Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
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Emperor Galerius himself. By the side of the main road running through town the carved pillars of a massive triumphal arch still commemorate Galerius’s defeat of the troublesome Persians. His own urban ambitions, influenced by Syrian and Persian models, were extensive. Today students sun themselves on the walkways above where his now vanished portico once connected the triumphal arch with an enormous palace and hippodrome. Meanwhile, in what is still the commercial heart of the city, archaeologists have uncovered a vast forum, a tribute to Greco-Roman consumerism, with a double colonnade of shops, a square paved in marble, a library and a large brothel, complete with sex toys, private baths and dining-rooms for favoured clients.
This was, in short, a flourishing settlement of key strategic significance for Roman power in the East. We may find it puzzling that Greeks even today will call themselves Romioi [Romans]. But there is nothing strange about it. The Roman empire existed here too, among the speakers of Greek, and continued to exert its spell long after it had collapsed in the West. Yet we need to be careful, for when Greeks use the term Romios, they do not exactly mean that they are ‘Roman’. Hiding inside the word is the one ingredient which has shaped the city’s complex cultural mix more strongly than any other – the Christian faith. The Ottomans understood the term this way as well: when they talked about the ‘community of Romans’ [Rum millet] they meant Orthodox Christians, not necessarily Greeks; Rum was Byzantine Anatolia; Rumeli the Orthodox Christian Balkans. Until the age of ethnic nationalism, to be ‘Greek’ was, for most people in the Ottoman world, synonymous with belief in the Orthodox Christian faith.
With this Christianization of the Roman Greek world few cities are as closely identified as Salonica. When the Apostle Paul passed through, Christians were merely a deviant Jewish sect, and members of the two faiths were buried side by side. By the late fourth century, however, Christianity had triumphed on its own terms and turned itself into a new religion: the Rotonda had been converted from pagan use, and chapels, shrines and Christian graveyards were spreading with astonishing speed across the city.
The figure who came to symbolize Christ’s triumph in Salonica, eventually outshining even the Apostle himself, was a Roman officer called Dimitrios who was martyred in the late third century AD. A small shrine to him was built alongside the many other healing shrines which studded the area around the forum. After a grateful Roman prefect was cured by his miraculous powers, he built a five-aisled basilica to the saint, which quickly became the centre of a major cult, attracting Jews as well as Christians and pagans. The adoration of Dimitrios swept the city, and by the early nineteenth century – the first time we have a name-by-name census of its inhabitants – one in ten Christians there were named after him.5
Like the other major early Christian shrines – the massive, low-sunk Panayia Acheiropoietos [the Virgin’s Church Unmade by Mortal Hands], the grand Ayia Sofia and the Rotonda itself – Dimitrios’s church shows how deeply the city’s Greco-Roman culture had been impregnated with Christian rituals and doctrines. Although the fire of 1917 caused irreparable damage to the priceless mosaics that line its colonnades, enough has remained following its restoration to illuminate the imperial-Christian synthesis: the saint is shown heralded by toga-clad angelic trumpeters, receiving children, or casting his arms around the shoulders of the church’s founders. Another saint, Sergios, is depicted in a purple chiton with military insignia around his neck. The city’s devoted inhabitants are Christians, but they are also recognisably Romans. Incorporated into the church’s structure is part of the original baths, the place of the saint’s martyrdom, which became a site of pilgrimage in the following centuries. And crowning the pillars which line the nave are marble capitals whose writhing volutes and acanthus leaves, doves, rams and eagles, sometimes taken from earlier buildings, sometimes carved specially for the church, cover the entire range of Roman design in the centuries when Christianity began to take hold of the empire. Byzantium is the name we have given to a civilization which regarded itself, and was regarded by those around it, as the heir to the glories of imperial Rome. Its character was defined by its cultural synthesis of the traditions of Greece, Rome and Christianity, and Salonica was one of its bastions.
Invaders
‘Guarded by God, greatly surpassing every city in Thrace and in all of Illyricum as to variety of wealth’, the city was superbly protected by its towering walls, by its fortress perched commandingly above the bay and even by the spit of land which guarded the entrance to the gulf itself. It needed all the divine protection it could get, however, for through the centuries its riches and location seemed to attract one invader after another. In the sea raid of 904 an assault by Sudanese, Arab and Egyptian soldiers, led by Byzantine converts to Islam, left the city strewn with corpses and thousands of its inhabitants were sold into slavery. But that remained an isolated event, for Macedonia was far from the centre of the long-running Byzantine-Arab land war, and in eastern Europe – unlike in Syria and Anatolia – the men of Christ had almost a thousand more years to proselytize before confronting a serious rival in Islam.
Infinitely more important in the long run than the booty-hunters were the nomadic tribes who found Salonica on their path as they migrated from the central Asian steppes to the verdant lands of Europe. Some passed through before veering off to the north and settling elsewhere. But starting in the mid-sixth century, Byzantine military experts became aware of a new threat – the Slavs. According to the court historian, Procopius, they lived in miserable huts, were often on the move, and went to war mostly on foot and armed only with small shields and javelins.6 Yet despite their poverty and their crude weaponry the Slavs had numbers on their side, and quickly became a serious threat to Byzantine rule. In the late sixth century, they reached the walls of Salonica for the first time, and a huge army gathered on the plains outside the walls.7 Only Saint Dimitrios saved the day: thanks to his inspiration, the defenders suspended curtains below the ramparts to blunt the shock of the missiles hitting the walls, while armed sorties frightened the attackers into retreat. Again and again the Slavs laid siege to the city; each time, Saint Dimitrios, it was said, kept them at bay in a series of miracles which were collected, written down, and re-told over centuries.
The Slav tribes did not disappear. They settled as farmers and traders in villages across Greece and down into the Peloponnese, and the fundamental ethnographic balance between Salonica and its hinterland over the next fourteen hundred years was henceforth established: a predominantly Slavic peasantry cultivated the soil and was kept under the political and economic control of non-Slav elites based in the city.8 But frontiers are places of interaction, and few frontiers were more permeable or symbiotic than that between the Slavs and the Greeks. The former trickled into Salonica, drawn by the seductive power of a Hellenic education and the upward mobility this bought. Only nineteenth-century romantic nationalism turned the permeable boundaries between Slav and Greek into rigidly patrolled national cages.
Moreover, the city did not only take in the Slavs, but it reached out to them too, and converted them, through the Church, into members of its own civilization. It was two brothers from Salonica, Constantine [better known to posterity by his later name, Kyrill] and Methodius, themselves possibly of Slavic descent, who drew up a new alphabet, adapted from Greek, translated the Christian liturgy into Slavic and spread Christ’s message across eastern Europe. The extent of their success was matched only by that with which others were spreading the word of Mohammed in the Middle East. The seeds of their mission were planted in Dalmatia, Hungary, Moravia and Poland; by the end of the ninth century the pagan Bulgars too had been converted. As a result, a version of the Cyrillic alphabet first devised by these two sons of a Byzantine officer from Salonica is taught today in schools from the Adriatic to Siberia.
The Coming of the Ottomans
Over the next six hundred years, the city became a centre of humanistic learning and theological debate. Many new churches were established, turning it into a treasure-house of late Byzantine art. Monasticism spread to the Balkans from Egypt and Syria, and the great foundations