:i'!"" ......tr~iiSY,lvnn ian
'-· ' X Alp s,tor~~
ism put even Athens to shame: here was a city which had remained
much closer to the values of the bazaar and the souk than anything to
be seen further south.
Athens itself had eliminated the traces of its Ottoman past without
much difficulty. For centuries it ·had been little more than an over-
grown village so that after winning independence in 1830 Greece's
rulers found there not only the rich cultural capital invested in its
ancient remains by Western philhellenism, but all the attractions of
something close to a blank slate so far as the intervening epochs were
concerned. ~alonica's Ottoman years, on the other hand, were a matter
of living memory, for the Greek army had arrived only.. io...J 9.!~., and
those grandmothers chatting quietly in the yards outside their homes
had probably been born subjects of Sultan Abdul Hamid. The still
Ionian
Sea
magnificent eight-mile circuit of ancient walls embraced a densely
thriving human settlement whose urban character had never been in
question, a city whose history reached forward from classic~l antiquity
uninterruptedly through the intervening centuries to our own times.
Even before one left the packed streets down near the bay and
headed into the Upper Town, tiny medieval churches half-hidden
below ground marked the transition from classical to Byzantine. It did
not take long to discover what treasures they contained-one of the
most resplendent collections of early Christian mosaics and frescoes to
100 200miles be found anywhere in the world, rivalling the glories of Ravenna and
Mediterrane an Sea Istanbul. A Byzantine public bath, hidden for much of its existence
under the accumulated topsoil, still functioned high in the Upper
Town, near the shady overgrown garden which hid tiny Ayios Nikolaos
The topography of the Balkans Orfanos and its fourteenth-century painted narrative of the life of
Christ. The Rotonda-a strange cylindrical Roman edifice, whose mul-

4 5
 Introduction Introduction

tiple re-incarnations as church, mosque, museum and art centre encap- Athens could not, to more than two thousand years of continuous
sulated the city's endless metamorphoses--contained some of the earli- urban life. But this history was decisively marked by sharp discontinu-
est mural mosaics to be found in the eastern Mediterranean. Next to it ities ·and breaks. The few Ottoman monuments that had endured were
stood an elegant pencil-thin minaret, nearly one hundred and twenty a handful compared with what had once existed. The old houses were
feet tall. falling down and within a decade many of them had collapsed or been
Like many visitors before me, I found myself particularly drawn to demolished. Some buildings have been recently restored and visitors
the Upper Town. There, hidden inside the perimeter of the old walls, can see inside the magnificent fifteenth-.centucy Bey Hamam, the
was a warren of precipitous alleyways sometimes ending abruptly, at largest Ottoman baths in.Greec-e; .or admire the distinguished mansion
others opening onto squares shaded by plane trees and cooled by foun- now used as a locafpublic library in Plateia Romfei. But otherwise the
tains. One had the sense of entering an older world whose life was con- Ottoman city has vanished, exciting little comment except among
ducted according to different .rhythms: cars found the going tougher, preservationists and scholars.
indeed few of them had yet mastered the cobbled slopes. Pedestrians Change is, of course, the essence of urban life and no successful city
took the steep gradients at a leisurely pace, pausing frequently for rest: remains a museum to its own past. The expansion of the docks since the
despite the heat, people came to enjoy the panoramic views across the Second World War has obliterated the seaside amusement park-the
town and over the bay. Down below were the office blocks and multi- Beshchinar gardens, or Park of the Princes-where the city's inhabi-
storey apartment buildings of the postwar boom. But here there were tants refreshed themselves for generations; today it is commemorated
few signs of wealth. Abutting the old walls were modest whitewashed only in a nearby ouzeri of the same name. In the deserted sidings of the
homes in brick or wood-often no more than a single small room with old station, prewar trams and elderly railway carriages are slowly disin-
a privy attached: a pot of geraniums brightened the window-ledge, a tegrating. Even the infamous swampy Bara-once the largest red-light
rag rug bleached by the sun served as a door mat, clotheslines were district in eastern Europe-survives only in the fond memories of a few
stretched from house to house. Their elderly inhabitants were neatly ageing locals, in local belles-lettres, and in its streets-still bearing the
dressed. Later I realized most had probably lived there since the 192os, old names, Afrodite, Bacchus-which now house nothing more excit-
drawn from among the tens of thousands of refugees from bsia M.J_n._o~ ing than car rental agencies, garages and tyre-repair shops.
who had settled in the . city after the e~change of populations witli But ridding the city of its brothels is one thing and eradicating the
Turkey. Their simple homes contrasted with the elegantly dilapidated visible traces of five centuries of urban history is quite another. What, I
villas whose overhanging upper floors and high garden walls still lined wondered, did it do to a city's consciousness of itself-especially to a
many streets; the majority, once grand, had been badly neglected: their city so proud of its past-when substantial sections were at best allowed
gabled roofs had caved in, their shuttered bedrooms lay open to public to crumble away, at worst written out of the record? Had this happened
view, and one caught spectacular glimpses of the city below through by accident? Could one blame the great fire of 1917 that had destroyed
yawning gaps in their frontage. By the time I first saw them most had so much of its centre? Or did the forced exchange of populations in
been abandoned for decades, for their Muslim owners had left the city r 923-when m9r~_than~thiJ1Y thousand Muslim refugees departed, and
when the refugees had arrived. The cypresses, firs and rosebushes in nearly one hundred tho~~d Orthodox. Christians took their place-
their gardens were overgrown with ivy and creeping vines, their for- suddenly turn one city into a new one? W~s the sen;e of u"ft;;;~ontl.nu­
merly bright colours had faded into pastel shades of yellow, ochre and ity, in other words, which had so powerfully attracted me to Salonica at
cream. Here were vestiges of a past that was absent from the urban the outset, an illusion? Perhaps there was another urban history waiting
landscape of southern Greece-Turkish neighbourhoods that had out- to be written in which the story of continuity would have to be told
lived the departure of their inhabitants; fountains with their dedicatory rather differently, a tale not only of smooth transitions and adaptations,
inscriptions intact; a dervish tomb, now shuttered and locked. but also of violent endings and new beginnings.
With later visits, I came to see that these traces of the Ottoman past For there was another vanished element of the city's past which I
offered a clue to Salonica's central paradox. True, it could point, as was also beginning to learn about. On the drive into town from the air-

6 7
 Introduction Introduction

port, I had caught intriguing glimpses of substantial nineteenth- plane back to London had grown up after the war in the quarter imme-
century villas hidden behind rusting railings and overgrown weeds diately above the old Jewish cemetery: she remembered playing in the
amid the rows of postwar suburban apartment blocks. The palatial wreckage of the graves as a child, with her friends, looking for buried
three-storey pile in its own pine-shaded estate, now the main seat of the treasure, shortly before the authorities built the university campus over
Prefecture, turned out to have been originally the home of wealthy the site. Everyone, it seemed, had their story to tell, even though at that
nineteenth-century Jewish industrialists., the Allatinis; this was where time what had happened to the city's Jews was not something much dis-
Sultan Abdul Ham..id had been kept when he was deposed by the Young cussed in scholarly circles.
Turks and exiled to the city in I909. Along the same road was the Villa A little later, in Athens, I came across several dusty unopened sacks
Bianca, an opulently outsize Swiss chalet, home of the wealthy Diaz- of documents at the- Central Board of Jewish Communities. When I
Femandes family. On the drive into town, one passed a dozen or more examined them, I found a mass of disordered papers--catalogues,
of these shrines to the eclectic taste of its fin-de-siecle elite-Turkish memoranda, applications and letters. They turned out to be the
army officers, Greek and Bulgarian merchants and Jewish ind~trt~H~ts~ : archives of the wartime Service for the Disposal of Israelite Property,
-· T~~k~ and Bulgarians figrired iirominently irithehisto'ries of Greece. - set up by the Germans in those few weeks in I943 when more than
I had read, usually as ancestral enemies, but the Jews were in general f.orty-five thousand 1ews...,..-one ·fifth of the eity's entire· population-
remarkable only for their absence, enjoying littli m'O'te than a bit-part . W.o~r~. con~igned to ~CH)Vitz. These files showed how the deportations
in the central and all-important story of modem Greece's emergence had affected Salonica itself by triggering off a scramble for property
onto the international stage. In Salonica, however, it would be scarcely and possessions that incriminated many wartime officials. I started to
an exaggeration to say that they had dominated the life of the city f()r think about deportations in general, and the Holocaust in particular,
many centuries. As late as I 9 I 2 they-were die largest ethni.c group and not so much in terms of victims and perpetrators, but rather as chapters
the docks stood silent on theJewish Sabbath. Jews were wealthy busi- in the life of cities. The Jews were killed, almost all of them: but the city
nessmen; but many more were porters and casual labourers, tailors, that had been their home grew and prospered.
wandering street vendors, beggars, fishermen and tobacco workers. The accusation that Waldheim had been involved in the Final Solu-
Today the only traces of their predominance that survive are some tion-unfounded, as it turned out-reflected the extent to which the
names-Kapon, Perahia, Benmayor, Modiano-on faded shopfronts, Holocaust was dominating thinking about the Second World War.
Hebrew-lettered tombstones piled up in churchyards, an old people's Sometimes it seemed from the way people talked and wrote as though
home and the community offices. There is a cemetery, but it is a post- nothing else of any significance had happened in those years. In
war one, buried in the city's western suburbs. Greece, for example, two other areas of criminal activity-the mass
Here as elsewhere it was the Nazis who brought centuries of]ewish shootings of civilians in anti-partisan retaliations, and the execution of
life to an abrupt end. When Kurt Wal1he~ro. the Austrian politician British soldiers-were far more pertinent to Waldheim's war record.
who had served in the city as an army officer, was accused of being There were good reasons to deplore this state of cultural obsession. It
involved in the deportations, I came back to Salonica to talk to sur- quickly made the historian subject to the law of diminishing returns. It
vivors of Auschwitz, resistance fighters, the lucky ones who had gone also turned history into a form of voyeurism and allowed outsiders to
underground or managed to flee abroad. A softly spoken lawyer stood sit in easy judgement. I sometimes felt that I myself had become com-
with me on the balcony of his office and we looked down onto the rows plicit in this-scavenging the city for clues to destruction, ignoring the
of parked cars in Plateia Eleftherias (Freedom Square), where he had living for the dead.
been rounded up with the other Jewish men of the city for forced Above all, unremitting focus upon the events of the Second World
labour. Two elderly men, not Jewish, whom I bumped into on Markos War threatened to tum a remarkable chapter in Jewish, European and
Botsaris Street, told me about the day the Jews had been led away in Ottoman history into nothing more than a prelude to genocide, over-
I943: they were ten at the time, they said, and afterwards, they broke shadowing the many centuries when Jews had lived in relative peace,
into their homes with their friends and found food still warm on the and both their problems and their prospects had been of a different
table. A forty-year-old woman who happened to sit next to me on the kind. In Molho's bookshop, one of the few downtown reminders of ear-
8 9
 Introduction Introduction

lier times, I found Joseph N ehama's magisterial Histoire des Israelites de of almost kaleidoscopic interaction. Leon Sciaky's evocative Farewell to
Salonique, and began to see what an extraordinary story it had been. The Salonica, the autobiography of a Jewish boy growing up under Abdul
arrival ofthe Iberian Jews after their expulsion from Spain, Salonica's Hamid, begins with the sound of the muezzin's cry at dusk. In Sciaky's
emergence as a renowned "centre of-f'a·bbfuicillearning, the disruption city, Albanian householders protected their Bulgarian grocer from the
caused by the most famous False Messiah of the seventeenth century, fury of the Ottoman gendarmerie, while well-to-do Muslim parents
Sabbetai Zevi, and the persistent faith of his followers, who followed employed Christian wet~nurses for their-children and Greek gardeners
him even after his conversion to Islam, formed part of a fascinating and for their fruit trees. Outside the Yalman family home the well was used
little-known history unparalleled in Europe. Enjoying the favour of the by "the Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews, Serbs, Vlachs, and Albanians
sultans, the Jews, as the Ottoman traveller Evll.ya.Clielebinoted; calied of the neighbourhooi!l.." And in Nikos Kokantzis's moving novella Gio-
the eity "our Salonica"___:a place where, in addition to Turkish: 'Greek conda, a Greek teenage boy falls in love with the Jewish girl next door in
and Bulgarian, most of the inhabitants "know the Jewish tongue because the midst of the Nazi occupation; at the moment of deportation, her
day and night they are in contact With, and conduct business withj ews." parents trust his with their most precious belongings. 3
Yet as I supplemented my knowledge of the Greek metropolis with Have scholars, then, simply been blinkered by nationalism and the
books and articles on its Jewish past, and tried to reconcile what I knew narrow:ed sympathies of ethnic politics? If they have the fault is not
of the home of Saint Dimitrios-"the Orthodox city"-with the theirs alone. The basic problem--common to historians and their pub-
Sefardic "Mother oflsrael," it seemed to me that these two histories- lic alike-has been the attribution of sharply opposing, even contradic-
the Greek and the Jewish--did not so much complement one another tory, meanings to the same key events. Both have seen history as a
as pass each other by. I had noticed how seldom standard Greek zero-sum game, in which opportunities for some came through the suf-
accounts of the city referred to the Jews. An official tome from I962 ferings of others, and one group's loss was another's gain: t43o--when
which had been published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Byzantine ccity f~lLto. Sultan~Mnracl-11-was a catastrophe¥for the
its capture from the Turks contained almost no mention of them at all; C~~s!i3:.1:1~~~E-~~~~p~ th~]'!lrks. Nearly five centuries later, the
the subject had been regarded as taboo by the politicians mastermind- Greek victory in I 9 I 2 reversed the equation. The Jews, having settled
ing the celebrations. This reticence reflected what the author Elias there at the invitationof the Ottoman sultans, identi£ed their interests
Petropoulos excoriated as "the ideology of the barbarian neo-Greek with those of the empire, something the Greeks foundha~d to forgive.
bourgeoisie," for whom the city "has always been Greek." But at the It follows that the real challenge is not merely to tell the story of this
same time, most Jewish scholars were just as exclusive as their Greek remarkable place as one of cultural and religious co-existence-in the
counterparts: their imagined city was as empty of Christians as the early twenty-first century such long-forgotten stories are eagerly
other was of]ews. 2 awaited and sought out-but to see the experiences of Christians, Jews
As for the Mu~JLws.,}vho had ruled Sal.onica from I43o tq 19I2, they and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing historical nar-
were more or" 'less absent from both. Centuries of European antipathy rative. National histories generally have clearly defined heroes and vil-
to the Ottomans had left their mark. Their presence on the wrong side lains, but what would a history look like where these roles were blurred
of the Dardanelles had for so long been seen as an accident, misfortune and confused? Can one shape an account of this city's past which man-
or tragedy that in an act of belated historical wishful thinking they had ages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical
been expunged from the record of European history. Turkish scholars discontinuities-the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements and
and writers, and professional Ottomanists, had not done much to rec- genocide-which it has also experienced? Nearly a century ago, a local
tify things. It suited everyone, it seemed, to ignore the fact that there historian attempted this: at a time when Salonica's ultimate fate was
had once existed in this corner of Europe an Ottoman and an Islamic uncertain, the city struck him as a "museum of idioms, of disparate cul-
city atop the Greek and Jewish ones. tures and religions." Since then what he called its "hybrid spirit" has
How striking then it is that memoirs often describe the place very been severely battered by two world wars and everything they brought
differently from such scholarly or official accounts and depict a society with them. I think it is worth trying again. 4

IO I I
 Introduction Introduction

identities changed and people were labelled in new ways: Muslims

turned into Turks, Christians into Greeks. Although in Salonica it was
IN THE I 93os, the spirit of the Sufi holy man MousaBaba was -occa- the Greeks who eventually got their state, and Bulgarians, Muslims and
sionally seen wanderillg near his tomb in the upper town. Even today Jews who in different ways lost out, it is worth remembering that else-
house-owners sometimes dream that beneath·their cellars lie Turkish where Greeks too lost out-in Istanbul, for example, or Trabzon,
janissaries and Byzantine necropoles. One reads stories of hidden Alexandria and Izmir, where thousands died during the expulsions of
Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who I922. Cities, after all, are places of both eviction and sanctuary, and
haunt the decaying villas near the sea. One hears rumours of buried many of the Greek refugees who made a new home for themselves in
Jewish treasure guarded by spirits which have outwitted the exorcists Salonica had been forced from their old ones elsewhere.
and proved themselves too strong for Massad agents, former Nazis and Similar transformations occurred in cities across a wide swathe of
anyone else who has tried to locate the hidden jewels and gold they the globe-in Lviv, for instance, Wroslaw. VIlna.and Tiflis, J~zysalem,
protect. Jaffa and Lahore. Each of these endured its own moments of trau:ma
But Salonica's ghosts en:)erge in other ways too, through documents caused by the intense violence that has accompanied the emergence of
and archives, the letters of Byz_antine archbishops, the court records of pation-states. Was the function of the Israeli Custodian of Absentee
Ottoman magistrates·and the hagiographies of the lives and extpto.:rdi.- Property after I 948, for example, handing out Arab properties to new
nary deaths ofChristiag_!l!:_al'ty!§. The silencing of the city's multifari- I Jewish owners, very different from that of the Greek Service for the
i
ous past has not been for ·iack of sources. Sixteenth-century rabbis Disposal of Jewish Property founded in Salonica five years earlier?
adjudicate on long-forgotten marital rows, business wrangles and the
f Both systematized the violence of dispossession and sought to give it a
r
tribulations of a noisy, malodorous crowded town. The diary of a more lasting bureaucratic form. Thanks to their activities, the rem-
Ukrainian political exile depicts unruly Jewish servants drunk in the nants of former cities may also be traced through the trajectories of the
mud, gluttonous clerics, a whirl of social engagements, riots and refugees who left them. A retiree clipping her roses in a Sussex country
plague. Travellers-drawn in ever-increasing numbers by the city's garden, an elderly merchant in an Istanbul suburb and an Auschwitz
antiquities, by the partridge and rabbits in the plains outside, by busi- survivor in Indianapolis are among those who helped me by reviving
ness, art or sheer love of adventure-penned their impressions of a their memories of a city that is long gone. 5
magical landscape of minarets, cypresses and whitewashed walls climb- By I950, when this book concludes, Salonica's Muslims had been
ing high above the Aegean. From the late nineteenth century-though resettled in Turkey, and-the Jews had been deported by the Germans
no earlier-there are newspapers, more and more of them, in half a and most of them killed. The Greek civil war had just ended in the tri-
dozen languages, and even that rarity in the Ottoman lands-maps. As umph of the anti-communist Right, and the city was set for the rapid
for the archives, they are endless-Ottoman, Venetian, Greek, Aus- I and entirely unexpected pell-mell postwar expansion which saw its
trian, French, English, American-compiled conscientiously by gener- population double and treble within thirty or forty years. A forest of
densely packed apartment blocks and giant advertising billboards
ations of long-departed foreign consuls. Drawing on such materials, I
begin with the city's conquest by Sultan Murad II in I4JO, delineate its
( sprouted where in living memory there had been cypresses and
daily life under his successors, and trace its passage from the multi- minarets, stables, owls and storks. Its transformation continues, and
confessional, extraordinarily polyglot Ottoman world-as late as the today Russian computer whiz-kids, Ghanaian doctors, Albanian stone-
First World War, Salonican boot-blacks commanded a working knowl- masons, Georgian labourers, Ukrainian nannies and Chinese street
edge of six or seven languages-to its role as an ethnically and linguisti- pedlars are entering Salonica's bloodstream. Many of them quickly
cally homogenised bastion of the twentieth-century nation-state in learn to speak fluent Greek, for the city's position within the modern
which by I950, more than ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants were, nation-state is unquestioned: the story of its passage from Ottoman to
by any definition, Greek. Greek hands has become ancient history.
The old empires collapsed and nations fought their way into being,

I2 IJ
 PART I

The Rose
of Sultan Murad
 I

. Conquest, 1430

BEGINNINGS

BEFORE THE CITY FELL IN 1430 ~ i~ .h;!dalready_~p.joy(!dseventeen

hundred years of life as a Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine metropo-
lis. Sometimes it had flourished;·at others it was sacked and looted. For-
eigners had seized it and moved on. Throughout it remained a city
whose inhabitants spoke Greek. But of this Greek past, only traces sur-
vived 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 sub-
stratum 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

17
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

with W. Pole," wrote Captain Vance from Edgware, Middlesex. "Every The irony was that Alexander himself never knew the city named
man in the last war did not know it as Salonika." Mr. "Wilks of Newbury after his half-sister, for it was founded during the succession struggle
tried to calm matters by helpfully pointing out that in 1937 "by Greek precipitated by his death. He had a general called Cassander, who was
royal decree, Salonika reverted to Thessaloniki." In fact it had been married to Thessaloniki. Cassander hoped to succeed to the Macedon-
officially known by the Greek form since the Ottomans were defeated ian throne and having murdered Alexander's mother to get there, he
in 1912. 1 founded a number of cities to re-establish his credentials as a statesman.
It is only foreigners who make things difficult for themselves, for The one he immodestly named after himself has vanished from the
the Greek etymology is perfectly straightforward. The daughter of a pages of history. But that given his wife's name in 315 BC came to join
local ruler, Philip of Macedon, was called Thessaloniki, and the city was Alexandria itself in the network of new Mediterranean ports that would
named after her: both daughter and city commemorated the triumph link the Greek world with the trading routes to Asia, India and Africa.
(niki) of her father over the people of Thessaly as he extended Mace- As events would prove, Cassander chose his spot well. Built on the
danian power throughout Greece. Later of course, his son, Alexander, slope running down to the sea from the hills in the shadow of Mount
conquered much more distant lands which took him to the limits of the Hortiatis, the city gave its inhabitants an easy and comforting sense of
known world. There were prehistoric settlements in the area, but the orientation: from earliest times, they could see the Gulf before them
city itself is a creation of the fourth-century BC Macedonian state. with Mount Olympos across the bay in the distance, the forested hills
Today the association between the city and the dynasty is as close as and mountains rising behind them, the well-rivered plains stretching
it has ever been. If one walks from the White Tower along the wide away to the west. Less arid than Athens, less hemmed in than Trieste,
seafront promenade which winds southeast along the bay, one quickly the new city blended with its surroundings, marking the point where
encounters a huge statue of Megas Alexandros-Alexander the Great. mountains, rivers and sea met. It guarded the most accessible land
Mounted on horseback, sword in hand, he looks down along the five- route from the Mediterranean up into the Balkans and central Europe,
lane highway (also named after him) out of town, towards the airport, down which came Slavs (in the sixth century), and Germans (in 1941)
the beaches and the weekend resorts of the Chalkidiki peninsula. The while traders and NATO convoys (on their way into Kosovo in 1999)
statue rises heroically above the acrobatic skateboarders skimming went in the other direction. Its crucial position between East and
around the pedestal, the toddlers, the stray dogs and the partygoers West was also later exploited by the Romans, whose seven-hundred-
queuing up for the brightly lit :floating discos and bars which now cir- kilometre lifeline between Italy and Anatolia, the Via Egnatia, it
cumnavigate the bay by night. It is a magnet for the hundreds who straddled.
stroll here in the summer evenings, escaping the stuffy backstreets for Poised between Europe and Asia, the Mediterranean and the
the refreshment of the sea breeze as the sun dips behind the mountains. Balkans, the interface of two climatic zones brings Salonica highly
But in 1992, after the collapse of Yugoslavia led the neighbouring changeable air pressure throughout the year. Driving winter rains and
republic of Macedonia to declare its independence, Alexander's Greek fogs subdue the spirits, and helped inspire a generation of melancholic
defenders took to the streets in a very different mood. Flags prolifer- modernists in the 1930s. The vicious north wind which blows for days
ated in shop-windows, and car stickers and airport banners proclaimed down the Vardar valley has done more damage to the city over the cen-
that "Macedonia has been, and will always be, Greek." Greeks and turies than humans ever managed, whipping up fires and turning them
Slavs did battle over the legacy of the Macedonian kings, and Salonica into catastrophes. A bad year can also bring heavy falls of snow, even
was the centre of the agitation. In the main square, hundreds of thou- the occasional ice in the Gulf: freezing temperatures in February 1770
sands of angry protestors were urged on by their Metropolitan, left "many poor lying in the streets dead of cold"; in the 196os, snow-
Panayiotatos (His Most Holy) Panteleimon (known to some journalists drifts blocked all traffic between the Upper Town and the streets below.
as His Wildness [Panagriotatos] for the extremism of his language). The Yet the city also enjoys Mediterranean summers-with relatively little
twentieth century was ending as it had begun, with an argument over wind, little rain and high daytime temperatures, only slightly softened
Macedonia, and names themselves had become a political issue in a way by the afternoon breeze off the bay. 2
which few outside Greece understood. This combination of winter rains and summer sunshine makes for
18
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

intensive cultivation. Apricots, chestnuts and mulberries grow well partridge, hare, rabbits and tortoises in the nearby plain, and oaks,
here, as do grains, potatoes, cucumbers and melons. Fringed now by beech and maple in the hills above, it is not surprising that the city
the Athens motorway, vegetable gardens still flourish in the alluvial flourished.
plains-"our California," a farmer once happily told me. "There is
excellent shooting in the neighbourhood," noted John Murray's Hand-
book in r854, "including pheasants, woodcocks, wildfowl etc." Cutting RoMANS
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 eas- A HELLENISTIC DYNASTY gave Salonica birth but it was under the
ily navigable, debouching finally into the miles of thick reedy insect- Romans that it prospered. Shrines to Macedonian and Roman rulers
plagued marshes which line its mouth. All swamp and water, the Vardar intermingled with temples to Egyptian gods, sphinxes and the city's
plain in December reminded John Morritt at the end of the eighteenth own special tutelary deities, the mysterious Samothracian Kabirii.
century of nothing so much as "the dear country from Cambridge to They were probably worshipped in the Rotonda, the oldest building
Ely." For hundreds of years it emanated "putrid fevers," noxious exha- still in use in the city, whose holy space has since attracted saints,
lations and agues which drove horses mad, and manifested them- dervishes and devotees of modem art and jazz. Even before the birth of
selves-before the age of pesticide-in the "sallow cheeks and Christ Salonica was a provincial capital with substantial municipal priv-
bloodless lips" of the city's inhabitants. 3 ileges. Later it became the base of Emperor Galerius himself. By the
"From water comes everything" runs the inscription on an Ottoman side of the main road running through town the carved pillars of a mas-
fountain still preserved in the Upper Town. Fed by rivers and rains and sive triumphal arch still commemorate Galerius's defeat of the trouble-
moisture rising from the bay, water bathes the city and its surroundings some Persians. His own urban ambitions, influenced by Syrian and
in a hazy light quite different from that of parched Attica, softer, Persian models, were extensive. Today students sun themselves on the
stranger and less harsh, shading the western mountains in grey, brown walkways above where his now vanished portico once connected the
and violet. After days of cloudy and stormy weather, the Reverend triumphal arch with an enormous palace and hippodrome. Meanwhile,
Henry Fanshawe Tozer realized "what I had never felt before-the in what is still the commercial heart of the city, archaeologists have
pleasure of pale colours." Artesian wells are dug easily down to the uncovered a vast forum, a tribute to Greco-Roman consumerism, with
water table which sits just below the surface of the earth, and there are a double colonnade of shops, a square paved in marble, a library and a
plentiful springs in the nearby hills. Winter rains have etched beds deep large brothel, complete with sex toys, private baths and dining-rooms
into the soil on either side of the town, torrents so quick to flood that for favoured clients.
well into the nineteenth century they would carry away a horse and This was, in short, a flourishing settlement of key strategic signifi-
rider, or sluice out the poorly buried bones of the dead in the cemeter- cance for Roman power in the East. We may find it puzzling that
ies beyond the walls. 4 Greeks even today will call themselves Romioi (Romans). But there is
From earliest times, too, fresh water has been channelled through nothing strange about it. The Roman empire existed here too, among
fountains, aqueducts and underground pipes, attracting the rich and the speakers of Greek, and continued to exert its spell long after it had
the holy, plane trees, acacias and monasteries, wherever it bubbles to collapsed in the West. Yet we need to be careful, for when Greeks use
the surface. Archaeologists have traced the remains of the Roman, the term R,omios., they do not exactly mean that they are "Roman." Hid-
Byzantine and Ottoman mills which dotted the water-courses leading ing inside the word is the one ingredient which has shaped the city's
down into the city's reservoirs. Until the 193os, villagers on nearby complex cultural mix more strongly than any other-the Christian
Mount Hortiatis produced ice from water-bearing rocks in the thickly faith. The Ottomans understood the term this way as well: when they
forested slopes above the town, kept it in small pits cut into the hillside talked about the "community of Romans" (Rum millet) they meant
and brought it down by donkey into the city each summer. With nearby Orthodox Christians, not necessarily Greeks; Rum was Byzantine Ana-
salteries vital for preserving cod and meat, abundant fish in the bay, tolia; Rumeli the Orthodox Christian Balkans. Until the age of ethnic

20 2!
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

nationalism, to be "Greek" was, for most people in the Ottoman world, take hold of the empire. Byzantium is the name we have given to a civi-
synonymous with belief in the Orthodox Christian faith. lization which regarded itself, and was regarded by those around it, as
With this Christianization of the Roman Greek world few cities are the heir to the glories of imperial Rome. Its character was defined by its
as closely identified as Salonica. In the days when the Apostle Paul cultural synthesis of the traditions of Greece, Rome and Christianity,
passed through, Christians were merely a deviant Jewish sect, and and Salonica was one of its bastions.
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 INVADERS
pagan use, and chapels, shrines and Christian graveyards were spread-
ing with astonishing speed across the city. "GuARDED BY GoD, greatly surpassing every city in Thrace and in
The figure who came to symbolize Christ's triumph in Salonica, all oflllyricum as to variety of wealth," the city was superbly protected
eventually outshining even the Apostle himself, was a Roman officer by its towering walls, by its fortress perched commandingly above the
called Dimitri()S who was martyred in the late. third ce~tucy .Ap. A bay and even by the spit ofland which guarded the entrance to the gulf
small shrine to him was built alongside the many other healing shrines itself. It needed all the divine protection it could get, however, for
which studded the area around the forum. After a grateful Roman pre- through the centuries its riches and location seemed to attract one
fect was cured by his miraculous powers, he built a five-aisled basilica to invader after another. In the sea raid of 904 an assault by Sudanese,
the saint, which quickly became the centre of a major cult, attracting Arab and Egyptian soldiers, led by Byzantine converts to Islam, left the
Jews as well as Christians and pagans. The adoration of Dimitrios city strewn with corpses and thousands of its inhabitants were sold into
swept the city, and by the early nineteenth century-the first time we slavery. But that remained an isolated event, for Macedonia was far
have a name-by-name census of its inhabitants-one in ten Christians from the centre of the long-running Byzantine-Arab land war, and in
there were named after him. 5 eastern Europe-unlike in Syria and Anatolia-the men of Christ had
Like the other major early Christian shrines-the massive, low- several hundred more years to proselytize before confronting a serious
sunk Panayia Acheiropoietos (the Virgin's Church Unmade by Mortal rival in Islam.
Hands), the grand Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda itself-Dimitrios's Infinitely more important in the long run than the booty-hunters
church shows how deeply the city's Greco-Roman culture had been were the nomadic tribes who found Salonica on their path as they
impregnated with Christian rituals and doctrines. Although the fire of migrated from the central Asian steppes to the verdant lands of Europe.
r9r7 caused irreparable damage to the priceless mosaics that line its Some passed through before veering off to the north and settling else-
colonnades, enough has remained following its restoration to illumi- where. But starting in the mid-sixth century, Byzantine military experts
nate the imperial-Christian synthesis: the saint is shown heralded by became aware of a new threat-the Slavs. According to the contemptu-
toga-dad angelic trumpeters, receiving children, or casting his arms ous court historian, Procopius, they lived in miserable huts, were often
around the shoulders of the church's founders. Another saint, Sergios, on the move, and went to war mostly on foot and armed only with small
is depicted in a purple chiton with military insignia around his neck. shields and javelins. 6 Yet despite their poverty and their crude
The city's devoted inhabitants are Christians, but they are also recog- weaponry the Slavs had numbers on their side, and quickly became a
nisably Romans. Incorporated into the church's structure is part of the serious threat to Byzantine rule. In the late sixth century, they reached
original baths, the place of the saint's martyrdom, which became a site the walls of Salonica for the first time, and a huge army gathered on the
of pilgrimage in the following centuries. And crowning the pillars plains outside the walls. 7 Only Saint Dimitrios saved the day: thanks to
which line the nave are marble capitals whose writhing volutes and his inspiration, the defenders suspended curtains below the ramparts to
acanthus leaves, doves, rams and eagles, sometimes taken from earlier blunt the shock of the missiles hitting the walls, while armed sorties
buildings, sometimes carved specially for the church, cover the entire frightened the attackers into retreat. Again and again the Slavs laid
range of Roman design in the centuries when Christianity began to siege to the city; each time, Saint Dimitrios, it was said, kept them at

22 23
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

bay in a series of miracles which were collected, written down, and re- gering from crisis to crisis. Ambitious Bulgarian and Serb rulers were-
told over centuries. despite their shared Christianity-more of a threat than they were
The Slav tribes did not disappear. They settled as farmers and allies. In rr85 Salonica was pillaged by Norman invaders. In 1204
traders in villages across Greece and down into the Peloponnese, and Catholic crusaders-Franks, as they were contemptuously known in the
the fundamental ethnographic balance between Salonica and its hinter- Orthodox world-sacked Constantinople itself and carved up its pos-
land over the next fourteen hundred years was henceforth established: a sessions. To the east, Byzantine power was largely spent. Turkish tribes
predominantly Slavic peasantry cultivated the soil and was kept under had moved in from central Asia, and the rise and fall of the Seljuk sul-
the political and economic control of non-Slav elites based in the city. 8 tans turned Anatolia into a battleground between competing emirates.
But frontiers are places of interaction, and few frontiers were more per- That the empire survived at all was owing to the weakness of its ene-
meable or symbiotic than that between the Slavs and the Greeks. The mies, and the judicious bribery of foreign allies.
former trickled into Salonica, drawn by the seductive power of a Hel- In the early fourteenth century, however, as Catalan mercenaries,
lenic education and the upward mobility this bought. Only nineteenth- Genoese, Venetians, Serbs and others fought for mastery in the eastern
century romantic nationalism turned the porous boundaries between Mediterranean, an entirely new power began the remarkable ascent
Slav and Greek into rigidly patrolled national cages. which would tum it within two hundred years into the greatest force in
Moreover, the city did not only take in the Slavs, but it reached out the world. Osman Ghazi, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, initially
to them too, and converted them, through the Church, into members ruled a small emirate on the frontier with Byzantine territory in Anato-
of its own civilization. It was two brothers frQm Salonica, Constantine lia. To his east lay more powerful Muslim emirs, and behind them the
(better known to posterity by his later name, Kyrill) and Methodius, mightiest state of all, that of the Mongol khans. By comparison, fight-
themselves possibly of Slavic descent, who drew up a new alphabet, ing the fading Greeks was easy. In I3o2 Osman defeated a mercenary
adapted from Greek, translated the Christian liturgy into Slavic and army sent out by the emperor and by the time of his death in I 3 26 he
spread Christ's.me,ssage across eastern Europe. The extent of their suc- had established his capital in the former Byzantine city of Bursa. Feud-
cess was matched oniy by that with which others were spreading the ing between the Byzantine Palaeologues and Cantacuzenes gave his
word of Mohammed in the Middle East. The seeds of their mission successors their chance in Europe. In I 354 his son Orhan won a
were planted in Dalmatia, Hungary, Moravia and Poland; by the end of foothold at Gallipoli and less than twenty years later the Byzantine
the ninth century the pagan Bulgars too had been converted. As a emperor Jean V Palaeologue made his submission to his successor
result, a version of the Cyrillic alphabet first devised by these two sons Murad I. By the end of the century, Murad's successor Bayazid I-the
of a Byzantine officer from Salonica is taught today in schools from the Thunderbolt-was styling himself Sultan.
Adriatic to Siberia. 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
THE CoMING oF THE OTTOMANs provinces) and nineteenth-century Balkan nationalism, the character of
the early Ottoman state remains poorly understood. The Ottomans
OvER THE NEXT six hundred years, the city became a centre of were Muslims, but their empire was built as much in Europe as it was in
humanistic learning and theological debate. Many new churches were Asia. In fact before the sixteenth century they probably ruled over more
established, turning it into a treasure-house of late Byzantine art. Christians than they did Muslims. Their form of Islam was a kind of
Monasticism spread to the Balkans from Egypt and Syria, and the great border religion spread both by warriors dedicated to Holy War and
foundations of Mount Athos attracted pilgrims, scholars and benefac- through religious fraternities which took over Christian shrines,
tors to the city as they made the journey to the Holy Mountain just to espousing a surprisingly open attitude to Christianity itself. They were
its east. in many ways heirs to central &ian Turkic versions of Islam, like that
Yet amid this cultural ferment, the Byzantine emperors were stag- embraced by the Grand Khan Mongha, for whom the religions of his
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

empire "are like the five fingers of the same hand." They followed the one for the Ottomans, who could be seen as protectors 'of Orthodoxy
Hanafi school of Sunni law, the most tolerant and flexible in relation to against the Catholics. The hope for political stability, the desire for
non-Muslims, their rulers married Serbian and Greek princesses- wealth and status in a meritocratic and open ruling system, admiration
which meant that many Ottoman sultans had Christian mothers-and for the governing capacities of the Ottomans, and their evident willing-
their key advisers and generals were often converts recruited from ness to make use of Christians as well as Muslims explain why adminis-
Byzantine service. 9 trators, nobles, peasants and monks felt the allure of the sultans and
One historian has recently argued that before the fifteenth century, why many senior Byzantine noble families entered their service. Murad
the empire was actually what he terms a "raiding confederacy," in IT's grand viziers were well known for their pro-Christian sympathies;
which the Ottomans joined with several other great families in the Murad himself was influenced by dervish orders which preached a sim-
search for land and plunder. Ghazi (frontier warrior) Evrenos Bey, the ilarly open-minded stance, and the family sheykh of the Evrenos family
leader of the most feared squad of raiders, was a former Byzantine mili- was reputed to be a protector of Christians. In the circumstances, it is
tary commander who converted to Islam. Evrenos acted in a way which not surprising why surrender seemed far more sensible an option than
suggested he was virtually a junior partner with the Ottoman emirs, futile resistance against overwhelming odds, and why the inhabitants of
and when he spearheaded the Ottoman assault on northern Greece the Salonica themselves were known, according to at least one Byzantine
value of his support was recognized by them with huge grants of land. chronicler, as "friends of the Sultan. " 12
The fiefdoms his family won in the vicinity of Salonica made them In the second half of the fourteenth century, one Balkan town after
among the largest land-owners in the empire and a dominant force in another yielded to the fast-moving Ottoman armies; the Via Egnatia
the city well into the twentieth century. His descendants included fell into their hands, and even the canny monks of Mount Athos sub-
Ottoman pashas and Young Turks, and his magnificent tomb was a mitted. Salonica itself was blockaded for the first time in I383, and in
place of pilgrimage for Christians and Muslims alike. 10 April I 387, surrendered without a fight. On this occasion, all that hap-
The Turks' attitude to religion came as a pleasant relief to many pened was that a small Turkish garrison manned the Acropolis. The
Orthodox Christians. Held captive by the Ottomans in I 355, the dis- town's ruler Manuel Palaeologue had wanted to resist, but he was
tinguished archbishop of Salonica, Gregory Palamas, was surprised to shouted down by the inhabitants, and forced to leave the city so that
find the Orthodox Church recognized and even flourishing in the lands they could hand themselves over..Manuel himself paid homage to the
under the emir. Prominent Turks were eager to discuss the relationship emir Murad, and even fought for his new sovereign before being
of the two faiths with him and the emir organized a debate between him crowned emperor.
and Christian converts to Islam. "We believe in your prophet, why Had the city remained uninterruptedly under Ottoman control
don't you believe in ours?" Muslims asked him more than once. Pala- from this point on, its subsequent history would have been very differ-
mas himself observed an imam conducting a funeral and later took the ent, and the continuity with Byzantine life not so decisively broken.
opportunity to joust over theology with him. When the discussion Having given in peacefully, Salonica was not greatly altered by the
threatened to overheat, Palamas calmed it down by saying politely: change of regime, its municipal privileges were respected by the new
"Had we been able to agree in debate we might as well have been of one rulers and its wealthy monastic foundations weathered the storm. The
faith." To which he received the revealing reply: "There will be a time small Turkish garrison converted a church into a mosque for their own
when we shall all agree." 11 use, and the devshirme child levy was imposed-at intervals Turkish sol-
As Byzantine power waned, more and more Orthodox Christians diers carried off Christian children to be brought up as Muslims-
felt caught between two masters. Faced with an apparent choice which must have caused distress. But returning in I393, Archbishop
between the reviled Catholics (their sack of Constantinople in I204 Isidoros described the situation as better than he had anticipated, while
never to be forgotten) and the Muslim Turks, many opted for the latter. the Russian monk Ignatius of Smolensk who visited in I40I was still
Written off as an embarrassment by later Greek commentators, the amazed by its "wondrous" monasteries. Christians asked the Sultan to
pro-Turkish current in late Byzantine politics was in fact a powerful intervene in ecclesiastical disputes, bishops relied on the Turks to con-

26 27
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

firm them in effice, and one "said openly to anyone who asked that he In fact Murad had set his heart on the city from the start. So far as he
had the Turks for patriarchs, emperors and protectors." 13 was concerned, it was not only a vitaLMedit.erranean,port, but belonged
Unfortunately for Salonica, the Byzantine emperor Manuel could to him by right since it had already submitted to Ottoman rule. After
not resist taking advantage of the Ottomans' own difficulties to try to 1422 his troops besieged it, and with the hinterland also under his con-
wrest the city back for himself. For in 1402, the Ottoman army suffered trol, there was litde the Byzantine emperors could do. The empire
the most crushing defeat of its entire history at the hands of the Mon- itself was dying. The city's inhabitants invited the Yenetians in, think-
gol khan Tamurlane. Sultan Bayazid died in captivity and his defeat led ing they at least would bolster the defences, but the situation went from
direcdy to a vicious Ottoman civil war which lasted nearly twenty years. bad to worse. By 1429 urban life had virtually collapsed, three-quarters
Exploiting the dynasty's moment of weakness, Manuel got one of the of the inhabitants had already fled-many into Ottoman-controlled
claimants, Suleyman, to marry his daughter, and to agree at the same territories-and only ten thousand remained. Despite occasional
time to return Salonica to Byzantine rule. Local ghazis like Evrenos Bey Venetian grain convoys, food was scarce. Some defenders let them-
were not pleased, but apart from delaying the withdrawal of the selves down by ropes to join the Turks. Others passed messages saying
Ottoman garrison they could do nothing. But in 142 I a new ruler, the theywished to surrender: the pro-Ottoman faction within the walls was
youthful Murad II, fought his way to the throne, and determined to put as powerful as it had ever been, its numbers swelled by Murad's prom-
an end to the confusion and internecine bloodletting which had divided ises of good treatment if the city gave in.
the empire. 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
THE SIEGE difficult to stomach than ten thousand deaths." But angry crowds
demonstrated against him. When he invoked the miraculous powers of
IN _I 430 Sultan Mu_r~~l.II was "a litde, short, thick man, with the phys- their patron Saint Dimitrios, and talked about a giant warrior on horse-
iognomy of a Tartar-a broad and brown face, high cheek bones, a back coming to their aid, they heard nothing but empty promises. God
round beard, a great and crooked nose, with litde eyes." Only twenty- had preserved the city over the centuries, he told them, "as an acropolis
six, he had already established his place in history by restoring the and guardian of the surrounding countryside." But the Turks were out-
authority of the Osmanlis after the defeat by the Mongols. Hard-living, side the walls, and the villages and towns beyond were in their hands.
hard-drinking and a keen hunter, he enjoyed the affection of his sol- Their mastery of the hinterland had turned the fortified city into a
diers and the respe'ct of diplomats and statesmen who encountered him. giant prison. Resistance meant certain enslavement. In 1429 Arch-
He was a brilliant warrior, who spent much of his reign building up bishop Symeon died, but the Venetians brought in mercenaries to pre-
Ottoman power in the Balkans and Anatolia, but he preferred a life of vent the defenders capitulating and the siege dragged on until in March
spiritual contemplation, tried twice to withdraw from the throne, and 1430 Murad determined to end it. He left his hunting leopards, falcons
was eventually buried in the mausoleum he had designed himself at and goshawks and joined his army before the city.
Bursa, a building of austere beauty, with an earth-covered grave open to Combining levies from Europe and Anatolia, his troops gathered
the skies. The much-travelled Spaniard, Pero Tafur, described him as outside the walls, while camel-trains brought up siege engines, stone-
"a discreet person, grave in his looks, and ... so handsomely attended throwers, bombards and scaling ladders. The sultan took up a position
that I never saw the like." 14 on high ground which overlooked the citadel, and sent a last group of
According to an Ottoman legend, the sultan was asleep in his palace Christian messengers to urge surrender. These got no more favourable
one night when God came to him in a dream and gave him a beautiful, a response than before. Prompted by the sight of a Venetian vessel sail-
sweet-smelling rose to sniff. ·when Murad asked if he could keep it, ing into the Gulf, and fearing the garrison was about to be reinforced,
God told him that the rose was Salonica and that he had decreed it Murad ordered the attack to begin.
should be his. For two or three days the desperate defenders managed to hold out
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

against the assault troops and sappers. But then Murad galvanized his erals actually founded a Christian monastery there. Salcinica's fate was
men. "I will give you whatever the city possesses," he pledged them. very different: ruined and eerily quiet, its streets and buildings lay
"Men, women, children, silver and gold: only the city itself you will empty. 16 In the Acheiropoietos church the sultan held a victory thanks-
leave to me." At dawn on 29 March, a hail of arrows "like snow" forced giving service. Then he had the building turned into a mosque, and
the defenders back from the parapets. Crowds of ghazi fighters, spurred ordered a laconic inscription to be chiselled into a marble column in
on by the sultan's words, attacked the walls "like wild animals." Within the north colonnade of the nave. There it survives to this day, and if
a few hours, one had scaled the blind side of the Trigonion tower, cut your eyesight is good enough, you can still make out in the elegaE!-A.J:a::- ,
off the head of a wounded Venetian soldier and tossed it down. His fel- hie script: "Sultan Murad Khan took Thessaloniki in the year 833
low ghazis quickly followed him up and threw open the main gates. [=1430]." -------
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 Anagnos-
tes-ransacked churches, homes and public buildings, looking for hid-
den 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 reck-
oned 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." 15
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 enslave-
ment 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 J annina, 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 every-
thing." Jannina obeyed and remained an important centre of Hellenic
learning throughout the Ottoman period: indeed one of Murad's gen-
 The Rose of Sultan Murad

does not cease to make victorious. And he slaughtered and took pris-
oner some of their sons, and took their property. "2
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
2 would have even liberated all the captives had not one of his senior
commanders prevented him. As it was, he personally ransomed mem-
bers of some of the city's notable Byzantine families (as was his custom
after a siege), and his vassal, the Serbian despot George Brankovich-
Mosques and Hamams whose daughter Mata he married a few years later-paid for others. In
all, about a thousand Greek ex-prisoners were thus rescued from slav-
ery 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
THE MIGHTIEST WAR having blocked a peaceful outcome to the siege, and some even ques-
tioned the powers of Saint Dimitrios himself. Gradually, the Byzantine
CENTRES oF TRADE, learning, religious piety and administrative caravanseray, public baths, old manufactories, tanneries and textile
I
,,. control, cities were essential for the prosperity of the Ottoman lands.
Yet as the sultati's knew, it is one thirig to conquer a city, another to
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
restore it to life. In 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror called the task of after the conquest. But the city was a shadow of its former self, a mere
reviving Constantinople after its conquest the "mightiest war" com- vestige of the flourishing metropolis of forty thousand inhabitants
pared with which the business of taking it had been merely one of the which had existed a decade earlier.
"lesser wars." Twenty years earlier his father, Murad, had viewed In fact, once Murad realized the extent of its depopulation, he
Salonica in a similar light. The man who for all his military genius was changed his mind and decided to bring in Muslim settlers as well. He
reputed "not to love war" now pondered how to return it to its former handed over many properties to senior officials at his court, and crafts-
glory. No other city in his domain matched its imposing fortifications men, attracted by tax breaks, were resettled from the nearby town of
or its commercial possibilities. It was thekey to the Balkans, and the Yannitsa and from Anatolia. Their arrival injected new blood into the
Balkans were fast on their way to becoming the economic powerhouse urban economy. But it was a major blow to the city's Christian identity
of his empire. According to Anagnostes: "When he saw a city so large, and the Greek survivors were shocked. Salonica, wrote Anagnostes,
and in such a situation, next to the sea and suitable for everything, then "wore this ugliness like a mourning garment ... The hymns to God
he grieved and wanted to reconstruct it." 1 and the choirs have fallen silent. In their place one hears nothing but
The first thing he did was to chase out the looters, camp-followers alalagmoi [the sounds of Allah] and the noise of the godless who make
and squatters. "The money and slaves which you gained should be Satan rejoice. And yet no sign of divine anger has appeared to punish
enough," he told his troops, "I want to have the city itself and for this I the unbelievers who defiled the churches, made families and houses
made many days' march and tired myself, as you know." He began by vanish, looted and destroyed churches and the city." 3
repairing the damaged walls and ordered the new garrison commander Thousands of the city's former inhabitants were still enslaved. "On
to modernize the fortress. Less than one year later, an inscription above numerous occasions we saw Christians-boys as well as unmarried
the entrance to the newly built main tower marked the swift comple- girls, and masses of married women of every description-paraded
tion of his work. "This Acropolis," it runs, "was conquered and cap- pitiably by the Turks in long lines throughout the cities ofThrace and
tured by force, from the hands of infidels and Franks, with the help of Macedonia," wrote the Italian merchant-antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona.
God, by Sultan Murad, son of Sultan Mehmed, whose banner God They were "bound by iron chains and lashed by whips, and in the end

33
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS
The Rose of Sultan Murad

put up for sale in villages and markets ... an unspeakably shameful and As it spread into Europe, Ottoman conquest brought the Islamiciza-
obscene sight, like a cattle market." (Cyriac's sorrow did not prevent tion of urban life. The centre of gravity of Balkan Christianity- shifted;_
him buying a young Greek slave and sending her home to his mother's into the rural areas,.where monaste.r.iesJ ,especially in Mount Athos,
household.) Some converted to Islam in the hope of better treatment; prospered. The cities were more _deeply altered. With the newcomers
others, yoked to one another by the neck, could be seen begging for came their faith, their places of w.~r~hip and characteristic institutions
alms in the streets of the capital, Edirne, where they were brought to be of their way of life. A few Christiaru .converted
b-· ·· ' to' .Islam ' both before

sold off, or entered the imperial service.

4 and after the conquest, but it was chiefly through the settlers from Ana-
Yet the Sultan certainly did not intend to wipe out Christianity from tolia that Salonica was transformed-in the words of the chronicler
the city. It was not only that this would have been economically harm- Ashikpashazade-froJ)l a ".domain.ofidolatry" to a "domain oflslam."
ful; it would also have been contrary to Ottoman practice and his own The sounds of Christian worship-the bells, processionals and Easter
beliefs. In fact, he quickly appointed a new archbishop, Gregorios, and fireworks-were replaced by the cry of the muezzin, the triumphant
his Serbian Orthodox wife, Mara, herself became a notable benefac- processions which celebrated a new conversion, and (later) the firing of
tress. Churches and monasteries were reconfirmed in their possessions guns at Bairam. At Ramadan, the bustle of the markets subsided, and
(in one case perhaps, as a malicious fifteenth-century chronicler alleged, even non-Muslims avoided eating in public, and waited for the sound of
because the monks had helped the Turks conquer the town). In keeping the fortress cannon at dusk to mark the onset of the nightly street
with the Muslim custorrdn cases where towns-had been won by force, a feasts, parties and Karaghoz shadow puppet shows whose obscenity
few churches were converted into mosques, looted for building mated- shocked later travellers. Minarets-spiralling, pointed, multi-coloured
~is, turned .into private hotnes o:r::ab~mdoried. But how many were taken or unadorned-dominated the skyline and became landmarks for visi-
over at · the start is hard to say. Anagnostes claims that only four tors, lit up during holidays and imperial celebrations. In r853 the
remained in Christian hands: yet even after Murad began to bring in Oxford geographer Henry Tozer saw them each "circled by a ring of
Muslims in 1432 many ecclesiastical foundations continued to collect glittering lamps"; as he sailed away by night "they formed a delicate
substantial revenues from their estates. After all, there was no point bright cluster, like a swarm of fire-flies on the horizon." 7
converting churches into mosques if there were not the congregations Murad's use of the Ottoman colonization technique of forced reset-
to use them: the wave of conversion thus followed the slow expansion tlementworked: the settlers kick-started Salonica's economy and more
of the Muslim population. Of the city's noblest buildings, Ayios Dimi- than doubled its population within a few years. The first extant
trios was converted into a mosque only in 149 r, Ayia Sofia and the Ottoman records, from 1478, show that unlike the Christian popula-
tion, who were almost entirely descended from pre-conquest families,
Rotonda a century later. 5
The real problem for the Christian survivors was not so much the the Muslims were new arrivals. They were grouped in communities,
expropriation of places of worship-for scores of them had lain within each with their own place of worship. With a total of twenty-six imams,
the walls before the conquest, and enough survived even after 1430 to they had one religious leader for each r66 Muslims, compared with
serve the city's sharply reduced population-as the,la.clwfp-riests to run an average of one priest to every 667 Christians. Islam, newly estab-
them. Many had fled or were still enslaved. Laymen were still having to lished though it was, was thus far better served than Orthodoxy. If
chant the hymns in the church of Ayia Paraskevi twenty years after the the urban grid-the course of the walls, the main roads, the location
conquest since, as one local Christian sadly noted, "the majority of the of markets-remained recognizably Greco-Roman, the demands of
clergy and of the others were then still in captivity and this condition Ottoman power and the Islamic faith were nevertheless changing Salon-
prevails up to today." Orthodoxy-though recognized by the Ottoman ica's physiognomy. 8
authorities-was scarcely flourishing. "One can hear only from the An imperial decree of 14 December 1479 appointing a teacher to a
more elderly people," wrote Anagnostes after his return from captivity, c:;ity m;~drese informs us about the spread of Muslim learning there. The
"that such and such a church was here, another one was there, and what appointee, mevlana Qivam ed-Din, was granted a salary of zo aspers
the beauty and charms of each had been."
6 daily and instructed to pray "for the continuity of the State." He was to

34 35
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

teach "sciences related to religion, to resolve the difficulties of the

branches of religious law, the subtleties of the tradition and the truths MosQUES AND VAKFS

of the exegesis of the Quran." He was not only to give lessons to stu-
dents, but also to look after their welfare and ensure they were properly IN MODERN SALONICA, where classical and Byzantine monuments
fed "so that religion finds its glory and learning its splendour and the have been shorn of the houses that surrounded them to make them
position of ulema attains the highest degree." 9 stand out more prominently, one has to search for remains of the early
Despite the existence of this and other schools, however, Salonica Ottoman years. Most mosques perished in the great fire of I9I7 and
never became a major centre of Muslim piety or learning. It seems to the surviving minarets were torn down shortly afterwards. Neverthe-
have lacked sufficiently illustrious historical, religious or emotional less, at the busy centtal junction of Egnatia and Venizelos streets, small
associations. Its medresas remained relatively small and undistinguished, shops, a disused cinema, and tourist boutiques still cling to the sides of
its mosques never rivalled the soaring masterpieces of ~dime, Bursa an elegantly domed mosque, one of the last in the city. Hamza Bey was
and Istanbul-the three imperial capitals-and its mufti (chief religious one of Murad's military commanders, and his daughter built a small
aaviser) was ranked only in the fourth class of the hierarchy, below his neighbourhood prayer hall in his memory in I468. As the city expanded
colleagues in the empire's eight leading cities. Was it the vast nearby and prospered, Hamza Bey's mosque grew too: it acquired a minaret
estates of the Evrenos family which reminded the Ottoman sultans (now gone) and a spacious columned courtyard. 11
uncomfortably of their early years in partnership, and led them to One other fifteenth-century mosque survives, similarly impressive
bestow their favour and money elsewhere? Its Balkan location probably in scale, though in better condition. This is the Aladja lmaret, which
did not help either, since Muslims there felt the presence of an alien peeps out of a gap between rows of concrete apartment blocks above
Christian hinterland even when they controlled the towns. Mehmed the bus stop on Kassandrou Street. The Aladja complex served as
the Conqueror had to remind the Muslims of Rumeli to pray five times school, prayer-hall and soup-kitchen for the poor and illustrates the
a day-an indication that the climate of observance in the Balkans was way older Muslim architectural forms were reworked by Ottoman
rather different from that in Anatolia. But elsewhere in the Balkans, the builders in territories which lacked any tradition of Islamic architec-
towns themselves at least were emphatically Muslim-90% of Larissa's ture. In the original Arabic-Persian type of medrese, or religious school,
population by I 53 o, for instance, 6 I% in Serres, 75% in Monastir and students and teachers took their lessons in rooms arranged around an
Skopje, 66% in Sofia. In Salonica, on the other hand, Muslims never open-air courtyard. The Seljuk Turks adapted this model for the
dominated the city numerically, and slipped from just under so% to harsher conditions of central Anatolia by covering the courtyard with a
2 s% of the population between the mid-fifteenth century and I 530· At dome, often adding a small prayer room at the back. Over time, the
the time of the first census of modem times-in I83I-Salonica _}].ad domed prayer-hall became larger still and was integrated into the main
the smallest Muslim population of any major Ottoman city. Yet to out- body of the building-the shape chosen by the unknown architect of
siders, its Islamic character was immediately evident. The city acquired the Aladja lmaret. A large airy portico runs the length of the fa~ade, and
a sheykh of the ruling Hanafi school of Islamic law, who acted as the once sheltered refugees and beggars, though it is now abandoned and
chief mufti of the town, and, after the empire expanded into the Arab covered with graffiti. The multi-coloured minaret, ornamented with
lands in the sixteenth century, jurists from the other three main schools stones in a diamond pattern, which gave the whole building its name
as welL There were soon more mosques than there were churches, and (Aladja =coloured) has long gone, though visitors to the nearby town of
tekkes (monasteries) were eventually established by the main mystical Verroia will find a very similar one, half-ruined, in a side-street off the
$.~fi orders, nearly one for every neighbourhood. To the seventeenth- main road. This style of minaret was a last faint Balkan echo of the
century geographer Hadji Chalfa, the city was "a little piece of polychromatic glories of central Asian and Persian Islam, whose influ-
Istanbul." 10 ence, 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. 12

37
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

Fifteenth-century records identify other newly founded mosques by foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running
the names of local notables-Sinan Bey, the fisheries owner Mehmed, of their institutions down to the smallest details-saffron rice and
the teacher Burhan, Mustafa from Karaferiye, the pilgrims Mehmed, honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with
Hasan, Ismail, Kemal, Ahmed and the judge Abdullah. Their neigh- spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school
bourhood mosques or mescids must have been relatively humble sites, regularly. 13
and the main Friday services for the city were held in "Old Friday"- The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the
the name given to the mosque founded by Sultan Murad in the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old
Acheiropoietos Church where he had held his victory service. More capital Bursa and the noble mosque he was building in Edirne, commis-
substantial foundations, like the Aladja Imaret, usually required the sioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well
kind of financing affordable only by notables. In this case the benefac- as the great central hamam complex. He also repaired the city's old
tor was another of Murad's commanders, Inegollii Ishak Pasha, whose Roman and Byzantine~aqueduct system -and settled colonists to look
illustrious career ended as governor of Salonica. Ishak Pasha spent his after it. His son, Mehmed the Conquemr, although hostile-te-the-vakf
fortune on many noble edifices including several mosques, a hamam, a idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control
bridge over the Struma River, fountains and a dervish tekke. He was not of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other
alone. Koca Kasim Pasha, who started life as slave of an Egyptian buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during
scholar, before rising in the imperial civil service to become grand his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new
vizier, founded another mosque-imaret in the city. Yakub Pasha, a six-domed stone bezesten (market building), for the storage of valuable
Bosnian-born vizier renowned both for his poetry and for his victories goods which is still in use today. Across the road from the Hamza Bey
against the Austrians and Hungarians on the Croat border, endowed a mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commer-
mosque named after himself. cial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling per-
"What is striking about these large-scale building projects-espe- fumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and
cially when compared with western Europe-is the speed of their con- also used the income to support the mosque he created when he
struction. Often only a few years were necessary for their completion. ordered the church of Ayios Dimitrios to be turned over to the faithful
Such efficiency implied not only plentiful skilled labour and highly in 1492.14
developed architectural traditions, but the means to accumulate and In addition to numerous chapels, schools, soup kitchens and Sufi
concentrate funds for such purposes much more quickly than most lodges, vakfs financed the spread of the wells and fountains necessary
European states could manage at this time. The highly centralized both for performing ablutions and for keeping the city alive. Public
nature of Ottoman authority helped, but the real vehicle of urban baths were constructed near places of worship and religious study so
t.:enewal was the pious charitable foundation known as the vakf that people could fulfil their obligation to make sure they were clean
The vakfwas a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a before entering the mosque to pray. Murad II built the sprawling Bey
property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a hamam as a place to prepare for the city's main mosque, only a stone's
vakf relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments throw away. Its steam-filled rooms and private suites, where young
but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings masseurs pummelled and oiled their clients as they stretched out on the
of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands hot stones, were also a place for sexual and social interaction in an
involved, vakf status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from urban environment with few public spaces. Bath-attendants always had
the often burdensome irregular state taxes, vakf properties thrived and an ambiguous reputation, but work in the hamam offered access to the
contributed to the city's prosperity. For the donor, turning his (or her- powerful and a step onto the ladder of imperial service. Salonica's Bey
the donors included many wealthy women) possessions into a vakf was hamam, with its separate baths for men and women, is one of the out-
also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, standing examples of early Ottoman architecture in the Balkans. Until
since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of the the 196os, travellers could still wash themselves in what were latterly

39
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

called the Paradise Baths. Today the constant flows of hot and cold water were essential both for trade and for the speedy military advances
mentioned by seventeenth-century travellers have dried up, but thanks through which Ottoman power was projected into south-eastern
to the Greek Archaeological Service it is possible to walk through the Europe. Robert de Dreux, a seventeenth-century French priest, was
narrow passages from room to room, and admire the intricacy of its impressed by the khans, hostelries as large as churches, "which the
internal decorations, the marble slabs where clients were massaged, and Bachas and other Turkish signors build superbly to lodge travellers,
the cool vaulted rooms with their stucco honeycombed muqarnas illu- without care for their station in life or religion, each one being made
minated only by bright shafts of light which burst through holes cut welcome, without being obliged to pay anything in return." As the key
deep into the domed ceiling. 15 naval, mercantile and military strong-point for the sultans' fifteenth-
Vtt.kJs., fostered trade too. In addition to Bayazid's central market century advance westwards, Salonica benefited from the pacification of
building, and quarters for flour, textiles, spices, furs, cloth and leather the countryside and the consolidation of Ottoman authority along the
goods, there was the so-called "Egyptian market" just outside the gate old Roman Via Egnatia. For the first time in centuries, after the acute
to the harbour, which (according to one later traveller) contained "all fragmentation and instability of the late Byzantine era, a single power
the produce of Egypt, linen, sugar, rice, coffee." Nearby were the city's controlled the region as a whole. 18
tanneries, which were already flourishing by the late fifteenth century.
Ship's biscuit was produced here, and later on coffee-houses and tav-
erns sprang up to cater to the needs of sailors, travellers, camel-drivers, RuNNING THE CITY
porters and day-labourers. At the heart of this bustling district lay the
Abdur-Reouf mosque-"a beautiful and most lovely sanctuary, a place IN THE BALKANs the Ottomans conquered a region whose cities
of devotion, respite and recovery"-founded by a mollah of the city, were already in decline as a result of the political and military instability
who built it to serve the traders, since there was none other outside the of the previous centuries. They had, therefore, not only to repopulate
walls, endowing this too as a vakf "Day and night," reports a seven- them but to reorganize them administratively as well. Salonica itself
teenth-century visitor, "the faithful are present there, because Muslim was brought under the direct control of the sultan and placed by him
traders from the four comers of the globe and god-fearing sailors and under the supervision of appointed officers. There was no clear legal or
sea-captains make their prayers in that place, enjoying the view of the institutional demarcation between the city and its rural hinterland-the
ships in the harbour." 16 same officials were often responsible for both and in contrast to the
It is worth pointing out that Christians could form vakfs as well as Romano-Byzantine tradition there was no municipal government in
Muslims and indeed had had a similar institution in Byzantine times. the strict sense. City-based tax farmers controlled the local salteries and
By 1498, the canny monks of the Vlatadon monastery, for example, city officials were instructed to look after the mines in the Chalkidiki
owned properties throughout the town: they had one shop in the fish peninsula. Moreover large areas within the walls were given over to
market (next door to that owned by someone the scribe referred to only vineyards, orchards and pasture, so that the countryside came within
as "the bey") as well as another seven nearby, (adjacent to the premises the city as well: indeed the Christians who patrolled the sea-walls
of a Christian, "Kostas son of Kokoris"). They also had three stalls in nightly, as ordered by Murad (in return for tax exemptions) were
the candle-makers' market, and two cobblers' workshops next to those mostly local shepherds and farmers. Nevertheless, the needs of the
owned by "Hadji Ahmed" and "Hadji Hassan." They rented out cook- urban economy and rhythms of urban life themselves required special
shops, wells and outbuildings in the old Hippodrome quarter, water- attention. 19
mills outside the walls, and a vineyard on the slopes of Hortiatis. With We lack documents which would show us precisely how Salonica
the revenues from these, they supported the life of the monastery and was run in the fifteenth century. But on the basis of what was happening
acquired yet more properties. 17 in other provincial towns we have a good idea. There would have been
Further afield, vakfs financed the construction and maintenance of a governor who combined military and urban functions--overall
bridges, post-houses, stables, caravanserais and ferries, all of which responsibility for the garrisoning of the fortifications, gates, local troop
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

contingents and horses on the one hand; and on the other, keeping an the water system w~s surprisingly sophistica:ted"-early travellers com-
eye on the local tax officials, especially those who had bought conces- mented on the abundance of public wells and fountains-and the flow
sions for customs duties, and on the needs of the city in general. The could be controlled and directed in an emergency to where it was
collection of taxes and the running of the market were the Ottoman needed. 21
state's priorities. It laid out, in enormous detail, the duties to be levied Thanks to the survival of a 1478 cadastral register, the third which
on each good brought into the city, and the governor was supposed to the conscientious Ottoman scribes had prepared since the conquest
check that these were properly paid. The guardian of the gates exam- (but the first to survive), we have a fairly precise picture of who was liv-
ined the produce and animals brought in by farmers and traders. ing where roughly half a century after the conquest. The pattern of set-
Another official regulated the buying and selling of "all that God has tlement indicates a kind of transition from the Byzantine period to the
created." He and his assistants paid weekly visits to the flour market Ottoman city in its heyday. A total of just over ten thousand people
and the slaughter-houses, checking weights and measures and monitor- lived there-so the population had barely recovered to the level it was
ing the price and quality of silver. He also kept an eye on the behaviour at when the Ottoman army burst in-roughly divided between Chris-
of slaves and made sure they prayed regularly, looking out for any signs tians and Muslims, with the former still very slightly in the majority.
of public drunkenness or debauchery. Production itself was organized The Muslims were immigrants and there do not appear to have been
in trade guilds, some-like the butchers, confined to one religion- many converts from among the Christians, in contrast with some other
others (like the shoemakers), mixed. But guild members did not cluster former Byzantine towns.
together in the same residential areas as they did elsewhere. The Byzantine past lingered on, and could be discerned in the
The Ottoman legal system was one qf_ mulpple l~gal jurisdictions. Greek names which continued to be used for neighbourhoods and dis-
The governor and several of his subordinates had powers of arrest and tricts. The Ottoman scribes faithfully referred to Ayo Dimitri, Ofalo,
imprisonment. The city's chief law officer and public notary was the Podrom (from the old Hippodrome), Ayo Mine, Asomat after the old
kadi but there was sometimes another judge, subordinate to him, whose churches. EvenAkhiropit(Acheiropoietos) was mentioned although the
remit covered "everything that could trouble public order"-murders, church had been converted into a mosque; it would be replaced by a
rape, adultery, robberies-crimes which in the Balkans at least were Turkish name only in the next century. Large churches-such as Ayia
often judged not according to the divine law but "on the basis of cus- Sofia-and the Vlatadon Monastery still lived off their estates. The
tom" or royal decree. For the empire had a triple system oflawwith the garrison was made up of Ottoman troops, but Christians were assigned
shari'a providing a foundation, alongside the body of customary law- the responsibility for maintaining and even manning the sea-walls and
adet-which varied from place to place, and the decrees and regulations the towers-an arrangement which a later governor at the start of the
issued by the sultan himself-the kanun. 20 seventeenth century regarded as a security risk and put an end to. As
With n0Jl1Ul1-icipal authority to watch over the city, it was up to the the details of the Vlatadon monks' property portfolio show, Muslims
governor to organize its polichtg, fire .prevention, sewage disposal and and Christians lived and worked side by side, probably because Murad
hygiene. Policing came out of the pockets of merchants and,local peo- had settled newcomers in the homes of departed or dead Christians.
ple who paid the PIJ.svant (from the Persian word for nightwatchman) to Indeed Christians still outnumbered Muslims in the old quarters on
patrol their neighbourhood. Four hundred years later, visitors to either side of the main street.
Salonica were still being kept awake by the unfamiliar sound of his Only in the Upper To;wn-a hint of the future pattern of resi-
metal-tipped staff tapping out the hours on the cobbles as he made his dence-were Muslims now in the majority. There they enjoyed the best
rounds. Householders also paid for rubbish to be collected, and were access to water and fresh air. The poor lived in h~~!e single-st9.rey
supposed to be responsible for the condition of pathways outside their homes whose· courtyards were hidden frnm ·the street~ heliindwh.ite-
homes. Gui!Q§. had the responsibility to provide young men for fire washed walls; the wealthy slowly built themselves larger stone man-
duty, but'the frequency with which the city was hit by devastating con- sions with overhanging screened balconies and private wells in their
flagrations was testimony to their ineffectiveness. On the other hand, extensive gardens, connected to the city's water system. Cypresses and

43
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad
plane trees provided shade, and there were numerous lciosks which lier. For after rsoo Salonica's population suddenly doubled, and soared
allowed people to escape the sun and drink fro~ fo..1JU!ains while enjoy- to thirty thousand by rszo, putting pressure on housing for the first
ing the views over the town. The highest officials were granted regular time, and necessitating the opening up of a new water supply into the
deliveries of ice.Jroro.Maunt Hortiatis, which they used mostly in the city. The newcomers emanated from an nnexpected quarter-the west-
preparation of sherbets. In the eighteenth century if not before, they ern Mediterranean, where the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and
started painting their houses and ornamenting them with verses from Isabella were talcing Christianization to a new pitch by expelling the
th~ Qur' an pic;ked out in red. 22 Jews from their lcingdom. Attracted by Bayazid's promises of economic
Imperial edicts had successfully replenished the city with the trades concessions and political protection, Spanish-spealcing Jews arrived in
for which it would shortly become renowned-leather .. and ·textile- droves. Some went on to Istanbul, Sarajevo, Safed and Alexandria, but
workers in parricular.-together with the donkey and caruel..:.drivers, the largest colony took shape in Salonica. By the time the Venetian
tailors, bakers, grocers, fishermen, cobblers and shopkeepers without ambassador passed through, it was a Jewish guide who showed him
which no urban life could be sustained. The city was now pro9.l1Cing its ronnd, and the Jews of the city were many times more numerous than
own rice, s~ap, knives, wax, stoves, pillows and pottery. Saffron, meat, in Venice itself. Of the three main religious communities contained
cheese and grains were all supplied locally. Fish were so plentiful that within the walls-Muslims, Christians and Jews-this last, which had
local astrologers claimed Selanik-as it was now known-lay under the been entirely absent from the population register of 1478, had suddenly
sign of Pisces. Scribes provide one badly needed slcill; the fifteen become the largest of them all. The third and perhaps most unexpected
hamam attendants-a surprisingly high number at this early date- component of Ottoman Salonica had arrived.
another. And the presence of merchants, a furrier, a jeweller and a sil-
versmith all indicate the revival of international trade and wealth.
Yet the city was still far from its prime. Many houses lay abandoned
or demolished, and great stretches of the area within the walls, espe-
cially on the upper slopes, were given over to pasture, orchards, vine-
yards and agriculture. Two farmers are mentioned in the 1478 register,
but many more of the inhabitants tended their own gardens (the word
the Ottoman scribe uses is a Slavic one, bashtina, a sign of the close link-
age between the Slavs and the land) or grazed their sheep, horses, oxen
and donkeys on open ground. Centuries later, when the population had
grown to more than one hundred thousand, the quasi-rural character of
Salonica's upper reaches was still visible: Ottoman photographs show
isolated buildings surrounded by fields within the walls-the Muslim
neighbourhood inside the fortress perimeter was virtually a separate
village-while the city's fresh milk was produced by animals which
lived alongside their downtown owners right up until 1920. In fact,
most of the time under the sultans there was more meadow within the
walls than housing. A Venetian ambassador passed through at the end
of the sixteenth century and what struck him-despite the "fine and
wide streets downtown, a fountain in almost every one, many columns
visible along them, some ruined and some whole"-was that the city
was "sparsely inhabited." 23
Yet not nearly as sparsely in the r 59os as it had been a century ear-

44 45
 The Rose of Sultan Murad

Jewish presence for perhaps the first time in over a millennium. This
was why in the 1478 register they did not appear. But then came a new
wave of anti-Jewish persecution in Christendom, and the Ottoman
willingness to take advantage of this. 2
3
FLIGHT AcRoss THE MEDITERRANEAN

The Arrival of the Sefardim WHEN THE ENGLI~H expelled their Jews in 1290, they inaugurated a
policy which spread widely over the next two ce nturies. In 1492 Ferdi-
nand and Isabella's edict of banishment forced thousands from a home-
land where they had known great securicy.and prpsperity. Sicily and
Sardinia, Navarre, Provence and Naples followed suit. By the mid-
WHEN EvLIYA CHELEBI, the seventeenth-century Ottoman trav- sixteenth century, J ~ws had.. been .evicted frm::nt:p.uch of western Europe.
eller, came to describe Salonica he provided a characteristically fantas- A few existed on sufferance, while many others converted or went
tic account of its origins. The prophet Solomon-"may God's blessing underground as Marranos and New Christians, preserving their cus-
be upon him"-had been showing the world to the Queen of Sheba toms behind a Catholic fa~ade. The centre of gravity of the ] ewish
when she looked down and saw "in the region of Athens, in the land of world shifted eastwards-to the safe havens of Poland and the Ottoman
the Romans, a high spot called Bellevue., There he built her a palace domains. 3
"whose traces are still visible," before they moved on eastwards to In Spain itself not everyone favoured the expulsions. (Perhaps this
Istanbul, Bursa, Baalbec and Jerusalem, building as they went, and was why a different policy was chosen towards the far more numerous
repopulating the Earth after the Flood. Chelebi ascribes the city's walls Muslims of Andalucia who were forcibly converted, and only expelled
to the "philosopher Philikos" and his son Selanik "after whom it is much later.) "Many were of the opinion," wrote the scholar and
named still." Later, he says, Jews fleeing Palestine "slew the Greek Inquisitor Jeronimo de Zurita, "that the king was making a mistake to
nation in one night and gained control of the fortress., Hebrew kings throw out of his realms people who were so industrious and hard-
did battle with Byzantine princesses, the Ottoman sultans eventually working, and so outstanding in his realms both in number and esteem
took over, and "until our own days, the city is full of]ews." 1 as well as in dedication to making money." A later generation of
Evliya's tall tale conveys one thing quite unambiguously: by the time Inquisitors feared that the Jews who had been driven out "took with
of his visit in 1667-68, the Jews were such an integral part of Salonica them the substance and wealth of these realms, transferring to our ene-
that it seemed impossible to imagine they had not always been there. mies the trade and commerce of which they are the proprietors not
And indeed there had been Jews in the city before there were any only in Europe but throughout the world." 4
Christians. In Byzantine times there were probably several hundred The expulsion of the Jews formed part of a bitter struggle for power
Greek-speaking Jewish families (or Romaniotes); despite often severe between Islam and Catholicism. One might almost see this as the con-
persecution, they traded successfully across the Mediterranean, at least test to reunify the Roman Empire between the two great monotheistic
to judge from the correspondence found in the Cairo Genizah many religions that had succeeded it: on the one side, the Spanish Catholic
years ago. Shortly before the Turkish conquest, they were joined by monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire; on the other, the Ottoman sul-
refugees fleeing persecution in France and Germany. Whether or not tans, themselves heirs to the Roman Empire of the East, and rulers of
they survived the siege of 1430 is not known but any who did were the largest and most powerful Muslim empire in the world. Its climax,
moved to Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror to repopulate it in the sixteenth century, pitted Charles V, possessor of the imperial
after its capture in 1453, leaving their home-town entirely without a throne of Germany and ruler of the Netherlands, the Austrian lands,

47
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

the Spanish monarchy and its possessions in Sicily and Naples, Mexico city in Europe, Salonica lagged far behind. Bayezid had been concerned
and Peru, against Suleyman the Magnificent, who held undisputed at its slow recovery and had been doing what he could to promote it
sway from Hungary to Yemen, from Algiers to Baghdad. Ottoman himself. Did he order the authorities to direct the Jews there? It seems
forces had swept north to the gates of Vienna and conquered the Arab likely, although no such directive has survived. According to a later
lands while Ottoman navies clashed with the Holy League in the chronicler, he sent orders to provincial governors to welcome the new-
Mediterranean and captured Rhodes, Cyprus and Tunis, wintered in comers. Since Salonica was the empire's main European port, many
Toulon, seized Nice and terrorized the Italian coast. The Habsburgs were bound to make their way there in any case. As wave after wave of
looked for an ally in Persia; the French and English approached the Iberian refugees arrived at the docks, the city grew by leaps and bounds.
Porte. It was an early modern world war. 5 By I 520, more than• half its thirty thousand inhabitants were Jewish,
In the midst of this bitter conflict the Ottoman authorities exploited and it had turned into one of the most important ports of the eastern
their enemy's anti-Jewish measures just as they had welcomed other Mediterranean. 8
Jewish refugees from Christian persecution in the past. They were Peo- Perhaps only now did the real break with Byzantium take place. In
ple of the Book, and they possessed valuable skills. Sultan Murad II had I478 Salonica was still a Greek city where more than half of the inhabi-
a Jewish translator in his service; his successors relied upon Jewish doc- tants were Christians; by I 5 I9, they were less than one quarter. Was it a
tors and bankers. Those fleeing Iberia would bring more knowledge sign of their growing weakness that between I490 and I 540 several of
and expertise with them. In the matter-of-fact words of one contempo- their most magnificent churches-including Ayios Dimitrios itself--
rary Jewish chronicler: "A part of the exiled Spaniards went overseas to were turned into mosques? A century later still, if we are to judge from
Turkey. Some of them were thrown into the sea and drowned, but those Ottoman records, the number of Christians had fallen further, both in
who arrived there the king of Turkey received kindly, as they were arti- absolute terms and as a proportion of the whole. "While Istanbul
sans."6 The French agent Nicolas de Nicolay noted: remained heavily populated by Greeks, local Christians saw Salonica
re-emerging into something resembling its former prosperity under a
[fhe Jews] have among them workmen of all artes and handi- Muslim administration and a largely Jewish labour-force.
craftes moste excellent, and specially of the Maranes [Marranos] Not surprisingly, Greco-] ewish relations were infused with tension.
of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to Occasional stories of anti-Jewish machinations at ·the Porte, long-
the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught running complaints that the newcomers paid too little tax, bitter com-
the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to mercial rivalries between Christian and Jewish merchants, the
make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other emergence of the blood libel in the late sixteenth century, even the odd
munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen riot, assault and looting of Jewish properties following fire or plague-
in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in these are the scattered documentary indications of the Greeks' deep-
light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, rooted resentment at the newcomers. It cannot have been easy living as
Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell. 7 a minority in the city they regarded as theirs. Jewish children laughed at
the Orthodox priests, with their long hair tied up in a bun: estd un papas
The newcomers were not enough in numbers to affect the demo- became a way of saying it was time to visit the barber. We learn from a
graphic balance in the empire-the Balkans remained overwhelmingly I7oo court case that the Greek inhabitants of Ayios Minas were so fed
Christian, the Asian and Arab lands overwhelmingly Muslim. But they up with] ewish neighbours throwing their garbage into the churchyard,
revitalized urban life after many decades of war. and mocking them from the surrounding windows during holiday ser-
And of all the towns in the empire, it was Salonica which benefited vices, that they appealed to the Ottoman authorities to get them to
most. Since I453, while Istanbul's population had been growing at an stop. The balance of confessional power within the city had shifted
incredible rate thanks to compulsory resettlement and immigration by sharply. 9
Muslims, Greeks and Armenians, turning it into perhaps the largest For the Jews themselves, a mass of displaced refugees living with

49
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

other recent immigrants among the toppled columns, half-buried tem- known at the other end of the Mediterranean. They worshipped in syn-
ples and ruined mementoes of the city's Roman and Byzantine past, this agogues named after the old long-abandoned· homelands- · Ispanya,
Macedonian port was at first equally strange and alienating. Lost "in a <;e~ilyan (Sicilian), Magrebi, Lizbon, Talyan (Italian), Otranto,
country which is not theirs," they struggled to make sense of forced Aragon, Katalan, Pulya, Evora Portukal and many others-which sur-
migration from "the lands of the West." Some were Jews; others were vived until the synagogues themselves perished in the fire of 1917;
converts to Catholicism. With their families forced apart, many Their family names-Navarro, Cuenca, Algava-their games, curses
mourned dead relatives, and wondered if their missing ones would ever and blessings, even their clothes, linked them with their past. They ate
return or if new consorts would succeed in giving them children to Pan d'Espanya (almond sponge cake) on holidays, rodanchas (pumpkin
replace those they had lost. The trauma of exile is a familiar refrain in pastries), pastel de k'V.!ezo (cheese pie with sesame seed),fijones kon karne
Salonican history. One rabbi was forced to remind his congregation "to (beef and bean stew) and keftikes de poyo (chicken croquettes), and gave
stop cursing the Almighty and to accept as just everything that has hap- visitors dulce de muez verde (green walnut preserve). People munched
pened."10 pasatempo (dried melon seeds), took the vaporiko across the bay, or
If Europe had become for them-as it was for the Marrano poet enjoyed the evening air on the varandado of their home. When Spanish
Samuel Usque-"my hell on earth," we can scarcely be surprised: scholars visited the city at t:4eend of the nineteenth century, they were
Salonica, by contrast, was their refuge and liberation. "There is a city in astonished to find a miniature Iberia alive and flourishing under Abdul
the Turkish kingdom," he wrote, "which formerly belonged to the Hamid. 12
Greeks, and in our days is a true mother-city in Judaism. For it is estab- For this, the primary conduit was language. As a Salonican mer-
lished on the very deep foundations of the Law. And it is filled with the chant, Emmanuel Abuaf, tried to explain in r6oo to a puzzled inter-
choicest plants and most fruitful trees, presently known anywhere on rogator of the Pisan Inquisition: "Our Jewish youngsters, when they
the face of our globe. These fruits are divine, because they are watered begin from the age of six to learn the Scripture, read it and discuss it in
by an abundant stream of charities. The city's walls are made of holy the Spanish langt:rage, and all the business and trade of the Levant is
deeds of the greatest worth." "When Jews in Provence scouted out con- carried on in Spanish in Hebrew characters ... And so it is not hard for
ditions there, they received the reply: "Come and join us in Turkey and Jews to know Spanish even if they are born outside Spain." 13 In
you will live, as we do, in peace and liberty." In the experience of the Salonica, there was a religious variant-Ladino-and a vernacular
Sefardim, we see the astonishing capacity of refugees to make an unfa- which was so identified with the Jews that it became known locally as
miliar city theirs. Through religious devotion and study, they turned ''Jewish" (judezmo), and quickly became the language of secular learn-
Salonica into a "new Jerusalem"-just as other Jews did with Amster- ing and literat,ure, business, science and medicine. Sacred ;na-;,-chO!arly
dam~\7ilna, Montpellier, Nimes, Bari and Otranto: wrapping their new texts were translated into it from Hebrew, Arabic and Latin, because
place of exile in the mantle of biblical geography was a way of coming "this language is the most used among us." In the docks, among the
to feel at home. "The Jews of Europe and other countries, persecuted fishermen, in the market and the workshops the accents of Aragon,
and banished, have come there to find a refuge," wrote Usque, "and Galicia, Navarre and Castile crowded out Portuguese, Greek, Yiddish,
this city has received them with love and affection, as if she were Italian and Proven~al. Eventually Castilian triumphed over the rest.
Jerusalem, that old and pious mother of ours." 11 "The Jews of Salonica and Constantinople, Alexandria, and Cairo,
Indeed, only a few devout older people, usually men, were ever Venice and ~ther commercial centres, use Spanish in their business. I
tempted to make the journey southeast to Jerusalem itself, even though know Jewish children in Salonica who speak Spanish as well as me if not
it formed part of the same Ottoman realm. As in Spain, the Jews came better," noted Gonsalvo de Illescas. The sailor Diego Galan, a native of
to feel-as one historian has put it-"at home in exile" and had no Toledo, found that the city's Jews "speak Castilian as fine and well-
desire to uproot themselves once more, not even when the destination accented as in the imperial capital." They were proud of their tongue-
was the Land their holy books promised them. For this home was not its flexibility and sweetness, so quick to bring the grandiloquent or
only their "Jerusalem"; it was also a simulacrum of the life they had bombastic down to earth with a ready diminutive. By contrast, the Jews

so
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

further inland were derisively written off as digi digi-incapable of with which the Sefardim dealt with their Ottoman masters. It took
speaking properly, too inclined to the harsh ds and gs of the Por- many visits, several years, and at least one change of sultan, before an
tuguese.14 answer was forthcoming. It could easily have resulted-had the impe-
rial mood been rather different-in the delegates losing their lives, as
happened to another rabbi when he tried to negotiate a later reduction
SERVING THE IMPERIAL EcoNOMY in the tax burden. But in rs68, it still seemed vital to the Porte to stay
on good terms with Salonica's Jews and the principal delegate, Moises
EARLY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, the Porte entrusted the Jews Almosnino, was able to return with welcome news: in return for the
of Salonica with the responsibility of manufacturing the uniforms for abolition of many speeial taxes, the community committed itself to col-
the janissary infantry corps, and over the next century this turned the lecting and handing over an agreed sum annually to the authorities.
city into one of the principal producers and exporters of cloth in the F:2r th~ Ottomans were not modern. capj,talists. They did not aim at
eastern Mediterranean. \Vealthy Jewish merchants bought up the local unlimited growtlfin unrestricted markets but rather at the creation and
supply of wool, imported dyes, and set up poorer Jews with equipment maintenance of a basically closed system to keep towns alive-in partic-
and wages for weaving, brushing, dyeing and making up the finished ular the ever-expanding imperial,Jp~!;fQpp)e-and to guarantee the
material. Ottoman authorities banned all exports of wool from the domestic production of commodities essential for urban life and the
region until the needs of the manufacturers had been met and tried to provisioning of the military. Salt, wheat, silver and woollens were what
chase back any weavers who sought to leave. By mid-century, the indus- they needed from Salonica, a list to which they occasionally added gun-
try was not only supplying military uniforms, but also clothing the city powder and even cannons. The primary value of the Jews lay in their
itself and sending exports to Buda and beyond. 15 ability to provide these things, thereby freeing Muslims for other occu-
Another imperial corvee a few years later jump-started silver-mining pations. After a century of Ottoman rule, more than half of the latter
outside the city--crucially easing the desperate Ottoman shortage of were now imams, muezzins, tax collectors, janissaries or other servants
precious metals. Because the silver shortage was one of the main con- of the state and its ruling faith. They administered the city; the Jews ran
straints on Ottoman economic growth, Grand Vizier Maktul Ibrahim its economy. It was a division of labour which suited both sides and the
Pasha brought in Jewish metallurgists from newly conquered Hungary, city :flourished. 17
and within a few years the Siderokapsi mines had become one of the For the rich, the buoyant Ottoman economy allowed them to invest
largest silver producers in the empire, with daily caravans making the their funds in attractive and profitable outlets such as the tax farms and
fifty-mile journey to Salonica and back. Bulgarian and Jewish miners concessions upon which the sultan relied for the gathering of many of
did the hard work, and rich Jewish merchants were commanded to his revenues. Salonican Jews thus came to play an important part in the
bankroll operations. To be sure, running the economy by imperial fiat regional economy of the Ottoman Balkans. Local Jewish sarrafs
in this way was not popular with the wealthy. The bankers complained (bankers) collected taxes from drovers, vineyards, dairy farmers and
bitterly at an obligation which was not shared by the community as a slave dealers. They bankrolled prominent Muslim office-holders such
whole, and which more often than not led to losses rather than profits. as the defterdar and local troop and janissary commanders, and farmed
They bribed Ottoman officials, hid or fled the city. The industry itself the customs concession for Salonica itself-one of the most important
became such a drain on resources that SalonicanJ ews shunned the min- sources of revenue for the empire-and the salt pans outside the city,
ers when they came into town: "They would rather meet a bear that where at their peak more than one thousand peasants worked. Many
lost its cubs than one of those people." 16 had interests in the capital, in Vidin, and along the Danube. Much of
In order to curb the impact of such obligations and to allow for the wealth of the Nasi-Mendes family-the most politically successful
greater fiscal predictability, the city's Jews sent a delegation to Suley- and prominent Jewish dynasty of the sixteenth century-was invested
man the Magnificent in 1562 to plead for a reform of their overall tax in concessions of this kind. 18
burden. The move indicated the surprising degree of self-confidence Capital accumulation was easy because Salonica was such a well-

53
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS
The Rose of Sultan Murad

pla~ed . trading base. It reached northwards into the inland fairs and parties and weddings, where men and women danced together-to the
markets of. the Balkans, south and east (via Jewish-Muslim partner- dismay of Greek Jews-were all attracting unfavourable comment. In
ships) to the Asian trading routes that led to Persia, Yemen and India, 1554 a rabbinical ordinance ruled that "no woman who has reached
and westwards through the Adriatic to Venice and the other Italian maturity, including married women, may take outside her home, into
ports. Italian, Arab and Armenian merchants all participated in this the markets or the streets, any silver or gold article, rings, chains or
traffic: but where the crucial Mediterranean triangle with Egypt and gems, or any such object except one ring on her finger." Murad himself
Venice was concerned, no one could compete with the extraordinary had, according to an apocryphal story, been so angered by Jewish osten-
network of familial and confessional affiliates that made the Salonican tation that he even contemplated putting all the Jews of the empire to
Jews and Marranos so powerful. Shifting between Catholicism (when death. Fear of exciting envy often lay behind the rabbis' efforts to urge
in Ancona or Venice) and Judaism (in the Ottoman lands), they domi- restraint. It took more than rabbinical commands, however, to stop
nated the Adriatic carrying trade, helped to build up Split as a major women wearing.the diamond .rozetas,. almend-ras ("almonds"),.choke:rs,
port for Venetian dealings with the Levant, and wielded their Ottoman earrings, coin necklaces and headpieces which still awed visitors to
connections whenever the Papacy and the Inquisition turned nasty. Salonica in the early twentieth century. 21
They combined commerce with espionage and ran the best intelligence It must have been as much the sheer number of the newcomers as
networks in the entire region. So confident did they feel, that some their behaviour which struck those who had known the town before
threatened a boycott of Papal ports when the authorities in Ancona their arrival. The once sparsely populated streets filled up and popula-
started up the auto-da-fe in 1556, and one even talked about spreading tion densities soared. At first Jews settled where they could, renting
plague deliberately to frighten the Catholics in an early attempt at bio- from the Christian and Muslim landlords who owned the bulk of the
logical warfare. 19 housing stock. The very :first communal ordinance tried to prevent
Greeks and Turks must have been astonished at the assertiveness of Jews outbidding one another to avoid driving up prices. But the contin-
the newcomers, for the Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jews they had known uous influx led to many central districts becoming heavily settled. Mus- • .•.
had always kept a low profile. In the early years, it is true, the Sefardim lims started to move ·up the -high~r slopes-enjoying better views,
tried to tread cautiously. Congregants were reminded by their rabbis to drainage and. ventilation, more space and less noise-while the
keep their voices down when they prayed so that they would not be Greeks-mostly tailors, craftsmen, cobblers, masons and metalwork-
heard outside. In external appearance, synagogues were modest and ers, a few remaining, scic::ms ·of-old, -distingp,i_~h~.Q ..J3yz;apJ:ine faroilic;:s
unobtrusive and even larger ones, like the communal Talmud Torah, among them-were pushed into the margins, near Ayios Min~s in the
were hidden well away from the main thoroughfares, in the heart of the west, and around the remains of the old Hippodrome. 22
Jewish-populated district. Thanks to the benevolence of the Ottoman South of Egnatia, with the exception of the market districts to the
authorities, however, more than twenty-five synagogues were built in west, the twisting lanes of the lo.wer towll..bekmged,to_th_(! newcomers.
less than two decades. After the fire of 1545, a delegation from Salonica Here wealthy notables lived together with the large mass of]'ewish .arti~
visited the Porte and quickly obtained permission for many to be sans, workmen, hamals, fishermen, pedlars and the destitute, cooped up
rebuilt. 20 in small apartments handed down from generation to generation. The
But the Iberian Jews had always known how to live well, and their overall impression of the Jewish quarters was scarcely one of magnifi-
noble families had been unabashedly conspicuous, with large retinues cence. Clusters of modest homes hidden behind their walls and large
of servants and African slaves. Even before Murad III introduced new barred gates were grouped around shared cortijos into which housewives
sumptuary legislation in the 1570s to curb Jewish and Christian luxury threw their refuse. As the city filled up, extra storeys were added to the
in the capital, the extravagant silk and gold-laced costumes of rich old -weoden...hous.e_s, and overhanging upper floors jutted out into the
SalonicanJews, the displays of jewellery to which the wealthier women street. Every so often, the cla:o;~~_?.~gqpjc ..~AQ.. airless alleys opened
were prone-they were particularly fond of bracelets, gold necklaces unpredictably into a small placa or placeta. Rutted backstreets hid the
and pearl chokers worn "so close to one another and so thick one would synagogues and communal buildings.
think they were riveted on to one another"-the noise of musicians at These were the l~ast hygienic or de~_irable residential areas, where

54 55
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

all the refuse of the city made its way down the slopes to collect in stag- whole, did not last for long and was then left vacant. Once Salonica
nant pools by the dank stones of the sea-walls. The old harbour built by emerged as the largest Jewish community in the empire, dwarfing that
Constantine had silted up and turned into a large sewage dump, the in Istanbul itself, the authority of the chief rabbi of the capital
Monturo, whose noxious presence pervaded the lower town. The tan- depended on obtaining the obedience of Salonican Jewry. But this was
neries and slaughter-houses were located on the western fringes, but not forthcoming. "There is no town subordinated to another town,"
workmen kept evil-smelling vats of urine, used for tanning leather and insisted one Salonican rabbi early in the sixteenth century. What he
dying wpol, in their haines. People were driven mad by the din of ham- meant was that his town would be subordinated to no other. 23
mers in the mebil foundries; others complained of getting ill from the The usual rule among Jews was that newcomers conformed to local
fumes of lead-workers and silversmiths-like the smell of the bakeries practice. But the ovel}Vhelming numbers of the immigrants, and their
but worse, according to one sufferer. Living on top of one another, well-developed sense of cultural superiority, put this principle to the
neighbours suffered when one new tenant decided to turn his bedroom test. The Spanish and ltalianJews regarded the established traditions of
into a kitchen, projecting effluent into the common passageway. The the Griegos (Greeks) or the Alemanos (Germans), as they were now
combination of overcrowding-especially after the devastatin g fire of somewhat dismissively known, as distinctly inferior. "Ni ajo dulce ni
I 545-and intense manufacturing activity meant that life in the city's Tudesco buena,"-neither can we find sweet garlic nor a good German
Jewish quarters continued to be defined by its smells, its noise and its (Jew)-was a local saying. No one likes being condescended to. Out-
la_ck of privacy. Why did people remain there, in squalor, when large side Salonica, the French naturalist Pierre Belon witnessed an argu-
tracts of the upper city lay empty? Was it choice-a desire to remain ment that flared up around a fish-stall. Did the claria have scales or not?
close together, strategically located between the commercial district Some Jews gathered and said that as it did not, it could be eaten. Oth-
and the city walls, their very density warding off intruders? Or was it ers-"newly come from Spain"-said they could see minute traces of
necessity-the upper slopes of the city being already owned and settled, scales and accused the first group of lax observance. A fist-fight was
even. if more sporadically, by Muslims? Either way, the living condi- about to erupt before the fish was taken off for further inspection. 24
tions of Salonican Jewry provoked dismay right up until the fires of Rabbis took the same unbending line over the superiority of the
I89o and I9I7, which finally dispersed the old neighbourhoods and Sefardic way that their congregants had done in the fish-market. As
erased the old streets from the map so definitively that not even their early as I 509, one wrote:
outlines can now be traced amid the glitzy tree-lined shopping avenues
which have replaced them. It is well-known that SephardicJews and their hakhanim [rabbis]
in this kingdom, together with the other congregations who join
them, comprise the majority here, may the Lord be praised. The
THE p 0 wE R 0 F THE RA BB I s land was given uniquely to them, and they are its majesty, its
radiance and splendour, a light unto the land and all who dwell in
HISTORIANS oF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE often extoll its hierarchi- it. Surely, they were not brought hither in order to depart! For
cal system of communal autonomy through which the sultan suppos- all these places are ours too, and it would be worthy of all the
edly appointed leaders of each confessional group (or millet) and made minority peoples who first resided in this kingdom to follow
them responsible for collecting taxes, administering justice and ecclesi- their example and do as they do in all that pertains to the Torah
a~tical affairs. The autonomy was real enough, but where, in the case of and its customs. 25
the Jews, was the hierarchy? It is true that in I45 3, after the fall of Con-
stantinople, Mehmed the Conqueror appointed a chief rabbi just as he Less than twenty years since the expulsions, this was a stunning display
had a Greek patriarch: the first incumbent was an elderly Romaniote of arrogance-turning the Romaniotes (Greek-speaking Jews), who
rabbi who had served under the last Byzantine emperor. But this posi- had lived in those lands since antiquity, into a subservient minority.
tion probably applied only to the capital rather than to the empire as a Such an attitude created friction with Istanbul where Romaniotes were

57
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

more numerous and not inclined to bow so easily. In Salonica itself, the the Sefardim created for themselves was a highly de-centralized, indeed
argument for Spanish superiority was repeated over and over again almost anarchic system, in which Jewish life revolved around the indi-
until it needed no longer to be made. "As matters stand today in vidual synagogue, and Jews argued bitterly among themselves as to
Salonica," commented Rabbi Samuel de .Medina in the I s6os, "the holy what constituted right practice. Fifteenth-century Spain had in fact
communities of Calabria, Provincia, Sicilia and Apulia have all adopted been not a unitary country so much as a collection of disparate cities,
the ways of Sefarad, and only the holy community of Ashkenaz [Ger- regions and states united eventually under the authority of a single
many] has not changed its ways." Thus it was not only because of the monarch; it was this keenly local and often rivalrous sense of place that
lack of a Jewish hierarchy comparable to that which structured the was reproduced in Salonica.
Orthodox Church that the model of communal administration sug- From the outset,.congregations guarded their independence jeal-
gested by the patriarchate was bound to fail. Salonica's largely Sefardic ously from each other. Synagogues multiplied-a fundamental princi-
Jewry never for a moment contemplated allowing itself to fall under the ple of Jewish life was that everyone had to belong to one congregation
guidance of a Romaniote chief rabbi. 26 or another-and within half a century there were more than twenty.
Yet not only did the Ottoman authorities apparendy not bother with Not all were of equal standing or size and many of the larger ones were
a centralized imperial Jewish hierarchy based in the capital, they constantly splitting apart thanks to the factionalism which seemed
scarcely bothered to formalize how the Jews organized themselves in endemic to the community: before long, the Sicilians were divided into
Salonica either. Under the Byzantine emperors, there was apparendy a "Old" and "New" as were the "Spanish Refugees." But the congrega-
Jewish "provost." No such post was established by the Ottomans. The tion was, at least at first, a link to the past and a way of keeping those
community could not fix upon a single chief rabbi, and its early efforts who spoke the same language together. No significant differences of
to set up a triumvirate of elderly but respected figures met the same fate liturgy or practice divided the worshippers in the New Lisbon or Evora
as the chief rabbinate·in the capital. There was thus not even a Jewish synagogues; only the small Romaniote Etz Haim and the Ashkenazi
counterpart to the city's Greek metropolitan. For a time, the local congregations might have pleaded the preservation of their traditions.
authorities appointed a spokesman for the Jews to act as intermediary Nevertheless whether the differences were liturgical or purely cultural
between the community and themselves. But the only mention of this and linguistic, each group preserved its autonomy as passionately as if
figure in the historical record paints him as an unmitigated disaster, its very identity was at stake. "In Salonica each and every man speaks in
who used the position for his own advancement, insulted respected rab- the tongue of his own people," wrote the rabbi Yosef ibn Lev in the
bis and eventually, through his blasphemous conduct, brought down I s6os. "When the refugees arrived after the expulsion, they designated
the wrath of God in the shape of the fire and plague of I 545. We do not kehalim [congregations] each according to his tongue ... Every kahal
hear about a successor: if he existed, he was of no importance. More or supports its own poor, and each and every kahal is singly recorded into
less all that mattered for the local Ottoman authorities was that taxes the king's register. Every kahal is like a TI.tyunto·itself. "28
were regularly paid to the court of the kadi or to the assigned collectors. This then was what the city actually meant for most Jews-a kahal
The community as a whole gathered as an assembly of synagogue rep- based in a squat and modesdy decorated building, unobtrusive from the
resentatives to apportion taxes. When there were difficulties it sent eld- street and plainly adorned inside, from which they ran their charity
ers to Istanbul to plead at court, or contacted prominent Jewish funds, their burial societies and study groups. There they organized the
notables for help. 27 allocation and collection of taxes and agreed salaries for their cantor,
In fact, in many ways it is misleading to talk about a Jewish commu- ritual slaughterers, the mohel (responsible for circumcisions) and rabbi.
nity in Salonica at all. From the outside, Jews could be identified by lan- Since usually only the taxable members of the community voted on
guage and officially imposed dress and colour codes. But with the communal policies, the domination of the notables was a frequent bone
exception of a small number of institutions which were organized for of contention with the poorer members.
the common good-the redemption fund that ransomed Jewish slaves Not surprisingly, such a system was highly unstable. Indeed the Jews
and captives, or the Talmud Torah, the community's combined school, were well known for their dissension and often bemoaned the lack of
shelter (for travellers and the poor), insane asylum and hospital-what fellow-feeling. Acute tensions between rich and poor, extreme faction-
ss 59
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan l'durad

alism, and the lack of any central organization made wider agreement tions against their doing so, usually to register commercial agreements,
very difficult and delayed badly needed social reforms: marriages took or divorce settlements in case of future legal disputes (for which the
place with startling informality outside the supervision of rabbis, lead- rabbinical courts were useless precisely because of their unofficial sta-
ing unfortunate girls astray; conversions--especially of slaves-to tus). Jewish workers ran to the courtroom to disclaim responsibility
Judaism were perfunctory; moreover, any rabbi was free to issue ordi- when a soldier's gun accidentally went off in their yard and killed some-
nances and excommunications, and some on occasions evidently abused one: only a judgement from the Ottoman judge could help them escape
these rights. In r 565 it was finally agreed that an ordinance could be paying a blood price for a death which they had not caused. Otherwise,
applied to the community as a whole only when it was signed by a the Ottoman authorities seemed· happy for the rabbis to run the legal
majority of the rabbis in the city. 29 affairs of their coiJll);l.unity;o{>Ooperating with them and giving them
Rabbis formed a privileged ruling caste free of communal or gov- support, for instance, in enforcing sentences, an area where the rabbis
ernment taxes. There was, of course, an Ottoman court system, often felt their weakness. Without this backing, the rabbinical courts
presided over by the kadi, an appointed official, who dispensed justice could not have functioned. 32
throughout the city. The kadi courts, though designed primarily for For the main point about this system was the enormous power it
Muslims (who were treated on a different footing than non-Muslims), gave to the rabbis themselves. Although they were appointed and paid
were considerate of]ewish religious demands: they never obliged a Jew by the lay notables who ran the synagogues, Ottoman practice in effect
to appear on the Jewish Sabbath, and sentJewish witnesses to the rabbi turned them into something approximating Jewish kadis-religiously
when it was necessary to swear an oath. But the kadi did not try to trained lawyers. But this is not really so surprising when one bears in
monopolize the provision of justice, and it was the rabbinical courts mind how, over time, Salonica's Jews were beginning to adapt some
which constituted the chief means through which Jews settled their dif- Ottoman legal institutions to their own needs-for instance, the chari-
ferences. Because they were never given any formal legal recognition, table foundation (vakf) and inheritable usufruct (yediki)-and starting
these existed for centuries in a kind of legal limbo sanctioned by the to follow Muslim custom by growing their beards longer, wearing tur-
force of custom. It was an extraordinary state of affairs and one which bans, robes and outer cloaks, and making thei'r women cover them-
offers an important clue into the way the Ottoman authorities ran their selves more than in the past. In the law, as in other areas of life, the Jews
state: strictly regimented where taxes and production were concerned, of Sefarad were becoming Ottoma:n~ 33
in other areas-such as law-almost uninvolved and only sporadically The range of issues rabbis pronounced on was vast: tenancy dis-
prescriptive. 30 putes, matrimonial, probate and commercial law made up the bread
Interventions by the Ottoman authorities in rabbinical affairs were and butter business, but there were also medical matters-what kinds
rare. It is true that a kadi would be deeply displeased to learn that rabbis of venereal disease justified a woman in divorcing her husband; or when
treated his court with disdain, or to be informed that Jews were being abortion was permissible. The traumatic rupture of family life experi-
urged by their rabbis not to use them. But only rarely did he stir into enced by the refugees was reflected in various dilemmas: Could the son
action. In one case, a dispute between two contenders for the position of a Jewish man and a black slave inherit his father's estate? "What was
of rabbi in the Aragon synagogue led to the kadi stepping in and making the situation of women whose husbands had converted to Christianity
the appointment himself; but this rendered the victorious candidate so and had remained in Spain? How many wives was a man allowed to
unpopular with his congregants, who were after all paying his salary, take? To help decide, entire libraries were brought over from Spain and
that he was forced soon after to move on. Another kadi dismissed a Italy, and merchants paid scribes and copyists to transcribe rare manu-
rabbi for instructing his congregants not to have recourse to the scripts and translate Hebrew texts into Ladino. In fact, rabbis felt at a
Ottoman courts. But in this case it was the congregants themselves who disadvantage when forced to rule without the judgements of their pre-
had shopped their rabbi by bringing his alleged remarks to the atten- decessors to guide them. One, caught outside the city by a supplicant at
tion of the authorities so as to get rid of him, and in any case he was a time when the plague was raging, apologizes in advance for offering
employed soon after by another congregation. 31 an opinion without having his books at his elbow. 34
In fact Jews did attend the Muslim courts, despite rabbinical injunc- Controlling power and resources unmatched by their peers else-
6o 6r
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

where, Salonica's rabbis possessed a degree of training and a breadth lim men, or converted to facilitate a divorce when their husband was
of outlook which made the city a centre of learning throughout the reluctant to grant it. All these situations made a knowledge of the sha-
sixteenth-century eastern .l\1editerranean. An extraordinary centre of ri'a desirable on the part of the rabbi-judge. But if a degree of familiar-
print culture too: Jewish books were printed there centuries before any ity with secular Ottoman law, the Qur'an and the shari'a was common
appeared in Greek, Arabic or Ottoman Turkish where religious objec- practice in many Ottoman Jewish communities, a few Salonican schol-
tions to seeing the sacred texts in print held things back. Equipped with ars took their interest in Arab thought even further. "I will only men-
the wide-ranging interests of the Spanish rabbinate, exploiting the tion the name of Abuhamed and his book, because it is very widespread
familiarity with the ·holy sources that their availability in translation among us," notes Rabbi Isaac ibn Aroyo, referring to the philosopher
offered, these scholars simultaneously kept in touch with the latest al-Ghazali. Rabbi David ibn Shoshan, blind and wealthy, was said to
intellectual fashions in western Europe and pursued extensive pro- have been not only "a master of all wisdom, both Talmud and secular
grammes of study that took them far beyond the confines of scriptural studies, astronomy and philosophy," but also "very familiar with books
commentary. They applied Aristotle and Aquinas to the tasks of Talmu- on the Moslem religion to such an extent that Moslem scholars and
dic exegesis, engaged with Latin literature, Italian humanism and Arab judges used to visit him to learn their own religious tomes from him."
science, and were not surprisingly intensely proud of the range of their When he moved to Istanbul, "the greatest Arab scholars used to hon-
expertise. Insulted by charges of parochialism, for instance, one young our him there greatly because of his great wisdom." One of his stu-
scholar challenged an older rabbi from Edirne to an intellectual duel: dents, Jacob HaLevi, translated the Qur'an, a book which we know
other Jewish scholars too kept in their libraries. 36
Come out to the field and let us compete in our knowledge of the
Bible, the Mishnah and the Talmud, Sifra and Sifre and all of
rabbinic literature; in secular sciences-practical and theoretical WHERE SALONICA wAs CONCERNED, the Ottoman strategy proved
fields of science; science of nature, and of the Divine; in logic- highly effective, and by attracting a large number of Jews and Marra-
the Organon, in geometry, astronomy Physics; ... Generatio et nos, the sultans succeeded in revitalizing the city. By the mid-sixteenth
Corruptio, De Anima and lvfeteora, De Animalibus and Ethics. In century its population had grown to thirty thousand and it generated
your profession as well, that of medicine, if in your eyes it is a sci- the highest per capita yield of taxes in the Balkans and the largest rev-
ence, we consider it an occupation of no special distinction and enue of any urban settlement to the west of Istanbul. It would not be
all the more in practical matters. Try me, for you have opened going too far to say that this economic success provided much of the
your mouth and belittled my dwelling-place, and you shall see fiscal sinew for the sultan's military triumphs. The Jewish immigrants
that we know whatever can be known in the proper manner. 35 embraced the opportunity Bayezid II had given them and brought an
entrepreneurial and productive energy which astonished the city's
All this was not love of learning for its own sake-though that there was existing residents. The resulting Hispanization of its culture was long-
too-so much as the fruits of the sophisticated curriculum required by lasting: although there were ups and downs in the state of the economy,
the city's scholar-judges, and their response to the opportunities cre- and in standards of rabbinical learning, the cultural imprint of Judea-
ated by Ottoman policy. Spanish was felt right up to the end of the empire. In I 892, on the four-
Nor did the rabbis, left to their own devices as they mostly were, hundredth anniversary of the edict of expulsion, Spanish journalists and
ignore the fact that they lived in a state run on the basis of the shari'a: politicians visited the Macedonian port. There they found a continuing
Jews might be represented by Muslims professionally if they lived in link to their own past, an outpost oflberian life which had been forgot-
certain neighbourhoods or belonged to certain guilds; Jewish men (like ten in the home-country for centuries. In the words of the Spanish
Christians) converted to Islam for financial advantage or to marry- senator Dr. Angel Pulido Fernandez, they were Spaniards without a
even on one occasion to get the help of the authorities in wresting Homeland; but this was not quite true. Their homeland was Salonica
another man's wife away from him; some Jewish women married Mus- itselfP
 The Rose of Sultan Murad

the Grand Signior, Christians or Jews, have [their slippers] either red,
violet or black. This order is so well-establish'd, and observ'd with such
Exactness, that one may know what Religion any one is of by the Feet
and the Head."2
4 But regulations were one thing, and what people did in real life was
another, especially when out of sight of the imperial capital. Boundaries
were constantly being subverted by accident or design and in a bustling
commercial port in particular, religious communities could not be
Messiahs, Martyrs and Miracles impermeably sealed tram one another. Young Muslim boys served as
apprentices to Christian shoe-makers; Jewish and Muslim hamals and
casual labourers scoured the docks together for work. When well-off
"When I was in Salonica the second time, I received an order to Muslim families employed Jewish and Christian servants and milk-
perform contrary deeds and so when I met a Turk on a Greek nurses, the children of the families intermingled and the boys often
street I drew my sword & forced him to speak the name of the became "milk-brothers," a relationship which could endure for many
First and the Second and to make the sign of the cross, and then years. In Salonica, with its unique confessional composition, there thus
I did not let him go until he did it; similarly, having met a Greek arose what a later visitor described as "a sort of fusion between the dif-
in a Turkish street I forced him to say the words "Mahomet is ferent peoples who inhabit the place and a happy rapprochement
the true prophet," and also the names of the first two & ordered between the races which the nature of their beliefs and the diversity of
him to lift one finger upward according to the Mahometan cus- their origins tends to separate." 3
tom. And again, when I met a Jew he had to make the sign of the The stress Islam laid on the unity of God made possible what was,
cross for me, and also to pronounce those two names when this
within its own self-imposed limits, an inclusive attitude to other reli-
happened in a Greek street, while when I met him in a Turkish
gions of the Book. For unlike the Jews, who regarded themselves as a
street he had to raise one finger upward & name those two
chosen people, and the Christians who repudiated and distanced them-
names. And I was performing those deeds daily.
selves from their origins by focusing on the charge of deicide against
YAKOV FRANK (I?26-I79I), Autohagiography no. rs 1* the Jews, Muslims explicitly acknowledged their own connection to the
earlier monotheistic faiths. Christ himself, though not regarded as
divine in nature, was celebrated as a prophet-one particularly stem
IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE religious af:filiationprovided the cate- preacher is even reputed to have had someone executed for blasphem-
gories according to which the state C~Jl~s~fied its subjects. Muslims had ing against his name. The adaptation too of churches and Christian
to be readily distinguishable from iiO'n-Muslims, who existed in a posi- shrines for Muslim use could be seen not as deliberate humiliation and
tion of !egal _inf~riority. "Their headgear is a saffron yellow turban," desecration-though it was naturally seen that way by Christians-but
wrote the French agent Nicolas de Nicolay of the SalonicanJews in the as a recognition by Muslims that God lingered already in the holy
mid-sixteenth century, "that of the Greek Christians is blue1 and that of places of their predecessors. 4
the..Turks.is pur.e white so that by the difference in colour they may be One should not, obviously, ignore the powerful evidence for the
known apart." Yellow shees, bright clothes and white or green turbans mutual contempt and hostility that could be projected across the reli-
were reserved for members of the ruling faith, as were delicate or gious divides-the janissaries who beat a Christian arms merchant to
expensive fabrics. A later traveller, Tournefort, found "the subjects of death in the market, shouting, "Why are you an unbeliever? So much
sorrow you are!"; the Jewish householders who mocked Christian wor-
*Frank, a messianic figure in his own right, was a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and shippers during holy festivals; the stuffed effigies of Judas burned with
Barouch Russo (see below). much glee by the Orthodox during Easter. (Muslims were occasionally
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

mocked in public too, but only by those who wished to become mar- large numbers of so-caJled Marranos and New Christians-in other
tyrs.) Popular hostility was palpable against those who converted and words, those who had already converted to Catholicism, in some cases
abandoned their ancestral faith. Yet even-perhaps especially-when many generations before leaving. Some of them-like the doctor-had
confessional boundaries were not crossed, the daily life of the city fos- kept Jewish customs alive secretly for decades, and equipped their chil-
tered a considerable sharing of beliefs and practices. 5 dren with two names ("If you ask one of their children: '\Vhat's your
For contrary to what our secular notions of a religious state might name?'" reported one observer, "they will respond: 'At home they call
lead us to believe, the Ottoman authorities were not greatly interested me Abraham and in the street Francesco.' "). On the other hand, many
in policing people's private beliefs. In general, they did not care what others were fully observant Catholics who had been forced from Spain
their subjects thought so long as they preserved the outward forms of and Portugal by the.Inquisition, essentially on the grounds of race
piety. This attitude was shared by many non-Muslims too. Visiting rather than religion. In Salonica, this group had trouble adjusting to
Catholics, for whom doctrine mattered a great deal, were struck by the rabbinical Judaism, and the rabbis in turn found it hard to make their
perfunctory character of Orthodox observance. "Among this people minds up about them. The question of whether or not they were "still"
there is immense ignorance not only of councils but of the Christian Jews divided learned opinion. Several leading rabbis thought not, since
faith," noted a Ukrainian Catholic in the early eighteenth century. many Marranos had only abandoned Iberia (and Catholicism) when
"They retain the name of Christ and the sign of the cross but nothing forced out. The I so6 Lisbon massacre of Portuguese "New Christians"
else." Such accusations of doctrinal ignorance said as much about the induced a more sympathetic attitude, but many of Salonica's Jews and
accuser as about Salonica's Christians, for the latter tenaciously their rabbis, even those descended from Marrano families themselves,
observed the feast-days and customs they felt to be important. But it is remained highly suspicious of the latters' motives and regarded them as
true that there was far less theological policing under the Ottomans apostates. 8
than there was in Christendom at this time, and this laxity of atmos- For as they well knew, religion could often serve simply as a flag of
phere and absence of heresy-hunters fostered the emergence of a popu- convenience. Catholics returned to Judaism as they had left it, to pro-
lar religious culture which more than anything else in the early modern tect their wealth or to inherit property from relatives; in Italy Jews
period united the city's diverse faiths around a common sense of the allowed themselves to be baptized for siinilar reasons. Traders even
sacred and divine. 6 switched between faiths as they sailed from the Ottoman lands to the
Papal states. One seventeenth-century Marrano, Abraam Righetto, in
his own words, "lived as a Jew but sometimes went to church and ate
MARRANOS AND MESSIAHS and drank often with Christians." Another, Moiseisrael, also known by
his Christian name of Francesco Maria Leoncini, was baptized no less
ON SuNDAY, 2 ]ANUARY I724, aJewish doctor was chatting with than three times as he shifted to and fro, and "was making merchandise
one of his Christian patients and telling him his life story. He had of sacred religion" in the graphic words of an outraged commentator.
grown up a Catholic in the Algarve where he had been baptized and Such men were dismissed by contemporaries as "ships with two rud-
went to church regularly. But his parents had also secretly instructed ders," but they were not particularly uncommon. A certain Samuel Levi
him in the tenets of Judaism as well and "inside he was a Jew." At the went even further, converting to Islam as a boy in Salonica-mostly,
age of thirty, after constant harassment and petty persecutions, he had according to him, to avoid punishment at school-then reverting to
left Portugal, and for the past fourteen years he had been settled in Judaism once safely across the Adriatic to marry an Ottoman Jewish
Salonica, where he had returned to his family's original faith. "So stub- woman-/a Turchetta-in the Venice ghetto, before ending up baptized
born are heathens in their unbelief," his shocked patient confided to his as a Catholic by the Bishop ofFerrara. 9
diary. 7 Salonica offered the Marranos the possibility of a less concealed,
It was not only Jews who had remained true to their ancestral faith perilous and ambiguous kind of life, and the activities of the Portuguese
that took the path of exile from the Iberian lands to Salonica, but also Inquisition after I 53 6 led many to make their home there. Yet even

66
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

those who returned to Judaism for good preserved characteristic fea- anything, more intense. In the centres of Jewish mysticism, Salonica
tures of the old ways. Their past experience of the clandestine life, their and Safed in particular, scholars prepared for the coming of the Mes-
inevitably suspicious attitude towards religious authority, as well as siah. The apocalyptically minded saw positive signs in the murderous
their exposure to Catholic illuminism, inclined them to esoteric beliefs wars of religion in central Europe, the Turkish campaigns in Poland
and mysticism. Salonica became a renowned centre of Kabbalah where and the Mediterranean, the admission of] ews into the Protestant lands,
eminent rabbis were guided by heavenly voices and taught their pupils and the persecution of east European Jewry by the Cossacks. Expecta-
to comprehend the divine will through the use of secret forms of calcu- tions-both Jewish and Christian-focused on the year 1666. 'tAccord-
lation known only to initiates. ing to the Predictions of several Christian writers, especially of such
And with Kabbalah came the taste for messianic speculation. Each who Comment on th.eApocalyps, or Revelations," wrote one commenta-
bout of persecution since the end of the thirteenth century had gener- tor, "this year of r666 was to prove a Year of Wonders, and Strange
ated prophecies of imminent redemption for the Jews. Their exodus Revolutions in the World." Protestants looked forward to the Jews'
from Spain, the Ottoman conquest of the biblical lands and the onset of conversion, Jews themselves to their imminent return to Zion.
the titanic struggle between the Spanish crown and the Ottoman sul- Rumours ran across Europe, and it was reported "that a Ship was
tans stoked up apocalyptic expectations to a new pitch. The learned arrived in the Northern parts of Scotland with her Sails and Cordage of
Isaac Abravanel, whose library was one of the most important in Silk, Navigated by Mariners who spake nothing but Hebrew; with this
Salonica, calculated that the process of redemption would begin in Motto on their Sails, The Twelve Tribes oflsrae/." 12 :~ ;.
1503 and be completed by 1531. Others saw in the conflict between That winter a forty-year-old Jewish scholar from Izmir headed for ,.)(J. '···
Charles V and Suleyman the Magnificent the biblical clash of Gog and Istanbul with the declared intention of tqppling the sultan and ushering
Magog which according to the scholars would usher in the "king- in the day of redemption. Sabb~taiZevi had been proclaiming himself
messiah."10 the Messiah on and off for some years while he wandered through the
In 1524, a mysterious Jewish adventurer called ~.fl.Yid_ Ruebeni rabbinical academies of the eastern Mediterranean. Helped by wealthy
arrived in Venice and presented himself as prince of one of the lost Jewish backers in Egypt, and by a promotional campaign launched on
tribes oflsrael. He gained an audience with the Pope and told the Holy his behalf by a young Gaza rabbi, he was mobbed by supporters when
Roman Emperor to arm the Jews so that they might regain Palestine. he returned to his home-town. According to one account "he immedi-
Crossing his path was an even less modest figure-a Portuguese New ately started to appear as a Monarch, dressed in golden and silken
Christian called Diego Pires. After rediscovering his Jewish roots and clothes, most beautiful and rich. He used to carry a sort of Sceptre in
changing his name to Solomon Molcho, he studied the Kabbalah in his hand and to go about Town always escorted by a great number of
Salonica with some of the city's most eminent rabbis and gradually Jews, some of whome, to honour him, would spread carpets on the
made the transition to messianic prophet. He predicted the sack of streets for him to step on." 13
Rome-which occurred at the hands of imperial troops in 1527-and It was only, however, once he headed for the capital, announcing he
then declared himself to be the Messiah, and went to Rome itself, in was planning to depose the sultan himself, that the Ottoman authorities
accordance with the apocalyptic programme, where he sat for thirty became alarmed. By this point, he had thrown the entire Jewish world
days in rags by the city gates praying for its destruction. Before being into turmoil. From Buda to Aleppo and Cairo, thousands declared their
burned at the stake, Molcho saw the future: the Tiber was flooding allegiance and shouted down the doubters. "It was strange to see how
over, and Turkish troops were bursting into the seat of the Papacy. The the fancy took, and how fast the report of Sabatai and his Doctrine flew
truly striking thing about Molcho is how many people believed in him through all parts where Turks and Jews inhabited," noted an English
and preserved and reinterpreted his messianic timetables. Relics of the observer. "I perceived a strange transport in the Jews, none of them
martyr were carried across Europe and a century after his death, they attending to any business unless to wind up former negotiations, and to
11
were still being displayed in the Pinkas Shut in Prague. prepare themselves and Families for a Journey to Jerusalem: All their
By the mid-seventeenth century, millenarian fever had grown, if Discourses, their Dreams and disposal of their Affairs tended to no

68
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

other Design but a re-establishment in the Land of Promise, to Great- Zevi and Nehemiah quickly quarrelled, no doubt because Zevi sus- .
14
ness, Glory, Wisdom, and Doctrine of the Messiah." pected the newcomer of trying to steal his thunder. But the quarrel had
Nowhere was the frenzy greater than in Salonica, where Zevi was a fateful implications, for Nehemiah went straight to the Ottoman
well-known figure. He had spent some years studying there with local authorities and revealed the full extent of what Zevi had been saying to
scholars, and preached regularly in the synagogue of the Marranos. In his followers. For added effect, he accused Zevi of lewdness and
1659 he had outraged his audience by pronouncing the divine na~e immorality, charges which his ecstatic conduct-and his well-known
and was excommunicated and forced to leave. Now, however, the City views that "God permitteth that which is forbidden"-made highly
was gripped by millenarian hysteria. Anticipating the Messiah's arrival, plausible. Although Mehmed IV's first impulse seems to have been to
rabbis ordered acts of penance and fasting; in their enthusiasm some have Zevi executed, the hunt-loving monarch, who rarely attended too
acolytes starved themselves to death, or whipped themselves till their closely to matters of state, was persuaded by his advisers to give pim the
backs were bleeding. "Others buryed themselves in their Gardens, cov- chance to convert to Islam. The ulema were conscious of the danger of
ering their naked Bodies with Earth, their heads onely excepted turning him into a martyr; the Grand Vizier agreed. Zevi was interro-
remained in their Beds of dirt until their Bodies were stiffened with the gated in the sultan's presence where one of the royal physicians, Haya-
cold and moisture: others would indure to have melted Wax dropt upon tizade Mustafa Fevzi Efendi-a convert whose original name was
their Shoulders, others to rowl themselves in Snow, and throw their Moshe Abravanel-translated for him from Turkish into Judea-
Bodies in the Coldest season of Wmter into the Sea, or Frozen Spanish, and said he could get his supporters to follow him if he became
Waters." Preparing to go and meet him, shopkeepers sold off their a Muslim. To the astonishment of Ottoman Jewry, Zevi agreed, taking
stock at bargain prices, parents married off their children and all sought the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi and being honoured with the title of
"to purge their Consciences of Sin." Christians and Muslims looked on in Chief Palace Gatekeeper and a royal pension. For the next six years, he
bemusement and scorn. When a French onlooker smiled at the wild lived in Edirne, Salonica and Istanbul under the eye of the Porte,
abandon of the crowds, a young Jewish boy told him "that I had noth- receiving instruction in Islam from-and offering insights into Judaism
ing to smile about since shortly we would all become their slaves by the to-the Grand Vizier's personal spiritual adviser. Sometimes Zevi
virtue of their Messiah." 15 issued commands which encouraged his followers to convert; at others,
Even Zevi's arrest en route to the capital, and his subsequent deten- he behaved as though still a Jew at heart. In 1672 he was banished to a
tion did not diminish his influence. To the Grand Vizier he denied ever remote port on the Albanian coast where he died four years later.
' claimed he was the Messiah; but at the same time, he addressed
having Despite the temptation to take stern action against the Jews, even
the Jews of the capital as "The Only Son and Firstborn of God, Mes- apparently considering at one stage to force them to convert en masse,
siah and Saviour of the World." Delegations visited him from as far the Ottoman authorities adroitly allowed the movement to fizzle out. 17
afield as Holland, Poland, Germany and Persia, and hundreds of pil- The Messiah's conversion was not the end of the matter, however.
grims made their way to see him. A light-so bright as to blind those After his apostasy, there were ceremonies of expiation, contrition, and
who looked upon it-was said to have shone from his face and a crown later of excommunication, but even then many of his followers
of fire was seen above his head. He was dressed in expensive garments remained undefl.ected: they argued the Messiah had converted to test
paid for by his admirers; in return, he sent out instructions for new fes- the strength of their faith, or perhaps to bring the Turks themselves
tivals to be celebrated in his honour. Only in Istanbul did doubters pub- onto the right path-for was the Messiah not to care for humanity as a
licly resist his claims. In the Balkans his supporters held sway; women whole, and not just the Jews? Reading things in this way did not seem
dressed themselves in white and prepared to "go and slay demons." His perverse to them: interpreting events so as to distinguish their outward
fame even prompted another Kabbalist, a Polish Jew namedN~hemiah, meaning from their true, inner significance was, after all, at the heart
to make his way to Gallipoli, where Zevi was being held, to tell him that of the Sabbataian teaching, while dissimulation and deliberate self-
the books foretold the arrival of a second, subordinate Messiah, which abasement in the eyes of the world had a positive value for mystics of all
unsurprisingly he proclaimed himself to be. 16 kinds-Jews, Christians and l\t1uslims. Zevi's apostasy was recast in
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

Kabbalistic terms as an act of virtue, a way to redemption, gathering in brother Jacob-Zevi's brother-in-law-as the Querida (Beloved) who
the sparks of the Divine that had become scattered throughout the had received Zevi's spirit, and there was a second wave of conversions.
material world of sensory perception and matter itself. Zevi may have Many of those who had converted at the same time as Zevi regarded
confirmed that those who thought this way were on the right path this as impious nonsense: they were known as Izmirlis, after Zevi's
when he stopped briefly in Salonica the year after his conversion. He birthplace. Jacob Querido himself helped Islamicize his followers and
certainly got a number of leading notables and rabbis to follow him, left Salonica to make the haj in the early r69os but died during his
provoking further fratricidal rage, brawls and even killings which the return from Mecca. As the historian Nikos Stavroulakis points out,
community managed to hush up. Eventually he was forced out of the both the f.zmirlis and the Yakublar (the followers of]acob Querido) saw
city for the last time, and a triumvirate of chief rabbis took control and themselves as the faithful awaiting the return of the Messiah who had
attempted to avert any further disturbances. Henceforth there was a "withdrawn" himself from the world; it was a stance which crossed the
deep suspicion of mysticism. Yet most of Zevi's followers-like his Judeo-Muslim divide and turned Sabbatai Zevi himself into something
right-hand man, the Gaza rabbi Nathan-never did convert and sub- like a hidden Imam of the kind found in some Shia theology. 19 A few
terranean Sabbataian influences could be found among Jews as far years later, a third group, drawn mostly from among the poor and arti-
afield as Poland; Italy and Egypt. In Salonica they lingered on for sanal classes, broke off from the lzmirlis to follow another charismatic
decades and only disappeared after the Napoleonic wars. 18 leader, the youthful Barouch Russo (known to his followers as Osman
Baba), who claimed to be not merely the vessel for Zevi's spirit but his
very reincarnation. 20
THE MA 'MIN Although they differed on doctrinal matters, the three factions had
features in common. Following the advice of Zevi himself, whose
HuNDREDS MORE, HOWEVER, did actually follow Zevi into Islam- eighteen commandments forbade any form of proselytism, they pre-
some at the time, and others a few years later-and by doing so they served an extreme discretion as a precaution against the suspicions and
gave rise to what was perhaps one of the most unusual religious com- accusations which they encountered from both Turks and Jews. Even
munities in the Levant. To the Turks they were called Di:inmehs (turn- their prayers were suffused with mystical allusions to protect their
coats), a derogatory term which conveyed the suspicion with which inner meanings from being deciphered by outsiders. 21
others always regarded them. But they called themselves simply Over time they developed a kind of mystical Islam with a Judaic
Ma'min,...the Faithful-a term commonly used by all Muslims.* There component not found in mainstream Muslim life. 'While they attended
were small groups of them-elsewhere, but Zevi's last wife, Ayse, and her mosque and sometimes made the haj, they initially preserved Judea-
father, a respected rabbi called Joseph Filosof, were from Sal.onica, and Spanish for use within the home, something which lasted longest
after Zevi's death, they returned there and helped to establish the new among Russo's followers. They celebrated Ramadan, and ate the tradi-
sect which he had created. By 19oo,. the city's ten-thousand-strong tional sweets on the roth of Moharrem, to mark the deaths of Hasan and
community ofJ;gQ.eo-Spanish-speaking .Mus~ims was one of the most Huseyn. Like their cooking, the eighteen commandments which they
extraordinary and (for its size) influential elements in the confessional attributed to Zevi showed clearly the influence of both Muslim and Tal-
mosaic of the late Ottoman empire. mudic practice. (Was it coincidence that eighteen was also a number of
Schism was built into their history from the start. Not unlike the special significance to the Mevlevi order?) They prayed to their Mes-
Sunni-Shia split in mainstr-eam Islam, the internal divisions of the siah, "our King, our Redeemer," in "the name of God, the God of
Ma'min stemmed from, disagreement over the line of succession which Israel," but followed many of the patterns of Muslim prayer. They
followed their Prophet's death. In r683 his widow Ay~e .hailed her increasingly followed Muslim custom in circumcizing their males just
before puberty, and read the QUF'an, but referred to their festivals
*In Hebrew, the term is Maminim; in Turlrish Mumin. Ma'min was a Salonica using the Jewish calendar. Some hired rabbis to teach the Torah to their
derivation. children. Although the common suspicion throughout the city-cer-

73
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

tainly well into the nineteenth century-was that they were really Jews vants. "The strife between the ..pld and ..the new was ever pre~!!.nt..in our
(if of a highly unreliable kind), in fact they were evolving over time into ho,J,JSe;"·he recollects. His uncle ~as· ofthe ~~~fschool: a de~~ut man, he
a distinctive heterodox Muslim sect, much influenced by the Sufi p~ayed five times a day, abhorred alcohol, and disliked travel or innova-
orders. tion. For some reason, he refused to wear white shirts; "a coloured shirt
The Ottoman authorities clearly regarded their heterodoxy with with attached collar was, for him, the extreme limit of westernization in
some suspicion and as late as 1905 treated a case of a Ma'min girl who dress to which he felt that one could go without falling into conflict
had fallen in love with her Muslim tutor, Hadji Feyzullah Effendi, as a with religion ... He objected to the theatr~J .m:usic, drinking, card
question of conversion. Yet with their usual indifference to inner belief, playing, an<~: p}:lOt?grap_hy-all new inventions which he- considered
they left them alone. A pasha who proposed to put them all to death part of Satan's _world." Yalman's father, on the other hand-Osman
was, according to local myth, removed by God before he could realize Tewfik Bey-was "a progressive, perhapseyen..a..re.valutionary," who
his plan. In r859, at a time when the Ottoman authorities were starting wore "the highest possible white collars," beautiful cravats and stylish
to worry more about religious orthodoxy, a governor of the city carried shoes in the latest fashion, loved poetry, theatre and anything that was
out an enquiry which concluded they posed no threat to public order. new, taking his children on long trips and photographing them with
All he did was to prevent rabbis from instructing them any longer. A enthusiasm. He adorned his rooms with their pictures and prayed but
later investigation confirmed their prosperity and honesty and after rare1y. 23 -"='
C.LU ..-::- y·t ~~-~-..,.,-
r875 such official monitoring lapsed. Ma'min spearheaded the expan- Esin Eden's memoir of the following generation shows Euro-
sion of Muslim-including women's-schooling in the city, and were peanization taken evenfurther. Hers was a well-tO-ao-fiimJY-oftooacco '
prominent in its commercial and intellectual life. Merchant dynasties merchants which combined a strong consciousness of its Jewish ances-
,_ ' . ..~-··· . ...
like the fez-makers, the Kapandjis, accumulated_?~_ge for-tunes, .bni.lt try widi pride in its contemporary achievements as part of a special
villas in the -European-s.cyle-by the-st:a and entered _the."muntcipal" Muslim community, umbilically linked to Salonica itself. The women
~-- -admiui~y.atiou. Others were in humbler -- traoes= barbers, copper- wer~ .all .Qighly educated-one was even a teacher at the famous new
smiths, tow:ri=criers and butchers.22 ~erakki ly~ee..2.sociable, energetic and articulate. They smoked lemon-
Gradually-as with the Marranos of Portugal, from whom many scented cigarettes in the garden of their modern villa by the sea, played
were descended-their connection with their ancestral religion faded. cards endlessly and kept their eyes on the latest European fashions.
High-class Ma'min married into mainstream Muslim society, though Their servants were Greek, ·their furnishings E-renclrancl~erman, and
most resided in central qua,rters, between the Muslim T1eighbour~9ods their cuisine a mix of"traditionally high Ottoman cuisine as wella s tra-
of the Upper Town and the ]~"Wish qriarte'iS-below, streets where ?ften ditional Sephardic cooking," though with no concern for the .c:!~etary
laws of]udaism. 24 .;.)(:, t--;. ~..:::> tA.,.:)...~
the two religions lived side 'by SJ.Cie: "Theywifl b"e converted puiely and
simply-into Musl.iills,''pr"'edicted one scholar in r897· But like many of When the Y~~g~~~~!!)!?~~ out inSaloniGa.in--I908., Ma'min ~. ...... ..,
Salonica's Muslims at this time, the Ma'min also ..~mbraced Europq n economics professa ·rs, newspaper men, businessmen and lawyers were
learning, and identified...~emselves with secul~r kn~\yJfdg~,-polit:Tc;al --- among the leading activists and there were three Ma 'min ministers in
radicalism ari"d" rreema;onry. By a strange twist of fate it was thus the the first Young Turk government. Indeed conspiracy theor!stS'SaW the
(
Jf Mu'slirr;t~llo.;~rs of a Jewish messiah who helped turn late-nineteenth- Ma'min everywhere and assumed any Muslim from Salonica must be
one. Today some people even argue that M~_g~(a Kemal .1\t~turk must
, \ ~ century Salonica into the most liberal, progressive and revolutionary
\ I
\ cit}!.j~~t!ts.~~pire .
-- . - have been a Ma'min (there is no evidence 'for this), and
s~ the destruc-
.) t--~- The juxtaposition of old and new outlooks in a fin-_de.-siecle Ma'min tion of the Ottoman empire and the creation of the secular republic of
heuseholdjs vividly evoked in the memoirs of A.11inea""Emiii:-TII1iri:aii.. Turkey as their handiwork-the final revenge, as it were, of Sabbl!taL._
His father, Osman Tewfik Bey, was a civil servant and a teacher of cal- Zevi, and the unexpected fulfilment of his dreams. In fact, m~~yof the
ligraphy. Living in the house with him and his parents were his uncle Ma'min themselves had mixed feelings at what was happening in
nationalist Turkey: some were Kemalists, others opposed him.IP, r 92 3,
and aunt, his seven siblings, two orphaned cousins and at least five ser- . ~- ' --
74 75
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

however, they were all counted as Muslims in the compulsory exchange dating Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Western travellers to the empire
of populations and packed off to Istanbul, where a small but distin- never, if they could help it, lost the opportunity to describe these mys-
guished community of businessmen, newspaper magnates, industrial- terious and otherworldly figures with their whirling dances and strange
ists and diplomats has since flourished. As the writer John}?reely tells ritual howlings. But dwelling on such eccentricities-abstracted from
us, their. o.n'i.letery, in the Valley of the Nightingales above U skiidar, on their theological context-turned their acolytes into figures of fun and
the Asian side of the Bosphorus, is still known as the Selanikliler overlooked their central role in bridging confessional divides during
1\tlezarligi-the Cemetery ofTnosefromSalonica. 25 the Ottoman centuriesP
Meanwhile, in the city which nurtured them for many years in its Many of these mystical orders borrowed heavily from the shamanis-
curiously unconcerned atmosphere, little trace of their presence now tic traditions of cen!ral Asian nomad life and from the eastern Chd's-
remains. Their old quarters were destroyed in the 1917 fire, or in the tia.nity they found ·aro:und,·th~em. But by the fourteenth a~d· fift~~th
rebuilding whf~K"foUowed; ·their cemetecy~which·layne'Xt to the large centuries they were powerful f~rces in their own right, supported by-
Sephardic necropolis outside the walls, became a football field. Today and supportive of-sultans like Murad II, who founded a large Mevlevi
their chief monument is the magnificent fin-de-siecle Yeni Djami, monastery in Edirne. When Ottoman troops conquered the Balkans,
tucked away in a postwar suburb on the way to the ·a irport. Used as an they were accompanied and sometimes preceded by holy men who
annexe to the Archaeological Museum, its leafy precinct is stacked with spread the ideas of the missionary-warrior Haci Bektash, the poet Rumi
ancient grave stelai and mausoleums, and its airy light interior is and Baha' al-Din Naqshband. Their highly unorthodox visions of the
opened occasionally for exhibitions. Built in 1902 by the local architect ways to God were shared in religious brotherhoods financed by pious
Vitaliano Poselli, it is surely one of the most eclectic and unusual benefactions. Some of their leaders-men like the fifteenth-century
mosques in the world, a domed neo-Renaissance villa, with windows heretic sheykh Bedreddin-saw themselves as the Mahdi, revealing the
framed in the style oflate Habsburg Orientalism and pillars which flank secret of divine unity across faiths, and l~galizing whlttlleshari'a had
the entrance supporting a solid horse-shoe arch straight out of Moorish previously forbidden. From the early sixteenth century, as the Ottoman
Spain. Complete with sundial (with Ottoman instructions on how to state, and its clerical class, the ulema, conquered the Arab lands and
set your watch) and clocktower, the Yeni Djami sums up the extraordi- became more conscious of the responsibility of the caliphate and the
nary blending of influences-Islamic and European, Art Nouveau dangers of Persian heterodoxy, these unorthodox and sometimes
meets a neo-Baroque Alhambra, with a discreet hint of the ancestral heretical movements came under attack. In the mid-seventeenth cen-
faith in the star of David patterns cut into the upper-floor balconies- tury, Vani Effendi, the puritanical court preacher who converted Sab-
which made up the Ma'mins' world. 26 batai Zevi, was outraged by the permissive attitude of some of them to
stimulants such as coffee, alcohol and opium, as well as by their worship
of saints and their pantheist tendencies. Murad IV took a dim view of
THE SuFI ORDERS such practices, and at least one tobacco-smoking mufti of Salonica got
in trouble as a result. In practice, however, many leading statesmen and
THE CITY, DELICATELY POISED in its confessional balance of clergymen were also "brothers" of one group or another, and generally
power-ruled by Muslims, dominated . hy.J.~ws, in a.J?._.ovex;whelmingly they prospered.28
Christian hinterland-lent itself to an atmosphereof overlapping devo- Most major orders had their representatives in a place as important
tion. With time it became covered in a dense grid ofholyplaces-foun-:- as Salonica where there were more than twenty shrines and monaster-
6tin.~.t.J;~bsl.... .f~.lll€teJ;.ies, -sb:r.iaes~aad-.menaster.ies-frequentea · by ies, guarding all the city's gates and approaches. We know of the exis-
members of all faiths in search of divine intercession. One of the most tence of the Halvetiye, who expanded into the Balkans in the sixteenth
important institutions in the creation of this sanctified world were the century and gave the city several of its muftis. Even during the First
heterodox Islamic orders-known to scholars as Sufis and to th-e public, World War, the Rifa'i were still attracting tourists to their ceremonies:
inac~~;;u;Iy,··a:s·aern~hes-who played ~uch a pivotal role in consoli- Alicia Little watched them jumping and howling, and was struck by

77
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

their generous hospitality and their courtesy to guests. One nineteenth- tance. In Macedonia, the Evrenos family supported the order; in
century Albanian merchant, who made his fortune in Egypt, allowed Salonica itself, it owned several modestly appointed tekkes. 31
his villa in the new suburb along the seashore to be used as a Melami The Bektashi themselves had a close con:q~ction Fith the worship of
tekke; among its adepts were the head of the Military School, an army Ghrist. Their trs~ ofbr~ad.aiia\Vinel"D.-i:heir · rituals, .·th~i~ ~tt--e;son:·t:he
colonel, a local book-dealer and a Czech political refugee who had con- --tWelv:eJmams (akin to the twelve apostles), and many other features of
verted to Islam. 29 their rit~s all bore a close resemblance to Christian practice. In south-
There were tekkes of the N akshbandis, the Sa' dis and many others. ern Albania, according to Hasluck, legend claimed that Haji Bektash
The magnificent gardens and cypresses of the Mevlevi monastery, situ- was himself from a Christian family-he had converted to Islam before
ated strategically next to a reservoir which stored much of the city's coming to recognize the superiority of his original faith, whereupon he
drinking water, attracted many of the city's notable families and appear invented Bektashism as a bridge between the two. The lack of any basis
to have been popular with wealthy Ma'min as well. The Mevlevi were in fact for the story should not disguise its symbolic truth. As one close
extremely well-funded, and controlled access to the tomb of Ayij>S ~ observer of the movement explained: "It is their doctrine to be liberal
Dimitrios and many other holy places in the city. They retainecyclose i towards all professions and religions, and to consider all men as equal in
ties with local Christians and were reportedly "always to be fqhnd in r the eyes ofGod." 32
company with the Greek [monks]." One British diplomat at the~nd of
the nineteenth century recounts a long conversation with a seruor_ j
Mevlevi sheykh, a man whose "shaggy yellow beard and golden specta-. ) / THE PowERS OF THE CITY
des _made him lao~ more like a German professor than a da?ci~g _)
demsh." Together, m the sheykh's office, the two men drank raki, dxs- ~ BENEATH THE CONFESSIO!>fAL divides and helped by such creeds,
cussed photography-local prejudices hindered him using his .,Kodak, ) there existeaakind of s..ibmerged popular religion, defined by common
the sheykh complained-and talked about the impact a new translation \ belief in the location and timingof ¥vine.PO':"C:!·
Take the calendar
of the central Mevlevi text, the Mesnevi, had made in London. '~e did ri:tself:whether Urii:let'lheirChdsi:ian or Muslim titles, Sain,t_G..~Qrge's
not care about the introduction of Mohammedanism into England," Day in the spring and Sain~ D.imitrios's.Day at. the ..encf_pf.~ptumn
noted the British diplomat, "but he had hoped that people might have ~ m-arked·· k:~y poi~ts in-the year for business and. legal arrangements
seen that the mystic principles enunciated in the Mesnevi were compat- - affecting the entire society, the dates for -instance when residential
ible with all religions and could be grafted on Christianity as well as on leases expired, shepherds moved between lowland and upland pastures,
Islam." 30 and bread prices were set by the local authorities.
Of all the Sufi orders in the Balkans, however, perhaps the most suc- Salonica's Casimiye Mosque, which had formerly been Saint Dimi-
cessful and influential were the .B.~k!~· They had monastic foun- trios's church, saw the cult of the city's patron saint continuing under
dations everywhere and they were very closely associated with the Muslim auspices. Casim himself was an example-one of many in the
janissary corps, the militia of forcibly converted Christian boys which Balkans-of those holy figures who were Islamicized versions of Chris-
was the spearhead of the Ottoman army. Often they took over existing tian saints, and Dimitrios's tomb was kept open for pilgrims of both
holy places, saints' tombs and Christian churches, a practice which had faiths by the Mevlevi officials who looked after the mosque. Near the
started in Anatolia and continued with the Ottoman advance into very end of the empire, a French traveller caught the final moments of
Europe. In the early twentieth century, the brilliant young British this arrangement and described how it worked. He was ushered into a
scholar Hasluck charted the dozens of Bektashi foundations which still dark chapel by the hodja, together with two Greeks who had come for
existed at the time of the Balkan Wars as far north as Budapest, most of divine help. This conversation followed:
which (outside Albania, which is even today an important centre) have
long since disappeared. In such places, people came, lit candles and "Your name?" asked the Turk ... "Georgios," replied the Greek,
stuck rags in nearby trees-a common way of soliciting saintly assis- and the Turk, repeating "Georgios," held the knot in the flame,

79
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

then commented to the Greek with an air of satisfaction that the gious authority, the reverse side of the power to curse or excommuni-
knot had not burned. A second time. "The name of your father cate. Both powers formed a key weapon in the armoury of the city's
and your mother?" "Nikolaos my father, Calliope my mother." spiritual leaders but also transcended the bounds of religious commu-
"And your children?" And when he had thus made three knots nity. According to a local story an archbishop converted to Islam and
carefully, he put the sacred cord in a small packet which he became a leading mollah. While he was still a Christian he had, in a
dipped in the oil of the lamp, added a few bits of soil from the moment of anger, cursed one of his congregation: "May the earth
tomb, wrapped it all up and handed it to the Greek who seemed refuse to receive you!" The man died and after three years passed his
entirely content. Then he explained: "If you are ill, or your body was exhumed. Of course it was found in pristine condition "just as
father, your mother, your children, put the knot on the suffering if he had been buried•the day before"-the power of the excommunica-
part and you will be cured." After which, turning to me, the Turk tion had evidently endured even though the cleric himself had since
asked "And you?" I shook my head. The Greek was amazed and converted, and only he could revoke it, even though he was now a Mus-
believed I had not understood and explained it all to me. When I lim: "Having obtained the Pasha's permission, he repaired to the open
continued to refuse he seemed regretful. "Einai kalon" [It is tomb, knelt beside it, lifted his hands and prayed for a few minutes. He
good] he told me sympathetically ... and the two Greeks, had hardly risen to his feet when, wondrous to relate, the flesh of the
together with the Muslim sacristan, left the mosque happily. 33 corpse crumbled away from the bones and the skeleton remained bare
and clean as it had never known pollution." Christian, Muslim or Jew,
These rituals were not especially unusual, though the setting was. "If one looked wherever it was necessary to make the spell work and bring
your heart is perplexed with sorrow," the Prophet Mohammed is said to peace to the living and the dead. 35
have advised, "go seek consolation at the graves of holy men." Mus- For the city was peopled gx;.spidts-evil as well as good. "There are
lims-especially women-made the _ziy'!:ret at times of domestic need, invisible influences everywhere in Turkey," writes Fanny Blunt, a long-
and the Arabic term was taken over by Salonica's Jews, who spoke of time resident of Salonica, in her classic study of Ottoman beliefs and
going on a ziyara to pray at the tomb of rabbis or deceased relatives. customs-vampires in cemeteries, spirits guarding treasures buried in
Christian women used both the Jewish cemetery and Muslim mau- haunted houses, djinns in abandoned konaks, and enticing white-dad
soleums when collecting earth from freshly dug graves to use against. peris who gathered anywhere near running water. Fountains were dan-
evit~Qixits. Mousa Baba, Meydan-Sultan Baba and Gul Baba gathered gerous, especially at certain times of the year, and antiquities like the
pilgrims to their tombs, even after the twentieth-century exodus of the Arch of Galerius were well known to possess evil powers, if approached
city's Turks. In the-I9-3.Q.~, .. Christian women from nearby neighbour- from the wrong all,gle. Church leaders tried to draw doctrinal distinc-
hoods were still lighting candles at the tomb of Mousa Baba and asking tions betweena~ceptable and unacceptable forms of the sU.I?.~E_natural,
his help (against malaria), to the surprise of some Greek commentators but Salonica's inhabitants did not bother. If the rabbi or bishop -could
who could not understand how they could do this "in a city where hun- not help them, they appealed to witches, wise men or healers. The reli-
dreds of martyrs and holy saints were tortured and martyred in the gious authorities never felt seriously threatened by such practices, and
name of Christ." The answer was that for many of those who came to
seek his help,·Meusa-.J~ab!J.was not really a Muslim holy man at all.
Rather he was Saint George himself, who had metamorphosed into a
Turk with supernatural powm: "I heard this when we refugees first
I it is a striking difference with Christian Europe that there were never
_' witchcrafndals..in.the..Ott-om:arr~ Devils, demons and e~if~pi;:::
its-euphemistically termed "those from below," or "those without
number," or more placatingly, "the best of us"-were a fact oflife. 36
came here from Thrace, from a Turkish woman, who told me she had "De ozo ke lo guadre el Dio-May God guard him from the eye," eld-
heard it from elderly Turkish women who had explained it to her." erly Jewish ladies muttered. Was there anyone in the city who did not
Why had Saint George assumed this disguise? For the same reason that fear being jinxed by the evil eye-to mati for the Greeks, the fena goz for
Sabbatai Zevi had converted, according to his followers: to make the the Turks-and sought remedies against it? All avoided excessive com-
.~ll!l:.l>.diey~r.s...bl!li£~e.
34
pliments and feared those who paid them, cursing them under their
Power to keep the dead at rest was one of the chief attributes of reli- breath. Moises Bourlas tells us in his wonderful memoirs how his
8o 1 81
r' :·
'-..--' t
/
j
 SALONICA, CITY OF GHOSTS The Rose of Sultan Murad

mother was sitting out in the sun one fine Saturday with her neigh- for others. Muslims were in the, ~~cend;:~.nt, and the assertive Sef;!r..dic .
bours, gossiping and chewing pumpkin seeds, when some gypsy fortune- ] ews, . who ·doriiliiared ·"hunwr~·~~Jly, found. their'· rule ·welcorilliig and
tellers passed them and shouted: "Fine for you, ladies, sitting in the sun were duly grateful. Mosques and synagogues proliferated as a result of
and eating pumpkin seeds!" To which his mother instantly and pru- official encouragement, and even the extraordinary episode of Sabbatai
dently replied-sotto voce in Judeo-Spanish, so that they could not Zevi can be seen as illustrating the Ottoman state's flexibility with
understand: "Tu ozo en mi kulo" (Your eye in my arse). 37 regard to the Jews, who lived in Salonica, as a ] esuit priest noted in
Fanny Blunt lists accepted remedies: "garlic, cheriot, wild thyme, 1734, with "more liberty and privileges than anywhere else."38
boar's tusks, hares' heads, terebinth, alum, blue glass, turqoise, pearls, For the city's Christians, on the other hand, Ottoman domination
the bloodstone, carnelian, eggs [principally those of the ostrich], a was very much harder to accept. The Byzantine scholar Ioannis
gland extracted from the neck of the ass, written amulets and a thou- Evgenikos lamented the capture of"the most beautiful and God-fearing
sand other objects." She tried out the ass gland on her husband, the city of the Romans," and a sense of loss continued to flow beneath the
British consul, when he was ill, and reported it a success. For keeping surface of Orthodox life. After all, not even Saint Dimitrios, Salonica's
babies in good health, experts recommended old gold coins, a cock's guardian, had saved it from "enslavement." Catholic visitors to the
spur or silver phylacteries containing cotton wool from the inaugura- Greek lands often saw their plight as a punishment for their sins, but so
tion of a new church (for Christians), bits of paper with the Star of did many Orthodox believers. An anonymous seventeenth-century
David drawn on them (Jews), or the pentagram (Muslims). Holy water author even pleaded in tones of desperation with the city's saint:
helped Christians, Bulgarians were fond of salt; others used the heads
of small salted fish mixed in water, while everyone believed in the 0 great martyr of the Lord Christ, Dimitrios, where are now the
power of spitting in the face of a pretty child. miracles which you once performed daily in your own country?
~p~lls.J~quired coun-oor""".s.pells. Mendicant dervishes and gypsy \Vhy do you not help us? \Vhy do you not reappear to us? \Vhy,
women were believed to know secret remedies, especially for afflicted St. Dimitrios, do you fail us and abandon us completely? Can
animals. Hodjas provided pest control in the shape of small squares of you not see the multitude of hardships, temptations and debts
paper with holy inscriptions that were nailed to the wall of afflicted that crowd upon us? Can you not see our shame and disgrace as
rooms and Jews wore amulets containing verses from the Torah to ward our enemies trample upon us, the impious jeer at us, the Sara-
off the "spirits of the air" which caused depression or fever. Blunt cens mock us, and everybody laughs at us? 39
describes some striking cases of cross-faith activity: a Turkish woman
snatching hairs from the beard of a Jewish pedlar as a remedy for fever; The small size of the surviving Orthodox population, its lack of wealth,
Muslim children having prayers read over them in church; Christian and the constant erosion of its power left none in any doubt of its
children similarly blessed by Muslim hodjas, who would blow or spit on plight. The Byzantine scholars who had made its intellectual life so
them, or twist a piece of cotton thread around their wrist to stop their vibrant fled abroad-Theodoros Gazis to Italy, Andronikos Kallistos
fever. Doctors wen: not much esteemed; the reputation of Ia indul- ending up in London-where they helped hand down classical Greek
cadera--the h~~lc::t.:-stood ·mll_c:;h higher. Against the fear of infertility, texts to European humanists. Within the city, while rabbinical scholar-
ill health, envy or bad luck, the barriers between faiths quickly crum- ship flourished, the flame of Christian learning flickered tenuously
bled. through the eighteenth century. Such intellectual and spiritual discus-
sions as were taking place within the empire were going on in the
monasteries of Mount Athos itself, in the capital, or in the Danubian
ORTHODOXY: Principalities to the north. Salonica-the "mother of Orthodoxy"-
TAx-CoLLECTORs AND MARTYRS became a backwater. Bright local Christian boys usually ended up being
schooled elsewhere. It is scarcely a coincidence that one of the best-
BuT WE SHOULD NOT PAINT toorosyapictureofthe . C:~tr'sreligious known works to have been composed by a sixteenth-century scholar
possibilities uncler.OttQ!!l~rule. Life was clearly better for some than from the city, the cleric Damaskinos Stouditis (rsoo-rs8o), was a col-
82 83
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62 reduction of temperature{ to}[ ]from 16° to 36°.
75 general relation between winds and cold {wave}[waves]
159 47 44 42 {29}[39] 36 34 31 53
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