Baltimore Sun, MD
May 14 2005
Historian writes love letter to the city of Salonica
Salonica, City of Ghosts
By Mark Mazower. Alfred A. Knopf. 474 pages. $35.
The grand metropolises of northern Europe – Paris, London, Berlin –
helped create the Western ideal of worldly, sophisticated cities.
Western travelers imagined every great city as places with large open
spaces and wide boulevards. Dense traffic became a measure of
vitality. So were bright lights and the preening and babble at cafes.
Salonica, for nearly five centuries one of the greatest trading
centers of Europe, defied every expectation, as Mark Mazower, a
Columbia University professor of history, chronicles in his
exhaustive, affectionate biography of the city, a deeply researched
account that becomes a portrait of the singular, vanished
cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman Empire.
“Rotten houses. Smell of rotten wood,” Herman Melville wrote in his
journal after a typically chaotic landing at Salonica’s port on the
Aegean, seeing the city’s distinctively dressed Muslims, Jews and
Christians, and touring the narrow, odorous lanes. “Imagine an
immense accumulation of the rags of all nations, and all colors
rained down on a dense mob, all struggling for huge bales and bundles
of rags, gesturing with all gestures and wrangling in all tongues.”
This was a different, more frenzied vitality than northern Europe’s.
Jaffa, Sofia, Sarajevo, even Beirut – all important Ottoman cities –
were backwaters compared with Salonica. After conquering the city in
1430, the Ottomans made themselves at home in the Upper Town, where
access to fresh air and fresh water were best; ice was delivered to
them for making sherbet. The city’s population doubled to 20,000 at
the end of the 1400s, thanks to the arrival of Jews expelled from
Spain, then grew to 30,000. The Jews were entrusted with
manufacturing uniforms for the empire’s infantry. Salonica’s trading
routes soon extended through the eastern Mediterranean, west to
Venice, and east to Persia and India.
The Sublime Porte, as the government in Constantinople was known,
nurtured an unruly religious tolerance. Salonica was the imperfect,
disorderly showcase for both religious antipathy and compromise. “The
city, delicately poised in its confessional balance of power – ruled
by Muslims, dominated by Jews, in an overwhelmingly Christian
hinterland – lent itself to an atmosphere of overlapping devotion,”
Mazower writes. “With time it became covered in a dense grid of holy
places – fountains, tombs, cemeteries, shrines and monasteries –
frequented by members of all faiths in search of divine
intercession.”
Until the city expanded beyond its walls, citizens of every faith
shared equally in its misfortunes. Fires repeatedly rendered
hundreds, then thousands of people homeless. Cholera killed hundreds,
then hundreds more. No visitors were feared more than the empire’s
plundering Albanians, and soldiers en route to war abducted people
for ransom. The pashas appointed by the Porte to govern the city
rarely stayed longer than a year and typically devoted that brief
tenure to extorting bribes.
For Westerners, the city and empire seemed wholly foreign. And for
that reason, Ottoman lands were deemed exotic and inferior. It was
the convention to highlight the empire’s corruption, to characterize
its weaknesses as a form of sinfulness. But Salonica nurtured great
verve in trade. Nationalism seemed less rational, less appealing, to
the city’s Muslims and Jews than did a loose allegiance to a distant
sultan. It is a worldliness mostly lost to us, a cosmopolitanism less
self-centered and strident than the national movements that succeeded
it.
The largest upheavals came during the first half of the 20th century.
After the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the victorious Greeks
supplanted the vanquished Ottomans. In 1923, Greek refugees arrived
from Anatolia, where tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians had
been murdered, and the city’s remaining Muslims fled to Turkey. The
final, terrible chapter in the city’s transformation came in 1943,
when the Nazis deported Salonica’s Jews to Auschwitz.
It is almost always a mistake to disparage the present. Salonica –
Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece – is now a more
rationally governed city, its streets wider, its nights busier, its
citizens materially richer. But Mazower’s deep excavation of its
history, and especially of its frail communalism, is a reminder of
qualities that the city, the Balkans and all the eastern
Mediterranean can no longer claim as their own.
Robert Ruby is The Sun’s foreign editor.