Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews

The Sufi Orders

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. 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. One of the most important institutions in the creation of this sanctified world were the heterodox Islamic orders – known to scholars as Sufis and to the public, inaccurately, as dervishes – who played such a pivotal role in consolidating Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Western travellers to the empire never, if they could help it, lost the opportunity to describe these mysterious and otherworldly figures with their whirling dances and strange ritual howlings. But dwelling on such eccentricities – abstracted from their theological context – turned their acolytes into figures of fun and overlooked their central role in bridging confessional divides during the Ottoman centuries.27

Many of these mystical orders borrowed heavily from the shamanistic traditions of central Asian nomad life and from the eastern Christianity they found around them. But by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were powerful forces in their own right, supported by – and supportive of – sultans like Murad II, who founded a large Mevlevi monastery in Edirne. When Ottoman troops conquered the Balkans, they were accompanied and sometimes preceded by holy men who spread the ideas of the missionary-warrior Haci Bektash, the poet Rumi and Baha’ al-Din Naqshband. Their highly unorthodox visions of the ways to God were shared in religious brotherhoods financed by pious benefactions. Some of their leaders – men like the fifteenth-century heretic sheykh Bedreddin – saw themselves as the Mahdi, revealing the secret of divine unity across faiths, and legalizing what the shari’a had previously forbidden. From the early sixteenth century, as the Ottoman state, and its clerical class, the ulema, conquered the Arab lands and became more conscious of the responsibility of the caliphate and the dangers of Persian heterodoxy, these unorthodox and sometimes heretical movements came under attack. In the mid-seventeenth century, Vani Effendi, the puritanical court preacher who converted Sabbatai Zevi, was outraged by the permissive attitude of some of them to stimulants such as coffee, alcohol and opium, as well as by their worship of saints and their pantheist tendencies. Murad IV took a dim view of such practices, and at least one tobacco-smoking mufti of Salonica got in trouble as a result. In practice, however, many leading statesmen and clergymen were also ‘brothers’ of one group or another, and generally they prospered.28

Most major orders had their representatives in a place as important as Salonica where there were more than twenty shrines and monasteries, guarding all the city’s gates and approaches. We know of the existence of the Halvetiye, who expanded into the Balkans in the sixteenth century and gave the city several of its muftis. Even during the First World War, the Rifa’i were still attracting tourists to their ceremonies: Alicia Little watched them jumping and howling, and was struck by their generous hospitality and their courtesy to guests. One nineteenth-century Albanian merchant, who made his fortune in Egypt, allowed his villa in the new suburb along the seashore to be used as a Melami tekke; among its adepts were the head of the Military School, an army colonel, a local book-dealer and a Czech political refugee who had converted to Islam.29

There were tekkes of the Nakshbandis, the Sa’dis and many others. The magnificent gardens and cypresses of the Mevlevi monastery, situated strategically next to a reservoir which stored much of the city’s drinking water, attracted many of the city’s notable families and appear to have been popular with wealthy Ma’min as well. The Mevlevi were extremely well-funded, and controlled access to the tomb of Ayios Dimitrios and many other holy places in the city. They retained close ties with local Christians and were reportedly ‘always to be found in company with the Greek [monks].’ One British diplomat at the end of the nineteenth century recounts a long conversation with a senior Mevlevi sheykh, a man whose ‘shaggy yellow beard and golden spectacles made him look more like a German professor than a dancing dervish’. Together, in the sheykh’s office, the two men drank raki, discussed photography – local prejudices hindered him using his Kodak, the sheykh complained – and talked about the impact a new translation of the central Mevlevi text, the Mesnevi, had made in London. ‘He did not care about the introduction of Mohammedanism into England,’ noted the British diplomat, ‘but he had hoped that people might have seen that the mystic principles enunciated in the Mesnevi were compatible with all religions and could be grafted on Christianity as well as on Islam.’30

Of all the Sufi orders in the Balkans, perhaps the most successful and influential were the Bektashi. They had monastic foundations everywhere and they were very closely associated with the janissary corps, the militia of forcibly converted Christian boys which was the spearhead of the Ottoman army. Often they took over existing holy places, saints’ tombs and Christian churches, a practice which had started in Anatolia and continued with the Ottoman advance into Europe. In the early twentieth century, the brilliant young British scholar Hasluck charted the dozens of Bektashi foundations which still existed at the time of the Balkan Wars as far north as Budapest, most of which (outside Albania, which is even today an important centre) have long since disappeared. In such places, people came, lit candles and stuck rags in nearby trees – a common way of soliciting saintly assistance. In Macedonia, the Evrenos family supported the order; in Salonica itself, it owned several modestly-appointed tekkes.31

The Bektashi themselves had a close connection with the worship of Christ. Their use of bread and wine in their rituals, their stress on the twelve Imams [akin to the twelve apostles], and many other features of their rites all bore a close resemblance to Christian practice. In southern Albania, according to Hasluck, legend claimed that Haji Bektash was himself from a Christian family – he had converted to Islam before coming to recognize the superiority of his original faith, whereupon he invented Bektashism as a bridge between the two. The lack of any basis in fact for the story should not disguise its symbolic truth. As one close observer of the movement explained: ‘It is their doctrine to be liberal towards all professions and religions, and to consider all men as equal in the eyes of God.’32

The Powers of the City

Beneath the confessional divides and helped by such creeds, there existed a kind of submerged popular religion, defined by common belief in the location and timing of divine power. Take the calendar itself: whether under their Christian or Muslim titles, St George’s Day in the spring and St Dimitrios’s Day in the winter marked key points in the year for business and legal arrangements affecting the entire society, the dates for instance when residential leases expired, shepherds moved between lowland and upland pastures, and bread prices were set by the local authorities.

Salonica’s Casimiye Mosque, which had formerly been St Dimitrios’s church, saw the cult of the city’s patron saint continuing under Muslim auspices. Casim himself was an example – one of many in the Balkans – of those holy figures who were Islamicized versions of Christian saints. Dimitrios’s tomb was kept open for pilgrims of both faiths by the Mevlevi officials who looked after the mosque. Near the very end of the empire, a French traveller caught the final moments of this arrangement and described how it worked. He was ushered into a dark chapel by the hodja, together with two Greeks who had come for divine help. This conversation followed:

‘Your name?’ asked the Turk …‘Georgios’, replied the Greek, and the Turk, repeating ‘Georgios’, held the knot in the flame, then commented to the Greek with an air of satisfaction that the knot had not burned. A second time. ‘The name of your father and your mother?’ ‘Nikolaos my father, Calliope my mother.’ ‘And your children?’ And when he had thus made three knots carefully, he put the sacred cord in a small packet which he dipped in the oil of the lamp, added a few bits of soil from the tomb, wrapped it all up and handed it to the Greek who seemed entirely content. Then he explained: ‘If you are ill, or your father, your mother, your children, put the knot on the suffering part and you will be cured.’ After which, turning to me, the Turk asked ‘And you?’ I shook my head. The Greek was amazed and believed I had not understood and explained it all to me. When I continued to refuse he seemed regretful. ‘Einai kalon’ [It is good] he told me sympathetically … and the two Greeks, together with the Muslim sacristan, left the mosque happily.33

These rituals were not especially unusual, though the setting was. ‘If your heart is perplexed with sorrow,’ the Prophet Mohammed is said to have advised, ‘go seek consolation at the graves of holy men.’ Muslims – especially women – made the ziyaret at times of domestic need, and the Arabic term was taken over by Salonica’s Jews, who spoke of going on a ziyara to pray at the tomb of rabbis or deceased relatives. Christian women used both the Jewish cemetery and Muslim mausoleums when collecting earth from freshly dug graves to use against evil spirits. Mousa Baba, Meydan-Sultan Baba and Gul Baba gathered pilgrims to their tombs, even after the twentieth-century exodus of the city’s Turks. In the 1930s, Christian women from nearby neighbourhoods were still lighting candles at the tomb of Mousa Baba and asking his help [against malaria], to the surprise of some Greek commentators who could not understand how they could do this ‘in a city where hundreds of martyrs and holy saints were tortured and martyred in the name of Christ’. The answer was that for many of those who came to seek his help, Mousa Baba was not really a Muslim holy man at all. Rather he was Saint George himself, who had metamorphosed into a Turk with supernatural powers: ‘I heard this when we refugees first came here from Thrace, from a Turkish woman, who told me she had heard it from elderly Turkish women who had explained it to her.’ Why had Saint George assumed this disguise? For the same reason that Sabbatai Zevi had converted, according to his followers: to make the unbelievers believe.34

Power to keep the dead at rest was one of the chief attributes of religious authority, the reverse side of the power to curse or excommunicate. Both powers formed a key weapon in the armoury of the city’s spiritual leaders but also transcended the bounds of religious community. According to a local story an archbishop converted to Islam and became a leading mollah. While he was still a Christian he had, in a moment of anger, cursed one of his congregation: ‘May the earth refuse to receive you!’ The man died and after three years passed his body was exhumed. Of course it was found in pristine condition ‘just as if he had been buried the day before’ – the power of the excommunication had evidently endured even though the cleric himself had since converted, and only he could revoke 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