Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews

Further afield, vakfs financed the construction and maintenance of bridges, post-houses, stables, caravanserais and ferries, all of which were essential both for trade and for the speedy military advances through which Ottoman power was projected into south-eastern Europe. Robert de Dreux, a seventeenth-century French priest, was impressed by the khans, hostelries as large as churches, ‘which the Bachas and other Turkish signors build superbly to lodge travellers, without care for their station in life or religion, each one being made welcome, without being obliged to pay anything in return.’ As the key naval, mercantile and military strong-point for the fifteenth-century advance westwards, Salonica benefited from the pacification of the countryside and the consolidation of Ottoman authority along the old Via Egnatia. For the first time in centuries, after the acute fragmentation and instability of the late Byzantine era, a single power controlled the region as a whole.¹⁸

Running the City

In the Balkans the Ottomans conquered a region whose cities were already in decline as a result of the political and military instability of the previous centuries. They had, therefore, not only to repopulate them but to reorganize them administratively as well. Salonica itself was brought under the direct control of the sultan and placed by him under the supervision of appointed officers. There was no clear legal or institutional demarcation between the city and its rural hinterland – the same officials were often responsible for both and in contrast to the Romano-Byzantine tradition there was no municipal government in the strict sense. City-based tax farmers controlled the local salteries and city officials were instructed to look after the mines in the Chalkidiki peninsula. Moreover large areas within the walls were given over to vineyards, orchards and pasture, so that the countryside came within the city as well: indeed the Christians who patrolled the sea-walls nightly, as ordered by Murad [in return for tax exemptions] were mostly local shepherds and farmers. Nevertheless, the needs of the urban economy and rhythms of urban life themselves required special attention.¹⁹

We lack documents which would show us precisely how Salonica was run in the fifteenth century. But on the basis of what was happening in other provincial towns we have a good idea. There would have been a governor who combined military and urban functions – on the one hand, overall responsibility for the garrisoning of the fortifications, gates, local troop contingents and horses; and on the other, keeping an eye on the local tax officials, especially those who had bought concessions for customs duties, and on the needs of the city in general. The collection of taxes and the running of the market were the Ottoman state’s priorities. It laid out, in enormous detail, the duties to be levied on each good brought into the city, and the governor was supposed to check that these were properly paid. The guardian of the gates examined the produce and animals brought in by farmers and traders. Another official called the muhtesib regulated the buying and selling of ‘all that God has created’. He and his assistants paid weekly visits to the flour market and the slaughter-houses, checking weights and measures and monitoring the price and quality of silver. He also kept an eye on the behaviour of slaves and made sure they prayed regularly, and looked out for any signs of public drunkenness or debauchery. Production itself was organized in trade guilds, some – like the butchers, confined to one religion – others (like the shoe-makers), mixed. In Salonica – unlike many other places – guild members did not cluster together in the same residential areas.

This was a system of multiple legal jurisdictions. The governor and several of his subordinates had powers of arrest and imprisonment. The city’s chief law officer and public notary was the kadi but there was sometimes another judge, subordinate to him, whose remit covered ‘everything that could trouble public order’ – murders, rape, adultery, robberies – crimes which in the Balkans at least were often judged not according to the divine law but ‘on the basis of custom’ or royal decree. For the empire had a triple system of law with the shari’a providing a foundation, the body of customary law – adet – which varied from place to place, and the decrees and regulations issued by the sultan himself – the kanun.²⁰

With no municipal authority to watch over the city, it was up to the governor to organize its policing, fire prevention, sewage disposal and hygiene. Policing came out of the pockets of merchants and local people who paid the pasvant [from the Persian word for nightwatchman] to patrol their neighbourhood. Four hundred years later, visitors to Salonica were still being kept awake by the unfamiliar sound of his metal-tipped staff tapping out the hours on the cobbles as he made his rounds. Householders also paid for rubbish to be collected, and were supposed to be responsible for the condition of pathways outside their homes. Guilds had the responsibility to provide young men for fire duty, but the frequency with which the city was hit by devastating conflagrations was testimony to their ineffectiveness. On the other hand, the water system was surprisingly sophisticated – early travellers commented on the abundance of public wells and fountains – and the flow could be controlled and directed in an emergency to where it was needed.²¹

Thanks to the survival of a 1478 cadastral register, the third which the conscientious Ottoman scribes had prepared since the conquest (but the first to survive), we have a fairly precise picture of who was living where roughly half a century after the conquest. The pattern of settlement indicates a kind of transition from the Byzantine period to the Ottoman city in its heyday. A total of just over ten thousand people lived there – so the population had recovered at least up to the level it may have been when the Ottoman army burst in – roughly divided between Christians and Muslims, with the former still very slightly in the majority. The Muslims were immigrants and there do not appear to have been many converts from among the Christians, in contrast with some other former Byzantine towns.

The Byzantine past lingered on, and could be discerned in the Greek names which continued to be used for neighbourhoods and districts. The Ottoman scribes faithfully referred to Ayo Dimitri, Ofalo, Podrom [from the old Hippodrome], Ayo Mine, Asomat after the old churches. Even Akhiropit [Acheiropoietos] was used although the church had been converted into a mosque; it would be replaced by a Turkish name only in the next century. Large churches – such as Ayia Sofia – and the Vlatadon Monastery still lived off their estates. The garrison was made up of Ottoman troops, but Christians were assigned the responsibility for maintaining and even manning the sea walls and the towers – an arrangement which another governor in the start of the seventeenth century regarded as a security risk and put an end to. As the details of the Vlatadon monks’ property portfolio show, Muslims and Christians lived and worked side by side, probably because Murad had settled newcomers in the homes of departed or dead Christians. Indeed Christians still outnumbered Muslims in the old quarters on either side of the main street.

Only in the Upper Town – a hint of the future pattern of residence – were Muslims now in the majority. There they enjoyed the best access to water and fresh air. The poor lived in humble single-storey homes whose courtyards were hidden from the street behind whitewashed walls; the wealthy slowly built themselves larger stone mansions with overhanging screened balconies and private wells in their extensive gardens, connected to the city’s water system. Cypresses and plane trees provided shade, and there were numerous kiosks which allowed people to escape the sun and drink from fountains while enjoying the views over the town. The highest officials were granted regular deliveries of ice from Mount Hortiatis, which they used mostly in the preparation of sherbet, one of the most popular beverages. In the eighteenth century if not before, they started painting their houses and ornamenting them with verses from the Qur’an picked out in red.²²

Imperial edicts had successfully replenished the city with the trades for which it would shortly become renowned – leather and textile-workers in particular – together with the donkey and camel-drivers, tailors, bakers, grocers, fishermen, cobblers and shopkeepers without which no urban life could be sustained. The city was now producing its own rice, soap, knives, wax, stoves, sherbet, pillows and pottery. Saffron, meat, cheese and grains were all supplied locally. Fish were so plentiful that local astrologers claimed the city itself lay under the sign of Pisces. Scribes provide one badly needed skill; the fifteen hamam attendants – a surprisingly high number at this early date – another. And the presence of merchants, a furrier, a jeweller and a silversmith all indicate the revival of international trade and wealth.

Yet the city was still far from its prime. Many houses had been abandoned or demolished, and great stretches of the area within the walls, especially on the upper slopes, were given over to pasture, orchards, vineyards 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 linkage 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 100,000, 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 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 1590s as it had been a century earlier. For after 1500 Salonica’s population suddenly doubled, and soared to thirty thousand by 1520, putting pressure on housing for the first time, and necessitating the opening up of a new water supply into the city. The newcomers emanated from an unexpected quarter – the western Mediterranean, where the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella were taking Christianization to a new pitch by expelling the Jews from their kingdom. Attracted by Bayazid’s promises of economic concessions and political protection, Spanish-speaking Jews arrived in droves. Some went on to Istanbul, Sarajevo, Safed and Alexandria, but the largest colony took shape in Salonica. By the time the Venetian ambassador passed through, it was a Jewish guide who showed him round, and the Jews of the city were many times more numerous than in Venice itself. Of the three main religious communities contained within the walls – Muslims, Christians and Jews – this last, which had been entirely absent from the population register of 1478, had suddenly become the largest of them all. The third and perhaps most unexpected component of Ottoman Salonica had arrived.

3 The Arrival of the Sefardim

WHEN EVLIYA CHELEBI, the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller, came to describe Salonica he provided a characteristically fantastic account of its origins. The prophet Solomon – ‘may God’s blessing be upon him’ – had been showing the world to the Queen of Sheba when she looked down and saw ‘in the region of Athens, in the land of the Romans, a high spot called Bellevue’. There he built her a palace ‘whose traces are still visible’, before they moved on eastwards to Istanbul, Bursa, Baalbec and Jerusalem, building as they went, and repopulating the Earth after the Flood. Chelebi ascribes the city’s walls to the ‘philosopher Philikos’ and his son Selanik ‘after whom it is named still’. Later, he says, Jews fleeing Palestine ‘slew the Greek nation in one night and gained control of the fortress’. Hebrew kings did battle with Byzantine princesses, the Ottoman sultans eventually took over, and ‘until our own days, the city is full of Jews’.¹

Evliya’s tall tale conveys one thing quite unambiguously: by the time of his visit in 1667–68, the Jews were such an integral part of Salonica that it seemed impossible to imagine they had not always been there. And indeed there had been Jews in the city before there were any Christians. In Byzantine times there were probably several hundred Greek-speaking Jewish families [or Romaniotes]; despite often severe persecution, they traded successfully across the Mediterranean, at least to judge from the correspondence found in the Cairo Genizah many years ago. Shortly before the Turkish conquest, they were joined by refugees fleeing persecution in France and Germany. Whether or not they survived the siege of 1430 is not known but any who did were moved to Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror to repopulate it after its capture in 1453, leaving their home-town entirely without a 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

Flight across the Mediterranean

When the English expelled their Jews in 1290, they inaugurated a policy which spread widely over the next two centuries. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella’s edict of banishment forced thousands from a homeland where they had known great security and prosperity. Sicily and Sardinia, Navarre, Provence and Naples followed suit. By the mid-sixteenth century, Jews had been evicted from much of western Europe. A few existed on sufferance, while many others converted or went underground as Marranos and New Christians, preserving their customs behind a Catholic façade. The centre of gravity of the Jewish world shifted eastwards – to the safe havens of Poland and the Ottoman domains.³

In Spain itself not everyone favoured the expulsions. (Perhaps this was why a different policy was chosen towards the far more numerous Muslims of Andalucía who were forcibly converted, and only expelled much later.) ‘Many were of the opinion,’ wrote the scholar and Inquisitor Jeronimo de Zurita, ‘that the king was making a mistake to throw out of his realms people who were so industrious and hard-working, and so outstanding in his realms both in number and esteem as well as in dedication to making money.’ A later generation of Inquisitors feared that the Jews who had been driven out ‘took with them the substance and wealth of these realms, transferring to our enemies the trade and commerce of which they are the proprietors not only in Europe but throughout the world.’⁴

The expulsion of the Jews formed part of a bitter struggle for power between Islam and Catholicism. One might almost see this as the contest to reunify the Roman Empire between the two great monotheistic religions that had succeeded it: on the one side, the Spanish Catholic monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire; on the other, the Ottoman sultans, themselves heirs to the Roman Empire of the East, and rulers of the largest and most powerful Muslim empire in the world. Its climax, in the sixteenth century, pitted Charles V, possessor of the imperial throne of Germany and ruler of the Netherlands, the Austrian lands, the Spanish monarchy and its possessions in Sicily and Naples, Mexico and Peru, against Suleyman the Magnificent who held undisputed sway from Hungary to Yemen, from Algiers to Baghdad. Ottoman forces had swept north to the gates of Vienna and conquered the Arab lands while Ottoman navies clashed with the Holy League in the Mediterranean and captured Rhodes, Cyprus and Tunis, wintered in Toulon, seized Nice and terrorized the Italian coast. The Habsburgs looked for an ally in Persia; the French and English approached the Porte. It was an early modern world war.⁵

In the midst of this bitter conflict the Ottoman authorities exploited their enemy’s anti-Jewish measures just as they had welcomed other Jewish refugees from Christian persecution in the past. They were People of the Book, and they possessed valuable skills. Sultan Murad II had a Jewish translator in his service; his successors relied upon Jewish doctors and bankers. Those fleeing Iberia would bring more knowledge and expertise with them. In the matter-of-fact words of one contemporary Jewish chronicler: ‘A part of the exiled Spaniards went overseas to Turkey. Some of them were thrown into the sea and drowned, but those who arrived there the king of Turkey received kindly, as they were artisans.’⁶ The French agent Nicolas de Nicolay noted:

[The Jews] have among them workmen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent, and specially of the Maranes [Marranos] of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell.⁷

The newcomers were not enough in numbers to affect the demographic balance in the empire – the Balkans remained overwhelmingly Christian, the Asian and Arab lands overwhelmingly Muslim. But they revitalized urban life after many decades of war.

And of all the towns in the empire, it was Salonica which benefited most. Since 1453, while Istanbul’s population had been growing at an incredible rate thanks to compulsory resettlement and immigration by Muslims, Greeks and Armenians, turning it into perhaps the largest city in Europe, Salonica lagged far behind. Bayezid had been concerned at its slow recovery and had been doing what he could to promote it himself. Did he order the authorities to direct the Jews there? It seems likely, although no such directive has survived. According to a later chronicler, he sent orders to provincial governors to welcome the newcomers. Since Salonica was the empire’s main European port, many were bound to make their way there in any case. As wave after wave of Iberian refugees arrived at the docks, the city grew by leaps and bounds. By 1520, more than half its thirty thousand inhabitants were Jewish, and it had turned into one of the most important ports of the eastern Mediterranean.⁸

Perhaps only now did the real break with Byzantium take place. In 1478 Salonica was still a Greek city where more than half of the inhabitants were Christians; by 1519, they were less than one quarter. Was it a sign of their growing weakness that between 1490 and 1540 several of their most magnificent churches – including Ayios Dimitrios itself – were turned into mosques? A century later still, if we are to judge from Ottoman records, the number of Christians had fallen further, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the whole. While Istanbul remained heavily populated by Greeks, local Christians saw Salonica re-emerging into something resembling its former prosperity under a Muslim administration and a largely Jewish labour-force.

Not surprisingly, Greco-Jewish relations were infused with tension. Occasional stories of anti-Jewish machinations at the Porte, long-running complaints that the newcomers paid too little tax, bitter commercial rivalries between Christian and Jewish merchants, the emergence of the blood libel in the late sixteenth century, even the odd riot, assault and looting of Jewish properties following fire or plague – these are the scattered documentary indications of the Greeks’ deep-rooted resentment at the newcomers. It cannot have been easy living as 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: está un papas became a way of saying it was time to visit the barber. We learn from a 1700 court case that the Greek inhabitants of Ayios Minas were so fed up with Jewish neighbours throwing their garbage into the churchyard, and mocking them from the surrounding windows during holiday services, that they appealed to the Ottoman authorities to get them to stop. The balance of confessional power within the city had shifted sharply.⁹

For the Jews themselves, a mass of displaced refugees living with other recent immigrants among the toppled columns, half-buried temples and ruined mementoes of the city’s Roman and Byzantine past, this Macedonian port was at first equally strange and alienating. Lost ‘in a country which is not theirs’, they struggled to make sense of forced migration from ‘the lands of the West’. Some were Jews; others were converts to Catholicism. With their families forced apart, many mourned dead relatives, and wondered if their missing ones would ever return or if new consorts would succeed in giving them children to replace those they had lost. The trauma of exile is a familiar refrain in Salonican history. One rabbi was forced to remind his congregation ‘to stop cursing the Almighty and to accept as just everything that has happened.’¹⁰

If Europe had become for them – as it was for the Marrano poet Samuel Usque – ‘my hell on earth’, we can scarcely be surprised: Salonica, by contrast, was their refuge and liberation. ‘There is a city in the Turkish kingdom,’ he wrote, ‘which formerly belonged to the Greeks, and in our days is a true mother-city in Judaism. For it is established on the very deep foundations of the Law. And it is filled with the choicest plants and most fruitful trees, presently known anywhere on the face of our globe. These fruits are divine, because they are watered by an abundant stream of charities. The city’s walls are made of holy deeds of the greatest worth.’ When Jews in Provence scouted out conditions there, they received the reply: ‘Come and join us in Turkey and you will live, as we do, in peace and liberty.’ In the experience of the Sefardim, we see the astonishing capacity of refugees to make an unfamiliar city theirs. Through religious devotion and study, they turned Salonica into a ‘new Jerusalem’ – just as other Jews did with Amsterdam, Vilna, Montpellier, Nimes, Bari and Otranto: wrapping their new place of exile in the mantle of biblical geography was a way of coming to feel at home. ‘The Jews of Europe and other countries, persecuted and banished, have come there to find a refuge,’ wrote Usque, ‘and this city has received them with love and affection, as if she were Jerusalem, that old and pious mother of ours.’¹¹

Indeed, only a few devout older people, usually men, were ever tempted to make the journey southeast to Jerusalem itself, even though it formed part of the same Ottoman realm. As in Spain itself, the Jews came to feel – as one historian has put it – ‘at home in exile’ and had no desire to uproot themselves once more, not even when the destination was the Land their holy books promised them. But this home was not only their ‘Jerusalem’; it was also a simulacrum of the life they had known at the other end of the Mediterranean. They worshipped in synagogues named after the old long-abandoned homelands – Ispanya, Çeçilyan [Sicilian], Magrebi, Lizbon, Talyan [Italian], Otranto, Aragon, Katalan, Pulya, Evora Portukal and many others – which survived until the synagogues themselves perished in the fire of 1917. Their family names – Navarro, Cuenca, Algava – their games, curses and blessings, even their clothes, linked them with their past. They ate Pan d’Espanya [almond sponge cake] on holidays, rodanchas [pumpkin pastries], pastel de kwezo [cheese pie with sesame seed], fijones kon karne [beef and bean stew] and keftikes depoyo [chicken croquettes], and gave visitors dulce de muez verde [green walnut preserve]. People munched pasatempo [dried melon seeds], took the vaporiko across the bay, or enjoyed the evening air on the varandado of their home. When Spanish scholars visited the city at the end of the nineteenth century, they were astonished to find a miniature Iberia alive and flourishing under Abdul Hamid.¹²

For this, the primary conduit was language. As a Salonican merchant, Emmanuel Abuaf, tried to explain in 1600 to a puzzled interrogator of the Pisan Inquisition: ‘Our Jewish youngsters, when they begin from the age of six to learn the Scripture, read it and discuss it in the Spanish language, and all the business and trade of the Levant is carried on in Spanish in Hebrew characters … And so it is not hard for Jews to know Spanish even if they are born outside Spain.’¹³ In Salonica, there was a religious variant – Ladino – and a vernacular which was so identified with the Jews that it became known locally as ‘Jewish’ [judezmo], and quickly became the language of secular learning and literature, business, science and medicine. Sacred and scholarly texts were translated into it from Hebrew, Arabic and Latin, because ‘this language is the most used among us’. In the docks, among the fishermen, in the market and the workshops the accents of Aragon, Galicia, Navarre and Castile crowded out Portuguese, Greek, Yiddish, Italian and Provencal. Eventually Castilian triumphed over the rest. ‘The Jews of Salonica and Constantinople, Alexandria, and Cairo, Venice and other commercial centres, use Spanish in their business. I know Jewish children in Salonica who speak Spanish as well as me if not better,’ noted Gonsalvo de Illescas. The sailor Diego Galan, a native of Toledo, found that the city’s Jews ‘speak Castilian as fine and well-accented as in the imperial capital’. They were proud of their tongue – its flexibility and sweetness, so quick to bring the grandiloquent or bombastic down to earth with a ready diminutive. By contrast, the Jews further inland were derisively written off as digi digi – incapable of speaking properly, too inclined to the harsh ds and gs of the Portuguese.¹⁴