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The vanished cosmopolitanism of ancient Salonica

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  • The vanished cosmopolitanism of ancient Salonica

    Herald News (Passaic County, NJ)
    June 26, 2005 Sunday
    All Editions

    The vanished cosmopolitanism of ancient Salonica

    By ROBERT RUBY, The Baltimore Sun, Wire Services


    "Salonica, City of Ghosts," by Mark Mazower (Alfred A. Knopf, $35,
    474 pp.)

    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 from northern Europe's.
    Jaffa (in contemporary Israel); Sofia, Bulgaria; Sarajevo,
    Yugoslavia; even Beirut, Lebanon - 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, Italy, 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.
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