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