Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 Read Online Free PDF Page A

difficulty posed to fire-fighters by the narrow roads had all contributed to the scale of the devastation. Ninety-five hundred buildings were destroyed and over seventy thousand people had lost their homes. The Jewish community was worst affected for the fire had consumed its historic quarters: most of its thirty-seven synagogues were gone, its libraries, schools, club buildings and offices. Many mosques were also burned, as were most of the great khans —Ismail Pasha, Eski Youmbrouk, the Pasha Oriental—which had housed travellers through the centuries.
    In the immediate aftermath, Allied military personnel helped the Greek authorities find shelter for the homeless. Many were settled provisionally in tents, huts and sheds around the city; those who could stay with relatives elsewhere were encouraged to leave. Five thousand Greeks moved to Athens, Volos and Larissa, and several hundred Jews—mostly very poor—emigrated to France, Italy, Spain, the USA and Old Greece. Soup kitchens were set up and fed thirtythousand daily. By September, there were only seventy-five hundred still in tents. Yet rebuilding would take very much longer. Two months after the fire, wrote a British soldier, “Salonica was a city of the dead. Its streets were deserted, its cafés and restaurants were no more, and at night the gibbous moon cast its silvery light over a waste land of ghostly ruins, projecting hanging girders and the blackened shells of houses … The slender but solidly built minarets had in most cases survived … and as one carefully picked his way through that stricken town, wailing on the still night air sounded the muezzin’s calls: ‘Alla-hu-akbar!’ ” 3
    In 1917, the brick frontier advancing slowly southeastwards over centuries from the seaboard of northern Europe had not yet reached the Balkans, where wood still remained the chief means of construction. In Salonica, fires were such a regular occurrence that prayers against them formed part of the local Yom Kippur service. With the increase in the town’s population in the nineteenth century, and the growing shortage of water, they seem to have got worse. “The French consul,” reported Ami Boué in 1854, “told us that he was always obliged to safeguard his most precious papers before going to the countryside for fear of fire.” Forty years and three major fires later, an American scholar, hoping to add to his collection of Judaica, was repeatedly told in his book-hunting expedition round the town: “We had books, but they were burned.” The great fire of 1890 had done huge damage to the centre of the Hamidian city, especially near the Christian quarter round the Hippodrome. But this was dwarfed by the impact of the 1917 fire which destroyed the essence of the Ottoman town, and its Jewish core. Out of the ashes, an entirely new town began to emerge, one moulded in the image of the Greek state and its society. 4
    R EBUILDING THE C ITY
    “T HE FIRE HAS CREATED THE CHANCE to build a new Salonica, a showpiece of business and commerce, commanding the foreigners’ respect,” wrote a British journalist in The Comitadji on 2 September. But officialdom was ahead of the journalists and moving with astonishing speed. Within five days of the fire, a meeting had been convened in Athens to discuss the government’s response, and the important decision was taken to expropriate the whole of the fire-affected city centre, and to rebuild the area on a new basis. General Sarrail offered his assistance, and recommended the architects and engineers on his own staffto the Greek authorities. As a result, a committee of Greek, French and British experts was quickly established. Prime Minister Venizelos had previously felt frustrated at his inability to force through what he considered badly needed aesthetic and hygienic improvements to Salonica during the previous four years. The fire, as he put it later, came “almost as a gift of divine providence” and he told the