Salonica, City Of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims And Jews 1430-1950 (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
The history of this city contains so many of the Big Human Themes. Exile, nostalgia. The course of empire. The maintenance of collective memory. The ways in which religions in close contact melt into each other. Nationalism vs. the Cosmopolis. The limits of tolerance, and the fated vulnerability of coastal, syncretic cities (I’m thinking of St. Petersburg and New Orleans, too). And most infuriatingly, the ludicrous imposture of the scoundrels who believe in tribal purity and uncomplicated cultural continuity. Mazower calls Salonica a “city of ghosts” because the postwar, self-consciously Greek city of high rises sits on the site of other Salonicas, the Ottoman and Jewish Salonicas that aren’t even touristically visible in attenuated but picturesquely restored quarters—these other Salonicas have vanished, either by natural disaster (a fire in 1917 destroyed 75% of the old Jewish neighborhoods in the city center) or by the deliberate dynamiting of mosques and the bulldozing—done with the Nazi’s approval but not at their insistence—of the one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe (it was 35 times larger than that of Prague’s).Salonica was also nicknamed “City of Refugees,” which could just as easily have been Mazower’s subtitle. Not only was the city a refuge, over many centuries, for millions of the displaced, huge portions of its citizens were driven away, forced to become refugees. The first were the thousands of Byzantine Christians the Ottomans sold into slavery after the 1430 conquest. The city lay barren and depopulated until 1492, when Sephardic Jews expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in their own homogenizing nation-building project settled in the city. The Ottomans were concerned with taxation and practiced a hands-off kind of governance, the Christians were still a small minority, so Salonica thus became a predominantly Jewish city, and a vibrant center of their learning and commerce. Politically Ottoman, ethnographically Jewish, geographically Bulgarian is how one 19th century observer described it.With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire the city’s Muslim population became the refugees. The Greek state, which had taken Salonica in the first Balkan War of 1912, and the now-Turkey, agreed in 1923 to exchange populations: the Greeks would send all the Muslims to Turkey, and Turkey would “repatriate” their Christians. Here is religious-tinged nationalism at its most farcical. The “Greeks” expelled from Turkey thought of themselves as “Eastern Christians”—they had no sense of themselves as Greeks, and didn’t usually speak Greek; they spoke Turkish, as one would expect of communities that had existed for centuries in Anatolia, Thrace, and around the Black Sea. The Muslims expelled from Salonica were in a similar position: they’d been rooted in the city and in the Macedonian and Bulgarian hinterlands for centuries, thought of themselves as Ottoman subjects, and did not understand—and when they did, scarcely approved of—the secularist Kemalist nation state of “Turkey.” The refugees from Turkey now tipped the balance of power in the city, which hadn’t rebuilt after the 1917 fire and now had trouble housing and employing all the newcomers. This scarcity of resources affected the city’s Jews as well: after the Nazis deported 45,000 to Auschwitz, the new “Greeks” wasted no time expropriating Jewish property and destroying the Jewish cemetery, over which a new university was built (its administrators to this day refuse to erect some kind of acknowledgement). The few thousand Salonican Jews who survived to return found it impossible to get much back. In time, after a few generations, the refugees from Turkey assimilated to Greek culture (Mazower writes that there is some nationalist embarrasment at being of refugee stock--and with understandable reason, as the refugees were not Greeks), and the city is now what the nation-builders of early 20th century Greece had envisioned: an ethnically and religiously homogenous “Greek” city, with its statue of Alexander the Great (he died before the city was founded), its Ottoman and Jewish pasts relegated to a hiccup between the imagined continuity of the Byzantine Empire and Modern Greece. This is the spine of the book but there is much more, of course. Mazower gives a fascinating account of the functioning of the Ottoman Empire, its policies for the ruling of a polyglot, religiously diverse empire. I really enjoyed the picture of the golden age of Salonican Jewry, and of the community’s durably Hispanic character; the chapter on the Orientalisms that fueled European tourism and amateur archeology was excellent as well. There’s also great stuff on Levantine commerce, and its attendant nuisances, piracy on the seas and brigandage in the hills. Mazower knows his Great Powers diplomacy; he also knows urban planning, the psychology of charismatic false messiahs, Balkan cabaret music, and the intricacies of rabbinic controversy. I learned more about the rise of modern Greece and the two Balkan Wars than I had previously suspected. If Salonica was a crossroads of nations, then it follows that its history will embrace much of the world.
Mazower's research here across languages and centuries and sources is a wonder and this book is a dense and elaborate delight. In Salonica, he follows the city from its Muslim conquest from the Byzantines in 1430 through the end of WWII. The Byzantine city was remade as Ottoman, but heavily flavored by Sefardic Jews around 1500, so that they were the largest group in the city in the 17th century. Mazower reconstructs this city of competing and cooperating religious and ethnic groups revealing details of more than oriental splendor. The task of reconstruction is difficult because after the city was captured by the Greeks in 1912, its entire Ottoman culture was eliminated. In part by deliberate destruction, but also by fire in 1917, the effective ethnic cleansing of Macedonia and Western Anatolia after World War I (removing most Muslims and adding Turkish-speaking Eastern Christian refugees), and the deportation of most of the large Jewish population to Auschwitz in 1943. He points to the complicity of the city's leadership in the Holocaust and the lack of any repurcussions for that complicity. Mazower does not glorify the Ottoman past, but despite its impotence and crime it seems much more alive than the 20th century state. As in his other books, he finds much to fault in the creation of the modern nation-state, coming as it did in Greece and throughout the Balkans with ethnic-cleansing and the reappropriation of the past. These paragraphs come at the end of the book: t"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 into a wider world, and even the largest learn how much they need their neighbor's 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.tThe 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." (439) Overall, an absolutely marvelous book.
What do You think about Salonica, City Of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims And Jews 1430-1950 (2006)?
Thanks, that's good to know. It has been on my to-read list for a long time and knowing that makes it easier to envision taking it on, even with all my other book projects.
—Kelly
Once called "Mother of Jurusalem" and "Mother of the Poor", it is above all a City of Refugees. Mazower tells the story of a mulitethnic and multireligious society, which comes abruptly to an end with rising nationalism. Orthodoxs, Jews, Greeks and Muslims lived in peace for centuries, each speaking their language.It an unbelievable sad story of how the city became greek.Ein Schlüssel von Salonica«Abarvanel, Farias oder Pinedo,weggejagt aus Spanien durch ungerechteVerfolgung, besitzen dennochDen Schlüssel eines Hauses in Toledo.» Jorge Luis Borges
—Daniela
It is a great book, in fact it is how I consider history books should be written especially when dealing with areas of the world plagued by nationalist hate. Personally, combining it with my knowledge of history and other books I 've read, I think that this book is as close to the truth as one can get. And as it is always the case with the truth it's not always pleasant for everyone and it tends to dispel various self-assuring myths. The book is about Salonica and its history but the ideas, acts and ideologies it examines, apply to the whole region of Balkans and serve to explain much to the modern reader about how and why things are shaped today.
—Michael Kotsarinis
