Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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and the position of ulema attains the highest degree.’9
Despite the existence of this and other schools, however, Salonica never became a major centre of Muslim piety or learning. It seems to have lacked sufficiently illustrious historical, religious or emotional associations. Its medresas remained relatively small and undistinguished, its mosques never rivalled the soaring masterpieces of Edirne, Bursa and Istanbul – the three imperial capitals – and its mufti [chief religious adviser] was ranked only in the fourth class of the hierarchy, below his colleagues in the empire’s eight leading cities. Was it the vast nearby estates of the Evrenos family which reminded the Ottoman sultans uncomfortably of their early years in partnership, and led them to bestow their favour and money elsewhere? Its Balkan location probably did not help either, since Muslims there felt the presence of an alien Christian hinterland even when they controlled the towns. Mehmed the Conqueror had to remind the Muslims of Rumeli to pray five times a day – an indication that the climate of observance in the Balkans was rather different from that in Anatolia. But elsewhere in the Balkans, the towns themselves at least were emphatically Muslim – 90% of Larissa’s population by 1530, for instance, 61% in Serres, 75% in Monastir and Skopje, 66% in Sofia. In Salonica, on the other hand, Muslims never dominated the city numerically, and slipped from just under 50% to 25% of the population between the mid-fifteenth century and 1530. At the time of the first census of modern times – in 1831 – Salonica had the smallest Muslim population of any major Ottoman city. Yet to outsiders, its Islamic character was immediately evident. The city acquired a sheykh of the ruling Hanafi school of Islamic law, who acted as the chief mufti of the town, and, after the empire expanded into the Arab lands in the sixteenth century, jurists from the other three main schools as well. There were soon more mosques than there were churches, and tekkes [monasteries] were eventually established by the main mystical Sufi orders, nearly one for every neighbourhood. To the seventeenth century geographer Hadji Chalfa, the city was ‘a little piece of Istanbul’.10
Mosques and Vakfs
In modern Salonica, where classical and Byzantine monuments have been shorn of the houses that surrounded them to make them stand out more prominently, one has to search for remains of the early Ottoman years. Most mosques perished in the great fire of 1917 and the surviving minarets were torn down shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, at the busy central junction of Egnatia and Venizelos streets, small shops, a disused cinema, and tourist boutiques still cling to the sides of an elegantly domed mosque, one of the last in the city. Hamza Bey was one of Murad’s military commanders, and his daughter built a small neighbourhood prayer hall in his memory in 1468. But as the city expanded and prospered, Hamza Bey’s mosque grew too: it acquired a minaret [now gone] and a spacious columned courtyard.11
One other fifteenth-century mosque survives, similarly impressive in scale, though in better condition. This is the Aladja Imaret, which peeps out of a gap between rows of concrete apartment blocks above the bus stop on Kassandrou Street. The Aladja complex served as school, prayer-hall and soup-kitchen for the poor and illustrates the way older Muslim architectural forms were reworked by Ottoman builders in territories which lacked any tradition of Islamic architecture. In the original Arabic-Persian type of medrese, or religious school, students and teachers took their lessons in rooms arranged around an open-air courtyard. The Seljuk Turks adapted this model for the harsher conditions of central Anatolia by covering the courtyard with a dome, often adding a small prayer room at the back. Over time, the domed prayer-hall became larger still and was integrated into the main body of the building – the shape chosen by the unknown architect of the Aladja Imaret. A large airy portico runs the length of the façade, and once sheltered refugees and beggars, though it is now abandoned and covered with graffiti. The multi-coloured minaret, ornamented with stones in a diamond pattern, which gave the whole building its name [Aladja = coloured] has long gone, though visitors to the nearby town of Verroia will find a very similar one, half-ruined, in a side-street off the main road. This style of minaret was a last faint Balkan echo of the polychromatic glories of central Asian and Persian Islam whose influence, as the historian Machiel Kiel points out, extended from the towns of Macedonia in the west to the north Indian plains and the Silk Road to the east.12
Fifteenth-century records identify other newly founded mosques by the names of local notables – Sinan Bey, the fisheries owner Mehmed, the teacher Burhan, Mustafa from Karaferiye, the pilgrims Mehmed, Hasan, Ismail, Kemal, Ahmed and the judge Abdullah. Their neighbourhood mosques or mescids must have been relatively humble sites, and the main Friday services for the city were held in ‘Old Friday’ – the name given to the mosque founded by Sultan Murad in the Acheiropoietos Church where he had held his victory service. More substantial foundations, like the Aladja Imaret, usually required the kind of financing affordable only by notables. In this case the benefactor was another of Murad’s commanders, Inegöllü Ishak Pasha, whose illustrious career ended as governor of Salonica. Ishak Pasha spent his fortune on many noble edifices including several mosques, a hamam, a bridge over the Struma river, fountains and a dervish tekke. He was not alone. Koca Kasim Pasha, who started life as slave of an Egyptian scholar, before rising in the imperial civil service to become grand vizier, founded another mosque-imaret in the city. Yakub Pasha, a Bosnian-born vizier renowned both for his poetry and for his victories against the Austrians and Hungarians on the Croat border, endowed a mosque named after himself.
What is striking about these large-scale building projects – especially when compared with western Europe – is the speed of their construction. Often only a few years were necessary for their completion. Such efficiency implied not only plentiful skilled labour and highly developed architectural traditions, but the means to accumulate and concentrate funds for such purposes much more quickly than most European states could manage at this time. The highly centralized nature of Ottoman authority helped, but the real vehicle of urban renewal was the pious charitable foundation known as the vakf.
The vakf was a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a vakf relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands involved, vakf status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from the often burdensome irregular state taxes, vakf properties thrived and contributed to the city’s prosperity. For the donor, turning his [or her – the donors included many wealthy women] possessions into a vakf was also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of the foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running of their institutions down to the smallest details – saffron rice and honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school regularly.13
The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old capital Bursa and the great mosque he was building in Edirne, commissioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well as the great hamam complex on Egnatia. He also repaired the city’s old Roman and Byzantine aqueduct system and settled colonists to look after it. His son, Mehmed the Conqueror, although hostile to the vakf idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new six-domed stone bezesten [market building], for the storage of valuable goods. Still in use across the road from the Hamza Bey mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commercial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling perfumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and also used the income to support the mosque he created when he ordered the church of Ayios