Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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it, even though he was now a Muslim: ‘Having obtained the Pasha’s permission, he repaired to the open tomb, knelt beside it, lifted his hands and prayed for a few minutes. He had hardly risen to his feet when, wondrous to relate, the flesh of the corpse crumbled away from the bones and the skeleton remained bare and clean as it had never known pollution.’ Christian, Muslim or Jew, one looked wherever it was necessary to make the spell work and bring peace to the living and the dead.35
For the city was peopled by spirits – evil as well as good. ‘There are invisible influences everywhere in Turkey’, writes Fanny Blunt, a long-time resident of Salonica, in her classic study of Ottoman beliefs and customs – vampires in cemeteries, spirits guarding treasures buried in haunted houses, djinns in abandoned konaks, and enticing white-clad peris who gathered anywhere near running water. Fountains were dangerous, especially at certain times of the year, and antiquities like the Arch of Galerius were well known to possess evil powers, if approached from the wrong angle. Church leaders tried to draw doctrinal distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of the supernatural, but Salonica’s inhabitants did not bother. If the rabbi or bishop could not help them, they appealed to witches, wise men or healers. The religious authorities never felt seriously threatened by such practices, and it is a striking difference with Christian Europe that there were never witchcraft trials in the Ottoman domains. Devils, demons and evil spirits – euphemistically termed ‘those from below’, or ‘those without number’, or more placatingly, ‘the best of us’ – were a fact of life.36
‘De ozo ke lo guadre el Dio – May God guard him from the Eye’, elderly Jewish ladies muttered. Was there anyone in the city who did not fear being jinxed by the evil eye – to mati for the Greeks, the fena göz for the Turks – and sought remedies against it? All avoided excessive compliments and feared those who paid them, cursing them under their breath. Moises Bourlas tells us in his wonderful memoirs how his mother was sitting out in the sun one fine Saturday with her neighbours, gossiping and chewing pumpkin seeds when some gypsy fortune-tellers passed them and shouted: ‘Fine for you, ladies, sitting in the sun and eating pumpkin seeds!’ To which his mother instantly and prudently replied – sotto voce in Judeo-Spanish, so that they could not understand: ‘Tu ozo en mi kulo’ [Your eye in my arse].37
Fanny Blunt lists accepted remedies: ‘garlic, cheriot, wild thyme, boar’s tusks, hares’ heads, terebinth, alum, blue glass, turqoise, pearls, the bloodstone, carnelian, eggs [principally those of the ostrich], a gland extracted from the neck of the ass, written amulets and a thousand other objects.’ She tried out the ass gland on her husband, the British consul, when he was ill, and reported it a success. For keeping babies in good health, experts recommended old gold coins, a cock’s spur or silver phylacteries containing cotton wool from the inauguration of a new church [for Christians], bits of paper with the Star of David drawn on them [Jews], or the pentagram [Muslims]. Holy water helped Christians, Bulgarians were fond of salt; others used the heads of small salted fish mixed in water, while everyone believed in the power of spitting in the face of a pretty child.
Spells required counter-spells. Mendicant dervishes and gypsy women were believed to know secret remedies, especially for afflicted animals. Hodjas provided pest control in the shape of small squares of paper with holy inscriptions that were nailed to the wall of afflicted rooms and Jews wore amulets containing verses from the Torah to ward off the ‘spirits of the air’ which caused depression or fever. Blunt describes some striking cases of cross-faith activity: a Turkish woman snatching hairs from the beard of a Jewish pedlar as a remedy for fever; Muslim children having prayers read over them in church; Christian children similarly blessed by Muslim hodjas, who would blow or spit on them, or twist a piece of cotton thread around their wrist to stop their fever. Doctors were not much esteemed; the reputation of la indulcadera – the healer – stood much higher. Against the fear of infertility, ill health, envy or bad luck, the barriers between faiths quickly crumbled.
Orthodoxy: Tax-Collectors and Martyrs
But we should not paint too rosy a picture of the city’s religious possibilities under Ottoman rule. Life was clearly better for some than for others. Muslims were in the ascendant, and the assertive Sefardic Jews, who dominated numerically, found their rule welcoming and were duly grateful. Mosques and synagogues proliferated as a result of official encouragement, and even the extraordinary episode of Sabbatai Zevi can be seen as illustrating the Ottoman state’s flexibility with regard to the Jews, who lived in Salonica, as a Jesuit priest noted in 1734, with ‘more liberty and privileges than anywhere else’.38
For the city’s Christians, on the other hand, Ottoman rule was very much harder to accept. The Byzantine scholar Ioannis Evgenikos lamented the capture of ‘the most beautiful and God-fearing city of the Romans’, and a sense of loss continued to flow beneath the surface of Orthodox life. After all, not even Saint Dimitrios, its guardian, had saved it from ‘enslavement’. Catholic visitors to the Greek lands often saw their plight as a punishment for their sins. So did many Orthodox believers. An anonymous seventeenth-century author pleaded in tones of desperation with the city’s saint:
O great martyr of the Lord Christ, Dimitrios, where are now the miracles which you once performed daily in your own country? Why do you not help us? Why do you not reappear to us? Why, St Dimitrios, do you fail us and abandon us completely? Can you not see the multitude of hardships, temptations and debts that crowd upon us? Can you not see our shame and disgrace as our enemies trample upon us, the impious jeer at us, the Saracens mock us, and everybody laughs at us?39
The small size of the surviving Orthodox population, its lack of wealth, and the constant erosion of its power left none in any doubt of its plight. The Byzantine scholars who had made its intellectual life so vibrant fled abroad – Theodoras Gazis to Italy, Andronikos Kallistos ending up in London – where they helped hand down classical Greek texts to European humanists. Within the city, while rabbinical scholarship flourished, the flame of Christian learning flickered tenuously through the eighteenth century. Such intellectual and spiritual discussions as were taking place within the empire were going on in the monasteries of Mount Athos itself, in the capital, or in the Danubian Principalities to the north. Salonica – the ‘mother of Orthodoxy’ – became a backwater. Bright local Christian boys usually ended up being schooled elsewhere. It is scarcely a coincidence that one of the best-known works to have been composed by a sixteenth-century scholar from the city, the cleric Damaskinos Stouditis (1500–1580), was a collection of religious texts put into simple language for the use of unlearned priests. Stouditis himself had been educated in Istanbul.40
First among the temptations that afflicted its Christians, of course, was Islam itself. During the prosperous sixteenth century, in particular, many poor young villagers flocked into the city from the mountains, and these newcomers soon formed a very large part of the local Christian population. Some of them, finding themselves adrift and vulnerable to the dangers facing those far from home, converted for the sake of greater security. Other converts were Christian boys apprenticed to Muslim craftsmen, or girls who had entered Muslim households as domestic servants: in both cases the economic power of the employers paved the way to conversion. But this was a dramatic step at the best of times and one which laid the individual open to unrestrained criticism from his relatives and community. Relatively few Christians (or Jews) with families in Salonica appear to have abandoned their faith. To judge from the mid-eighteenth century, which is when the first data became available, the overall numbers of converts were not great – perhaps ten cases a year in the city and its hinterland.41
Even so, Orthodox clerics were always deeply anxious about this. A monk called Nikanor (1491–1549) travelled in the villages to the west of the city, urging the inhabitants to stay true to Christ: ‘by his