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Suddenly the port of Salonica had become the focus of conflicting, yet converging, imperial designs. In April, Edward VII and Tsar Nicholas II met at Revel, on the Baltic, where they put the finishing touches to an accord on the pacification program needed to carry out their railway construction program. The scheme was as brilliant as it was disastrous. The Great Powers, caught up in bitter economic competition, would cooperate peacefully to dispossess the Sick Man of Europe. The Turks, as a corollary, would cease to be masters in Macedonia.6
For the better part of two decades dissident intellectuals who had sought refuge in European capitals had been agitating for a the re-establishment of the constitutional order, which they saw as the only way to save the crumbling Turkish state. They called their movement the Committee for Union and Progress, establishing its headquarters in Paris, where they modeled it on the nationalist-revolutionary movements that flourished throughout Europe.
But the Young Turks’ forced march to the balcony overlooking Liberty Square, and thence to Istanbul, only began in earnest when a clandestine group of officers of the Ottoman Third Army Corps in Macedonia—one of whose members was a Salonica native named Mustafa Kemal, later self-baptized as Atatürk, “father of the Turks”—merged with the Union and Progress organization in September 1907. The merger channeled the national humiliation felt by the idealist intellectuals into the day-to-day humiliation faced by the hard-bitten field commanders of the Ottoman army at the hands of overbearing foreign “observers.” To this explosive cocktail was added a groundswell of discontent among the ranks of underpaid and underfed conscripts. The troops of the reformed Empire were now expected to behave like professional soldiers; no longer could pillage be accepted as the army’s chief method of sustaining its men in the field.
In early 1908, insurrection spread like a viral contagion through the Macedonian garrisons of the Third Army Corps, along the very railway lines the Ottomans had built to enable them to transport troops into the hinterland. A full-fledged mutiny was in progress, sped along by the cricket song of the telegraph key and the rhythmic click of wheels on steel rails: the lines of communication had been turned against those who had built them. Emboldened, the mutineers came out into the open. They petitioned Salonica’s European consulates to pressure Istanbul to restore the never-applied constitution. Sultan Adbulhamid scoffed. The revolt spread. By now the revolutionaries had established contact with the city’s Bulgarian, Greek, Rumanian, Armenian and Albanian clandestine organizations. The Jews, Salonica’s largest ethno-religious community, quickly organized a levy to propagate the good tidings throughout the Balkans, as far afield as Sofia and Bucharest.7
Now the sovereign played for time, attempting to forestall the inevitable with the “time dishonored” carrot and stick of bribery and repression. All failed. On July 24, 1908, Hussein Hilmi Pasha, Inspector General of European Turkey and a late convert to the revolutionary cause, proclaimed the Constitution.8
Liberty Square became the focal point of public festivities: Jews, Turks, Greeks, Bulgars, Albanians, Armenians and Levantines fraternized, wept tears of joy and cheered. Forgotten were the blood feuds and deadly rivalries which had transformed the surrounding countryside into a bewildering warren of no-go zones and battlefields. Orthodox popes, rabbis and Muslim imams embraced in public. Brass bands marched and countermarched along the quay, blaring the Marseillaise.
Down from the hills came the guerrilla band leaders: Bulgarian and Macedonian comitajis, Serbian chetajis, Greek andartes. Blood hatreds suddenly dissolved as yesterday’s bandits mingled, hugging and kissing, in the cafés, and were photographed for posterity, their wild beards set off by the cartridge belts criss-crossed over their chests. Sandanski, comrade-in-arms of the martyred Gotse Delchev and one of the most feared of the Bulgaro-Macedonian anarchists/terrorists/freedom fighters, posed in the dignified dark suit of an incipient Father of his Country. The liberation of the subject peoples was at hand. Talk of the old dream of Balkan federation was in the air. Even the town’s Free Masons, who had discretely lent their lodges to the revolutionaries, appeared in public beneath their banners, to the acclaim of a populace in a state of near-rapture. “Long live the Constitution! Long live the Army!” trumpeted souvenir postcards depicting a dashing, rapier-thin Enver Bey. “Liberty, equality, fraternity, justice!” roared the crowd in a Babel of tongues.
To the astonishment of Europe, Salonica overnight became the de facto capital of the Empire, issuing orders, appointing governors, instituting reforms, administering the widespread dominion. Delegations bearing messages of solidarity converged on the city from Greece and Serbia, from Austro-Hungary, from Romania and France. Citizens were suddenly free to speak their minds, to meet in public. The press flourished. But when a delegation from Bulgaria arrived several weeks later, it was welcomed by a shut-down of the city’s coffee-houses and restaurants, including the most prestigious of them all, the Olympus. The Bulgarian government had just declared its intention to free itself of its status as an Ottoman protectorate, upsetting the fragile Balkan equilibrium. The proprietors of the closed establishments were Greek to a man.9
Meanwhile, strikes by workers acting in defense of their class interests had already begun in the heady first days of the revolution under the leadership of the Fédération socialiste, established by radicals who had accompanied the Bulgarian delegation. Salonica, in the first decade of the twentieth century, was not only the second port of the Empire after Izmir, it was Turkey’s largest industrial center, its doorway to European industrial modernity. The propaganda and organizing efforts of the socialists, spurred on by a combative press, rapidly overflowed the small Bulgarian community and took root among the Jews, who formed the majority of the city’s 25,000-strong proletariat, and the Turks. Dozens of strikes broke out, involving longshoremen, bank employees and tobacco workers.
Not only the Greeks, who were the third most numerous population group after the Jews and the Muslim Turks, stood aloof from the growing labor unrest. The Young Turk leadership, which had initially supported the workers, feared that the sudden outburst of industrial activity would scare away the European capitalists who were to revitalize the semi-moribund Empire and transform it into a model of free-market democracy. The situation became even more alarming—from the government’s point of view—when the Fédération sought and was granted affiliation with the International Socialist Federation as sole representative of the Ottoman state.
For decades the ghost of the Fédération haunted the square. During the thirties it was the rallying point for workers’ demonstrations organized by Greece’s militant Communist party. One day in May, 1936, a cortege of strikers set out from Liberty Square led by pallbearers carrying the body of a young worker killed by police. By day’s end ten more strikers had been shot down in the streets. Three months later, on the eve of a nationwide general strike, an army officer called Ioannis Metaxas had declared himself dictator and instituted a fascist regime named for the date—August 4—on which it was proclaimed.
As art stands for the primacy of experience in the world and against the reengineering of the past, so Yannis Ritsos’ “Epitaph” cast the tragic May events in poetic form, as a mother’s lament over the body of her dead son. In the early sixties composer Mikis Theodorakis set Ritsos’ poetry to music, adapting it to the austere, percussive cadences of the rebetiko style.
There you stood at your window And your strong shoulders Hid the sea, the streets below . . .
You were like a helmsman, my son, and the neighborhood was your ship
On another day in May,