Le Passé

Conclusion

The Memory of the Dead

We are turned to hollow bones, shall we be restored to life? A fruitless transformation!1

—QUR’AN

BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR, the dead were to be found, not only in the weed-strewn cemeteries which lined the approaches to the walls, but also withinthe city itself, crammed into the small railed enclosure by the Saatli Djami, under the trees of the Vlatadon monastery, in dervish turbes and roofed family mausoleums on street corners. A tiny graveyard of richly carved turbaned tombs stood near the Hamza Bey mosque, surrounded by pastry-shops, watch-menders, bakeries and general stores in the busy commercial quarter where the Kapali Çarsi—the main shopping arcade—met the old Bezesten. When they drew water at the fountain, or entered their church, mosque or hamam, the living saw inscriptions which reminded them of how much they owed to those who had gone before them. But they remembered them too in public pilgrimages to the cemetery like the Jewish Ziyara grande which took place thirteen days before Yom Kippur. Women paid visits to their relatives’ graves to pray for domestic advice and tied small pieces of paper or ribbons to tomb railings. The dead, with their powers and demands, thus formed part of the world of the living. When a rabbi died, a note was often placed in his hand prior to burial asking for some important favour from God: this was done when Rabbi Levi Gattegno passed away in the middle of a dry spell, and the rains came within hours. Bodies which had not decomposed indicated the presence of a restless spirit; bodies laid the wrong way or face down would rest uneasily in the ground. Sometimes tombs were re-opened to check that all was well. But people also visited cemeteries for picnics and conversation. The dead watched the living enjoying themselves as well as lamenting their passing. Above the graves the city’s inhabitants worked, begged, grazed their animals and indulged in a variety of activities which Ottoman legislators vainly tried to curb.2

In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the dead and the living began to move apart. Following the 1866 International Sanitary Conference in Istanbul, Ottoman regulations proscribed burial within the capital. Graveyards had to be moved to a sufficient distance from the walls to avoid their “putrid emanations” endangering public health. Similar measures were introduced in Salonica, and the occupants of some of the small neighbourhood graveyards within the city were incorporated in the larger ones outside. City burial became an exclusive matter: only spiritual leaders could still be buried in their places of worship, a privilege which was sometimes extended to religious benefactors as well. Was this a mark of honour for these men of distinction, or a sign that their remains radiated a special power that helped those living among them?3

After the 1917 fire, Hébrard’s plan for the modern city envisaged radical changes in the use of urban space, and relegated the dead definitively to the margins. Where the Jewish cemetery was concerned, German occupation in the Second World War simply provided an opportunity for the municipality to carry out its own modification of Hébrard’s ideas. Today the area is dominated by the massive Corbusier-style faculty blocks, concrete plazas and landscaped avenues of the Aristoteleion University; but the ground had been prepared in the winter of 1942 when council workers turned the old cemetery into a rubble-strewn waste-land of vandalized graves, with shattered fragments of marble, brick and human bones everywhere. “Desecration of the graves is forbidden,” wrote the Salonica novelist Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis in his stream-of-consciousness Mother Thessaloniki. But whose graves?4

MADAME SARA, one of the last exponents of a powerful Ottoman tradition, was born in Edirne in 1926 and now lives in Istanbul. She is Jewish and is much in demand as a spirit medium, communicating with the dead at the request of the living. She first realized the gift God had given her when she was a child, and used to collect water from a fountain near a Muslim cemetery. There she saw others praying to a wise man, and soon heard him calling her over. Sadik, a Muslim holy man who had died more than a century earlier, became her spiritual guide, and has helped her ever since, in her own life and in her work.5 Not so long ago this kind of story was less exceptional than it is today. For over many centuries the power of the dead remained an ecumenical one. The Ottoman authorities acknowledged the potent sanctity of the blood of Christian martyrs. Saint Dimitrios’s tomb was guarded by a Mevlevi dervish who advised Christian pilgrims how its holy earth should be used. But as the empire fell apart and nation-states came into being, something changed in people’s minds. The age of mass migrations began, waves of refugees came and went, and the dead who stayed behind suddenly became just another target for the living whose political passions and enmities brought them humiliation, desecration and eviction. 

In Salonica, it was not only the Jewish dead who were treated as though they were less valuable than the land they occupied and the slabs that covered them. The city’s Muslim and Ma’min graveyards had already vanished under new roads and buildings. With the exception of the mausoleum of Mousa Baba, a couple of tombs in the precinct of the Rotonda, a sarcophagus stored on the west side of Ayia Sofia, and another grander one in the garden of the Yeni Djami, there is virtually no resting-place for the Muslim dead in the city today. General Taksin Pasha, the Greek-speaking Ottoman general who surrendered Salonica to Prince Constantine in 1912, is said to have been buried on the city’s outskirts on his death a few years later, but no trace of his tomb has survived. The Bulgarian cemetery was expropriated after the Bulgarians were expelled in 1913, and graves with inscriptions in Slavic lettering are hard to find, though one or two remain in the grounds of the old Catholic seminary in Zeitenlik.6

The compulsory population exchange of 1922 was the turning-point. For like the departing Muslims, the Greek immigrants had been forced by the catastrophe that befell them to leave their own forebears behind. Since the dead who counted to them lay far away, often in unknown graves, why should they have attached importance to those who happened to be buried in their new places of settlement? Some refugee women—having chatted with the Turkish women of the neighbourhood before the latter left—continued to pray at the graves of Muslim holy men in the upper town. But these practices became rare. Feeling at home in Salonica meant turning it into an entirely new city, building settlements on the outskirts that had not even existed in Ottoman times. It meant re-baptizing it, with names that created ties to their own homelands (much as the Jewish refugees from Spain had done four centuries before them), and finding new homes for the precious icons they had managed to bring with them. Nostalgia for the lost lands of Christian Orthodoxy thus meshed with the city’s expansion and modernization.

The rising death toll and mass violence of the twentieth century also played their part in this devaluation of the dead. The era of political assassination had come to the city as the century began, but politically motivated killings soon multiplied. At its murderous apogee, the 1940s brought not only the genocide of the Jews and the destruction of their graves, but also the loss of hundreds of civilians shot by the Germans in mass executions, and hundreds more in the civil war that followed. “Our city is full of dead people whom nobody escorted to their final resting-place,” wrote Pentzikis, who lived through it all. “The lovely dawn, which best shows off the flowers, often brings corpses to light on the roads. Mutilated faces. With no nose or ears. Blood on the steps of the garden gate. On the pavement.”7

TO MANY GREEK WRITERS after 1912, the generation of the new arrivals, Salonica seemed suspended in the present, cut off from any recognizable past. Brought up on Pound, Eliot and Joyce, they inhabited a melancholic wasteland of alienation and anomie. But in the meantime, the archaeologists were helping to restore a past they could connect with, creating new forms of historical memory to bolster local Hellenic pride. Digging deep into the earth, they exhumed long-forgotten paleochristian tombs, and brought to light old gods, temples and shrines. Some decades earlier they had turned the Athens Acropolis into a contemporary icon of antiquity by ridding it of its medieval and Ottoman buildings. Salonica did not have the Acropolis, but it had its churches. In 1914, a Greek scholar declared it the “Byzantine city par excellence,” and described it as the symbol of “the new great historical horizon” that the victories of the Greek army had made possible. “Athens represents, embodies better, antiquity in our history and in our consciousness,” writes the novelist Ioannou. “Salonica Byzantium.” An inspectorate of Byzantine monuments was established in 1920, and the restoration of the city’s churches, with islands of space carved out around them to allow them greater prominence, indicated how much importance was being attached locally to this historical legacy. After the Second World War, an old Byzantine festival in honour of Saint Dimitrios was revived, and eventually the city even acquired its long-promised Byzantine museum.8

Byzantium’s material re-emergence helped Greeks to feel confident the city was theirs, a place of resurrection and of miraculous Orthodox renewal. But much as in Athens earlier, recovering the memory of one past meant forgetting or even destroying another. The centuries of Ottoman rule were written off as a long historical parenthesis, a nightmare of oppression and stagnation. Any surviving remains associated with them not only lacked historical value but potentially threatened the new image the city was creating for itself. This was the primary explanation for the demolition of the minarets and the total destruction of the Jewish cemetery, and why Greek archaeologists published learned articles on the ancient inscriptions that came to light on the reverse side of many uprooted Jewish tombstones, whilst ignoring their Hebrew, Portuguese or Judeo-Spanish epigraphs. Anything post-Byzantine in the city was at risk, except for the White Tower which had quickly achieved such symbolic status that most people refused to believe it was an Ottoman construction. It took the 1978 earthquake to get surveys made of the remaining fin-de-siècle villas on Queen Olga Street, and only in the 1980s did state funds begin to be assigned to Ottoman monuments. Today, it is true, a few grand Ottoman houses have been converted into libraries or museums. The old mill has become a busy complex of bars, jazz clubs and galleries and the streets behind the long-neglected lumber yards are jam-packed with parked cars till the early hours; the Yedi Koulé fortress—where leftists were held to be executed in the civil war—has been smartened up and turned into a cultural space, and Ladadika, the last remaining pre-1914 downtown quarter, has seen the warehouses on Odos Egyptou turned into restaurants. In fact, there is a far greater willingness than ever before to find historical value across all periods and in all kinds of buildings. But much of this is less the indication of a new cultural consciousness than a reflection of the scarcity of old buildings of any kind in Salonica today. The anxiety that globalization will soon eradicate whatever particular charm the city possesses has put new wind in the preservationists’ sails. As a result, prestige is now attached to anything dating back more than a few decades. History itself had not always been seen as a handmaiden of the nation: indeed, in 1880, when Mihail Hadzi Ioannou published the first description of Salonica in Greek, he deliberately called his work a “Description of the City” (astugrafia), preferring this to the clumsy term “Description of the Fatherland” (patridografia), since as he put it, he wished to write something “for everyman.” But after 1912 this kind of cosmopolitan outlook became uncommon. As Greece’s rulers set up new institutions of learning to shape the national consciousness of the city in fundamentally new ways and with a different kind of authority—the authority of historical science—they found they could rely on scholars to fulfil their side of the bargain.9

Through research institutes, publishing programmes and higher education, those in command of the twentieth-century Greek state showed they were fully conscious of “the possibilities of a past”—that consciousness which seemed so strangely lacking in the city when the century began but which came to be indispensable to its emergent national identity. In 1939, a Society of Macedonian Studies was founded, with support from the municipality. During the Cold War struggle with the communist Slavs to the north, this enjoyed government backing, moving into spacious premises in a prime location just opposite the White Tower. The Society played a crucial role in developing historical research into the city and embarked on a major publishing programme of its own, giving birth to two important new institutions—the Institute of Balkan Studies in 1953, and the Historical Archives of Macedonia the following year. All three have since generated many scholarly works—without the society’s journal Makedonika, for instance, this book could not have been written. But they were also closely connected with local centres of power. The governing committee of the archives had the metropolitan as chair and the mayor on the board. The Society of Macedonian Studies itself was founded by the president of the city’s Federation of Merchants: fifty years later, his successor boasted that the society had been able to promote scientific research “within the framework of our national identity.” That much good work emerged did not alter the fundamentally instrumental conception of history which motivated their backers.10

It was not only the “Turks” and “Bulgarians” that suffered as a result. The myth of eternal Hellenism flattened out the past of the Greeks themselves and made it less interesting. Instead of showing how Orthodox Christian villagers speaking Vlach, Albanian and Slavic tongues had come over time to see themselves as Greeks, the history books described a sense of Greekness that had been there from the start. There was, in other words, no Hellenization, only Hellenes. Such a denial of the past could not easily accommodate the real role the church had played in Ottoman times. It could not even deal with the experiences of the refugees, many of whom, as we have seen, had been ignorant of Greek and needed time to understand why they should stop calling themselves simply “Eastern Christians.” In fact, despite the unmistakable contribution of the refugees to the life of the city, and despite their numbers, the refugee experience too was a kind of taboo, and for many years their own stories and sufferings were rarely discussed. “Today no one says he is a ‘refugee,’ ” declared Ioannou in 1982. “And at most perhaps, if pressed, that he is ‘of refugee origins.’ ”11

Then, in 1986, the Greek state set aside a day—14 September—as a “national day of remembrance” to commemorate the destruction of Smyrna and the exodus from Asia Minor.12 By now, the refugees were power-brokers in the city; they had broken the hold of the Peloponnesians and the Cretans, and stood for something more than funny accents and peculiar music. The identity politics of the second and third refugee generations began to chip away at the smooth façade of official Hellenism and broke down the emphatic nationalism of the Cold War era. With the collapse of communism, the city and the world around it were transformed even more rapidly. Bulgaria was no longer the arch-enemy; with Turkey too a rapprochement was conceivable. True, bloodshed, war and ethnic antagonisms were what made the headlines whenever the Balkans were discussed internationally. But just as important in the long run was the fact that Salonica was connected again—for the first time in generations—to older markets, breaking out of the economic strait-jacket which had shut it in since 1912. Its businessmen were looking north and east to invest, for they were now the wealthiest and most experienced capitalists in the region. Coming the other way were thousands of migrants searching for work. By 1997 the city housed an estimated 100,000 of them, some 10 per cent of its population, and Albanian could be heard in the coffee-houses round the railway station. Others streamed in from Poland, Turkey, Moldova and Bulgaria. Pushed by Western Europe on the one hand, and Eastern Europe on the other, Greek society was changing fast, and the old historical truths (which in truth were not that old) no longer escaped criticism.

IN 1994 A BITTER PUBLIC ROW swirled around the Rotonda, one of the city’s most ambiguous and unusual buildings. Roman in origin, it had been a Byzantine church before being converted to a mosque in 1591 when Hortaç, sheykh of the nearby Halvetiye monastery, engineered its conversion by a demonstration of his miraculous powers. In 1912 it was returned to Christian use, and the following year it was declared a “national monument.” When the city’s other twenty-six minarets were demolished by contractors in 1925, its was left standing and still survives.13 Although the dispute between Greece and the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia rumbled on, Salonica had been nominated as Cultural Capital of Europe and European funds were pouring in for the restoration of its antiquities. The ministry of culture planned to use the Rotonda for concerts and exhibitions, and so at the end of 1994 it permitted the church to organize a display of icons there and allowed a prayer service to be held for the exhibition’s opening. The Sunday after the exhibition closed, however, worshippers gathered outside once again, and tried to get in to pray. This was evidently more than a mere misunderstanding, because the following day local church leaders called for an all-night vigil. Police had to be called to guard the building as a large crowd began to chant slogans: “Not a synagogue, nor a mosque but a Greek church!” and “This is not Greece, not Albania; onwards for Macedonia and Orthodoxy!” Eventually hundreds of the protestors forced their way through the gates, and the local church hierarchy demanded that the Rotonda be returned to religious use, and even brought a lawsuit against the Archaeological Service for plundering and desecrating it. This ferocious row over the competing claims of culture and religion went to the heart of the very character of the Greek state. Both had traditionally been utilized in the name of Hellenism; now they were pitted against one another. As the crowd’s slogans suggested, it was not only the strong feelings generated locally by the Macedonia question that had prompted the stand-off: arguments over the city’s complex cultural identity were also involved. The demonstrators outside the Rotonda had equated control of the building by the ministry of culture with the return of Jews and Muslims to a Christian place of worship. And indeed there was a kind of symbolic truth behind the rumour, for Salonica’s designation as Cultural Capital of Europe had led many local commentators to stress its ethnically mixed past as a way of marking it out from, and perhaps proclaiming its superiority to, Athens. It was against these developments that the crowd had been protesting. “The people of God have triumphed,” asserted their ringleader Canon Tassias, after they disrupted a piano recital there the following October. “They tell us that Thessaloniki is a multi-historical city. If they mean that many conquerors passed through here, then I agree. But the Orthodox character of the city was never altered.”14

The politicians who opened the festivities of the Cultural Capital two years later did their best to smooth things over. There was much mention of “European values” and speakers underscored the historical significance of the Orthodox legacy for Europe as a whole. The mayor talked about “Greeks and Europeans” being initiates in the same mysteries, about being “re-baptized” in a “feast of cultural delights” and he declared that history was important in showing the 2300 years of a Greek Macedonian past in “one of the most multi-cultural cities in Europe.” The Commissioner of the European Union discussed Europe’s common future, and reminded his audience that Salonica was a place that had always welcomed refugees. The public debate about “multiculturalism”—a concept much in vogue at this time—reflected awareness of the recent wave of immigration. But the term itself was just a buzz-word and gave a very misleading impression. For all its newcomers Salonica at the end of the twentieth century remained predominantly Greek in culture and Orthodox in religion—and clung to this image of its past.15

TODAY, ACKNOWLEDGING ITS OTTOMAN LEGACY still appears to be as unimaginable to most people as when the historian Kostas Moskof first proposed the idea, more than twenty years ago. The city’s older museums cover classical antiquity, Macedonian folklore and the Macedonian Struggle; newer ones, created in a recent frenzy of museological activity, cater for interests in Byzantium, photography, the cinema, modern art, water supply and musical instruments. The White Tower hosts a charming exhibition of the city’s history and art which begins with its foundation but ends emphatically at the Ottoman conquest of 1430. The Bey Hamam is being restored, but the sixteenth-century Pasha Hamam, which had been in use until 1981, remains in disrepair and the Hamza Bey mosque stands forlornly in the centre of town like an unwanted guest. The Yeni Djami, the quiet of its leafy courtyard barely disturbed by visitors, is used as an annex to the Archaeological Museum and an occasional venue for art exhibitions. Ironically, the best surviving example of nineteenth-century Ottoman architecture is probably Ataturk’s well-guarded birthplace, now the Turkish consulate.

The Jewish community—that other reminder of Ottoman times—recently opened a small museum of its own and at the end of the 1997 celebrations, a Holocaust memorial was unveiled, something the community had been seeking since 1945. Yet its eventual location was suggestive of unease in the municipality. A proposal to set it somewhere central—perhaps in the square where the Jewish men had been rounded up in 1942—was rejected, and it was finally erected on a distant suburban intersection on the road out to the airport. The so-called Square of the Jewish Martyrs, one of the few street-names which makes any reference to the city’s Jews today, languishes in obscurity, unknown to all but the most experienced taxi drivers. And despite recent demands by many professors, successive administrators of the university have refused to mark the site of the Jewish cemetery.16

If all this mattered, it was only because by the late twentieth century, official monuments had become the way the living re-affirmed their connection to the dead. The Holocaust memorial joined the Giacometti-like cluster of Macedonian Fighters erected on a square in front of the Acheiropoietos church, Alexander the Great on the waterfront, an unknown Mother of Refugees, Venizelos, Prince Constantine and various ministers and mayors. What they had in common was their public character and their lack of any organic connection with the precise spot where they stood. None of them signified the presence of physical remains, like the mausolea of the past, nor that those they honoured had actually died there, like the humble paveside memorial put up in 1913 to King George at the place of his assassination, which has long since disappeared in its turn. Venizelos stood in the heart of the city he had rebuilt. Alexander the Great could have gone anywhere since the city did not exist in his lifetime. Location was no longer about the site of a spiritual connection between living and dead so much as a reflection of electoral calculus. Salonica had turned into a symbolic space to be defined and redefined by its political masters. But there was no mystique in marble when the bones were not there, and the age in which people paid attention to monuments, if it had ever existed, was rapidly passing. All that could be said for them, like street-names, was that they helped establish the identity of those figures who the authorities regarded as important enough to be brought to the public’s attention. By the end of the twentieth century, therefore, the city’s relationship with the dead had been radically transformed. Although the churches remained, the Ottoman network of synagogues and mosques had vanished and the streets had been so comprehensively realigned that it was often difficult to know where they once stood. The cemeteries had long gone too and in their place a new archipelago of arts centres, museums, monuments and carefully preserved sites of historical value provided the living with their entrance to the past, with curators and scholars serving as their guides.

Today nearly one million people inhabit this ever-expanding city. Its transport system is stretched, though there is talk of an underground train line—and the traffic, parking and pollution are, if anything, a worse headache than in Athens. In 1900 the waters of the bay were so clear that one could look down and see the fish; a century later, they are a murky grey-green, and diners at waterside tavernas risk their meal being spoilt by the stench of sewage when the wind is in the wrong direction. The city centre is bursting, prices even in the Upper Town are sky-high, and younger couples are being forced further and further into the suburbs. With all these problems to cope with, what use to them is the history of a small city, with a complex polyglot population, which disappeared many decades before?

And yet that older city may turn out to serve the living in new ways only now coming into view. Nation-states construct their own image of the past to shore up their ambitions for the future: forgetting the Ottomans was part of Greece’s claim to modernity. But today the old delusions of grandeur are being replaced by a more sober sense of what individual countries can achieve alone. As small states integrate themselves in a wider world, and even the largest learn how much they need their neighbours’ help to tackle the problems that face them all, the stringently patrolled and narrow-minded conception of history which they once nurtured and which gave them a kind of justification starts to look less plausible and less necessary. Other futures may require other pasts. The history of the nationalists is all about false continuities and convenient silences, the fictions necessary to tell the story of the rendezvous of a chosen people with the land marked out for them by destiny. It is an odd and implausible version of the past, especially for a city like Salonica, most of whose inhabitants cannot trace their connection to the place back more than three or four generations. They know that whatever they are taught at school, their own family experiences suggest a very different kind of story—a saga of turbulence, upheaval, abandonment and recovery in which chance, not destiny, played the greater role.

It is just such a history that I have tried to show unfolding, a history of forgotten alternatives and wrong choices, of identities assumed and discarded. In this city, the dominant group for centuries was a people who clung to the medieval language of the country from which they had been expelled, yet who felt in Salonica, as Rabbi Moses Aroquis put it in 1509, that “to them alone the land was given, and they are its glory and its splendour and its magnificence.” As it happened, God had already given it to the Ottoman sultans so that, in the words of the fifteenth-century chronicler Asikpashazadé, “the metropolis of unbelief should become a metropolis of Islam.” Before that he had given it to Christians, and in 1912, the city’s Greeks once again gave thanks to God for the triumph of their army. They all claimed the city for themselves in God’s name. Yet is it not said: where God is, there is everything?17

Salonica, City of Ghosts - Christians, Muslims, and Jews: Mark Mazower