Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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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.
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