LITMIR.BIZ

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chafed at Austria’s occupation of Bosnia. The stage was set for the Third Round, which was to begin one year later, when Archduke Francis Ferdinand visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, St. Virus’ day, anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, in 1389.

      A HISTORIAN HAS APTLY DESCRIBED the Balkan crisis as causing “the spark that set off the fatal blast in the powder keg of Europe.”²⁴ Salonica, which had been the apple of discord throughout the long agony of the Ottoman Empire, remained a ring-side spectator to the hostilities as Greece declared neutrality at the beginning of the First World War. This ill-suited the Entente powers, which attempted to entice Athens to enter the war on their side with promises of territory in Asia Minor in return for concessions to Bulgaria in Macedonia, thus laying the groundwork for another disaster. Venizelos, Great Statesman on the make, rose to the bait like a hungry carp. But the court and its pro-German friends in the armed forces favored the Central Powers and refused to take any action which might offend the Kaiser. Stalemate ensued.

      A small French-British expeditionary force was promptly dispatched to Salonica under the pretext of honoring the Entente’s treaty obligations to Serbia. The allies landed in October, 1915, at Karaburun, a promontory east of the city not far from Batche Ciftlik, and thus began a de facto military occupation/blockade which was to last until Greece finally agreed to join the war against the Central Powers.

      Once more the cafés of Liberty Square hummed with the cosmopolitan confusion of tongues as French and English vied with Greek and Italian. Ladino, too, was never far out of earshot. The polylingual brothels of Vardar Square did ravishing business. For lack of military diversion, Generalissimo Paul Sarrail, the aging supreme commander of the allied forces, spent most of his time organizing glittering soirées the main attraction of which was his young and voluptuous bride, prompting French Prime Minister Clémenceau to remark that Sarrail had two fronts to defend.²⁵

      Into the morass of a city surrealistically aloof from combat while caught up in swirling, intertwining currents of intrigue, sailed a modern-day Argonautin-reverse. Alberto Savinio, younger brother of painter Giorgio De Chirico, had set out from Taranto aboard the troop-ship Savoia, a member of the Italian contingent of the Entente forces. Their final destination was Salonica.

      We arrive at our goal. The sun rises above Mount Athos. I look to the left: from the middle of a boiling ridge of clouds the white wedge of Olympus opens out. Jove sleeps up there amidst the snow and the cries of lice infested eagles: ex-god, with thundering eyebrows who clasps Ganymede in his arms, tender little sacerdote of mystic pederasty. And look down there, another world: it’s Salonica, which I nickname ‘the disquieting city’. . .”²⁶

      Savinio’s vision of the Orient as represented by Salonica may have been a response to the Grecophile proclivities of his more gifted elder brother, an orientalizing counter-vision, a proto-Nietzschean parody or the congenital envy-tinged scorn we reserve for those who are almost identical to us. Something of each, probably. Savinio is nothing if not the ambiguous counterweight to the classicist de Chirico, who assimilated and later metaphorically depicted the mechanisms (including those of the engineer and the earth measurer) by which Europe had managed to appropriate ancient Greece while conjuring up a “Greece” of the imagination on the site of a former Byzantine outpost and Ottoman province. To call our visitor jaundiced would be to understate the matter:

      I’ve even had to give up the little bourgeois diversion of reading the newspapers. I don’t have the courage to barter away half my pay for one of those smart, hybrid multilingual sheets that tell me ‘Luna di Moisè Molho and Guida Bejà Matarasso are fiancés’ or ‘Maison Saporta met en vent des articles militaires à prix très réduits . . .’ Then there’s the night life: ‘The White Tower’ and the little shack called the ‘Variétés’ where a Corinthian songwriter sings ‘The Lover’s Deaf in the Neapolitan dialect . . . Oh, my far away friends, I have dreams, so many dreams (. . .)

       August. Half of Salonica burns in a single night. A bit of relief from the mattress of monotony. But the fire’s put out and my relief with it. ²⁷

      What had succeeded only in stirring the semi-catatonic Savinio from his lethargy was, for Salonica, a monstrous convergence of disaster and opportunity: the Great Fire of August 5, 1917. Kindled in a tiny shack just north of Saint Demetrius Street, and fanned by hot winds, the blaze quickly engulfed the wood-framed constructions that made up most of Salonica’s central district. Under orders from General Sarrail, the French forces bombarded the city to stop the fire from spreading, thereby encouraging its ravages. By the time it hand finally burnt itself out, 72,000 people were homeless, and more than 4,000 buildings had been destroyed. Gone were the cosmopolitan cafés and the great sea-front hotels, the department stores and hundreds of small craftsmen’s shops. More tragically, the fire obliterated the infrastructure of the Jewish community, its synagogues and schools; most of the buildings lost had been owned by Jews. All that had given the city its distinctive flavor now lay in smoldering ruins.

      The Venizelos government, which had begun as an anti-monarchist military rebellion in Salonica the preceding year, promptly expropriated the burned-out area, and appointed an international commission chaired by Ernest Hébrard, a French city-planner serving in the Army of the Orient, to supervise the transformation from a Jewish-Ottoman city to a Helleno-European one. Hébrard, who was later to gain higher distinction for his remake of French colonial Hanoi, devised a uniform architectural style, opened wide boulevards and diagonal transverse avenues in the manner of Baron Hausmann. The memory of the city was to be embodied—embalmed, better—in “noble” buildings harking back to the Roman and Byzantine past.²⁸ The plan, needless to say, expressed the prevailing ideology of the day: modern Greece as the reincarnation of Byzantine imperial glory, somehow combined with the democratic heritage of the Athenian Golden Age and seasoned with a liberal pinch of Alexander the Great. What the fire had not obliterated, Hébrard’s plan would. The remaining vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, and the muscle and sinew of the Jewish community which for four centuries had given Salonica its inimitable character and its life, were swept away.

      Map of Salonica from Karl Baedeker’s guide (1914).

       From Old Salonica, ©1980, Elias Petropoulos

      CHAPTER 2

       SAINTS AND ZEALOTS

      THE SALONICA SEA FRONT functions simultaneously as the city’s focus and as a powerful dilatory organ which concentrates in one energy-charged space a succession of coffee-shops, bars, sweet emporiums, amusement parks, ice-cream parlors, pop-corn and toasted nut wagons, self-propelled sandwich outlets, strolling balloon and souvenir hawkers. When the weather is fine, the broad promenade is thronged with well-dressed peripatetic philosophers of a certain age who gesticulate more energetically than they walk, with youthful joggers, bicyclists, with groups of townspeople simply enjoying the cool, damp air; gulls, pigeons, and further offshore, cormorants. There is something romantic, even erotic—metaphorically at least—about this boundary zone where the city meets the sea, where the hot concrete and asphalt meld into the enveloping liquid embrace of the waters.

      Further east, the paved promenade gives way to a narrow, weed-grown sidewalk; the perspective of Salonica Bay to a succession of water-sport installations, marinas and boat clubs, and then, to rows of psarotavernas where, later in the evening, the good burghers will repair for a meal of mussels stuffed with rice, fried baby squid, grilled shrimp and tangy cabbage salads laced with hot pepper, washed down with raki or dry white wine from the vineyards of the Halkidiki peninsula, in the shadow of Mount Athos.

      It is here, along the sweeping arc of the sea-front that I found myself strolling briskly, of a cloudy evening in early April. A moist southerly breeze was blowing, but not strongly enough to ripple the foul smelling, viscous water lapping against the quay. Freighters, their bows and sterns aglow, rode low at anchor, silhouetted against the darkening sky.

      My

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