LITMIR.BIZ

      Liberty Square, Salonica, before the fire of 1917.

       From Old Salonica, ©1980, Elias Petropoulos

      The greater the haste with which the architects of national identity—or of whatever new verity—seek to expunge discordant evidence from historical consciousness, to excise it from the living urban fabric, the greater the effort to reclaim that evidence must be. In Athens, the rupture with the past has been long consummated. The sole connection with the golden age remains a rhetorical one, preserved by a tissue of museums and green spaces protecting archaeological sites of interest to tourists but ignored by the shop-keepers, civil servants, rentiers and businessmen who populate the city core. Salonica, a vital urban continuum for nearly 2,500 years and a relative latecomer to the leaden influence of national integration, remains fertile terrain for the unmediated archeology of memory.

      Liberty Square is not a place to linger. Often I circumnavigate it, and always hastily, on my way to or from the west end of town. Today, lined with bank headquarters on one side, fast-food restaurants and travel agencies on the other, the square which lies hard by the elegant, despairingly silent maritime passenger terminal, owes its name not to some putative liberation of Greek Macedonia. The embarrassment, for Salonica’s masters, is that the Greeks had very little to do with it, except as onlookers.

      The name commemorates the short-lived experiment in Ottoman democracy known as the Young Turk revolution which flowered here; celebrates a string of upheavals that catapulted Salonica overnight into the forefront of history. For a millennium it had been the second city of an empire; fleetingly it became the first, though the Empire over which it briefly ruled was already in its death throes.

      How majestic our hindsight as we dispose of events which, for the participants, were ripe with the chaos of hope and potentiality. July 24, 1908. From the balcony of the Club de Salonique, the Masonic Lodge overlooking what was then called Olympos Square, Enver Bey, leader of the uprising, proclaimed to a cheering crowd: “There are no longer Bulgars, Greeks, Rumanians, Jews, Mussulmans. We are all brothers beneath the same blue sky. We are all equal, we glory in being Ottoman.”⁴

      Enver’s new constitutional order was to usher in an era of peace, freedom and democracy for the subject peoples of the Ottoman state. But its unavowed intent was to restore the tottering Empire itself. The constitutional order did exist for a few months, before turning, inevitably, into its opposite. Or perhaps, to speak the language of the long ago, far away dialectic, it had carried its negation within it all along.

      The Young Turks were the natural ideological offspring of a political and social order which had become increasingly schizophrenic as it confronted the West’s military, social and political superiority. A catastrophic series of military and political defeats were followed by first a subtle, then a violent, penetration of European nationalism into the Balkans. This opened the door to the creation of quasi-independent national states in Serbia and Greece by the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century. The once-immense multinational Ottoman Empire had begun to shrink. Worse yet for Istanbul, the fledgling states were little better than creatures of the Great Powers of Europe, who saw them as useful agents in their war of attrition against the Ottomans. Urgent action was needed to halt the slide. In 1839, Sultan Abdulmejid I launched a series of social, political and economic reforms known as the Tanzimat. For the pro-western forces of the Empire, the evidence was as inescapable as it was overwhelming: Turkey had to modernize or perish. Modernize it would. In the event, it was done in by the cure—a half-willing victim of the New World Order of the day.

      The European Powers had dubbed the long, slow collapse of Turkey the Eastern Question. The term euphemistically concealed their aim: to dismantle and redistribute the Empire, particularly its far western and eastern extremities—Macedonia and Mesopotamia—among themselves. The only serious questions, those addressed in back-room negotiations and consigned to secret treaties, were “when?” and “who?” Political and economic divergence among the suitor/rapists gradually became more acute, coming to a peak in August, 1914. The process bore—are we remiss in noticing the forever unclothed emperor?—an uncanny resemblance to the haste with which the European powers and their American cousins now rush to divide the former Yugoslavia and the ex-USSR, fighting the battle for global culture and economic domination to the last Bosnian, Serb or Croat; the last Chechen, Ingush or Tadjik?

      The remedy chosen touched off an accelerated decline. By introducing a foreign form of government, under foreign pressure, the Tanzimat threw the country wide open to foreign influence and interference. Foreigners had been given the right to own land in Turkey, and were acquiring positions of control in every branch of the economic and public life of the Empire. To domestic tyranny the men of the Tanzimat had added foreign exploitation.⁵

      No reform, no homeopathic dose of “westernization,” could stem the Ottoman decline. Markets were being globalized in the usual aggressive fashion. Throughout the nineteenth century, the continued erosion of Turkish military power coupled with the Empire’s industrial inferiority combined to set the stage for a full-scale European economic invasion of the Balkans, foreshadowing the lines of battle that would score the peninsula during the First World War. This invasion would take place in Macedonia, core of Istanbul’s European possessions, Salonica’s economic hinterland and key to the prosperity—even the survival—of the regime.

      The process was sped along by Turkey’s violent suppression of embryonic Macedonian nationalism. The cruelty of the Ottoman forces had aroused Western public opinion, as malleable then as now, and brought foreign military observers to Macedonia. This combination of crowning indignity and mortal threat to the integrity of the Empire came to a head in early 1908 when Austro-Hungary, which had ruled Bosnia-Herzegovina as a protectorate since the

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