Salonica Terminus - Fred A. Reed

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a left-wing member of parliament, was killed by a three-wheeled motorcycle in a street just two blocks away after leaving a political meeting. The “accidental” death was quickly proved to have been an assassination plotted by the country’s highest political authorities, and carried out by the same kind of lumpen patriots who, in 1967, scuttled Greece’s fragile democracy and set up the Junta. Today a bronze dove surrounded by upreaching, outstretched hands and identified only by the date—May 22, 1963—marks the place of the crime. While every other statue in Salonica bears a name, the Lambrakis memorial is anonymous. But the sculpture is never without fresh-cut flowers—red carnations, mostly—even on this raw winter evening, as the Vardari, sweeping dust and scraps of oily paper before it, rips down the streets like the scythe of some elemental grim reaper.

      LIKE ALL REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS, the Young Turks carried within them sharply contradictory objectives, both of which had been latent during the decades of opposition and exile. Those whom we might call liberals favored decentralization, and some degree of autonomy for the Empire’s rich mosaic of religious, linguistic and national minorities. Their adversaries were dedicated to reinforcing the centralizing power of Istanbul, and to Turkish domination. Within less than a year, the Committee of Union and Progress had fallen under the control of the centralizers.10

      In their objective, they enjoyed the support of their military allies, whose prime objective had always been to remove the corrupt, incompetent Abdulhamid, and to replace him with a government which would defend the Ottoman state, not liquidate it at discount prices to the Great Powers and their financial backers. The officers were indifferent to ideology. What concerned them was the survival of the institutions they and their fathers had served.11

      As with all revolutions, seizing power was the easy part. The Young Turks’ honeymoon was as fleeting as a mayfly’s prime. On the home front, the Islamic Committee of Salonica accused the revolutionaries of atheism, echoing the views of the Caliphate in Istanbul. And as Enver, Talat and their associates slid deeper into the conceptual swamps of Pan-Turkism, the subject peoples of the Empire began to pick up the scent of mortal danger—not only to their prospects for building a multinational state in whose life they could participate as equals, but to their very existence. For what the Committee of Union and Progress had done was to steal a march on its Balkan tormentors. Its new, improved edition of the Ottoman state would apply the same Jacobin nation-state model as they had done, but on a much broader scale, and with all the force and coercive power it could muster. The subject peoples who had rallied to the Young Turk banner—the Armenians in particular—would pay a heavy price for their presumption.

      In a speech to a secret conclave of the Salonica Committee of Union and Progress, in 1911, as reported by the acting British Consul in Monastir, Talat Bey declared: “We have made unsuccessful attempts to convert the Ghiaur [Christian Ottoman subjects] into a loyal Osmanli and all such efforts must inevitably fail, as long as the small independent states in the Balkan Peninsula remain in a position to propagate ideas of Separatism among the inhabitants of Macedonia. There can therefore be no question of equality, until we have succeeded in our task of Ottomanizing the Empire . . .”12

      International reaction to the events in Salonica was swift and, given the weakness of the Empire’s new, untested, and unconsolidated rulers, crippling. Within four months Greece had declared Crete part of the Kingdom of the Hellenes; formerly docile Albania, long a source of dedicated Ottoman soldiers, was in turmoil; Tsar Ferdinand I had crowned himself ruler of an independent Bulgaria; farther north, Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. With Bosnia in Austrian hands, the frustrated, landlocked Serbs turned their attention south and westward, toward Macedonia and the ports of the Adriatic littoral, while at the same time plotting revenge against Vienna. Now, as the Ottoman collapse accelerated, national myths were being honed to a razor edge. And where myth became historical necessity, disaster was sure to follow.

      Meanwhile, in Istanbul, traditionalist resistance came to a head with a bloody mutiny against the Young Turks by soldiers and theological students in April, 1909. Ten days later, the constitutionalist “Army of Action” from Salonica crushed the insurgents and on April 27, Abdulhamid, the man who had ruled an Empire that stretched from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf, was officially deposed and sent into exile, replaced by his brother Mehmed Reshad. When his captors informed him of his destination, the “Red Sultan” is said to have fainted. It was to be Salonica.

      THE VILLA ALLATINI stands, like a fairy-tale castle nestled in a grove of pines on the eastern outskirts of the city, surrounded by the usual suburban disorder of apartment blocks, gas stations and parking lots. The elegant three-story country estate, designed by architect Vitaliano Poselli for the Allatini family, one of Salonica’s most powerful Jewish industrial and banking clans, is one of a handful of structures to have survived the leveling wrath of the developers.

      Here Abdulhamid was dispatched. Along with five wives, several children and a retinue of servants, he lived under house arrest for three years, an object of curiosity for the citizens who, of an evening’s spin in a horse-drawn buggy, might catch a glimpse of the mustachioed old Sultan, red fez atop his head, gazing from the second floor window of the Villa toward Salonica Bay.13

      Abdulhamid’s ultimate humiliation came two years later when his brother, now designated Mehmed V, visited Salonica to climax an imperial swing through what the Europeans now called Macedonia. “The population gave their beloved sovereign a reception worthy of the first Constitutional Sultan. Marvelous triumphal arches were erected wherever the monarch was to pass,” rhapsodized journalist Sami Levi, compiler of a lavish photographic album commemorating the royal tour.14

      The arches were erected by the city’s principal religious groups—Jews, Muslims, Orthodox (Greek) and Bulgarian, its main industrial establishments which included fez and woolen fabric manufacturing, the Ottoman Tobacco Monopoly, the Light and Power Company, the railways, and the port, as well as several of its most prominent commercial firms: the Café Crystal in Liberty Square, the Splendid Palace Hotel on the quay, and the Au Louvre department store. One of them drew Levi’s admiring attention:

      “On the road leading to the city, at the entrance to Union Boulevard, soars an arch of truly monumental aspect. It has been erected by the Ottoman Industrial and Trading Company of Salonica [formerly the Allatini mill and brick works]. Here we behold, in an ingeniously conveyed contrast, the felicitous encounter of Moorish architecture with modern industry. For while the central section of the monument which forms the principal arch, stands against the sky with a silhouette suggestive of the Orient, it is flanked by two huge factory smokestacks creating a most pleasing effect. The harmony of contrasts achieved here, a harmony which a skeptic would have considered impossible, does honor to the architects. Upon the pediment, giving onto the sea-front, is a picture of the mill, on the other side is a picture of the brick works. Both are accompanied by illustrations of the machinery used in the two factories.”15

      The diligent Levi could not, of course, dare mention that the dethroned predecessor and elder brother of the beloved sovereign was an involuntary guest in the villa of the Allatini family, owners of those self-same mill and brick-works. For at the conclusion of the imperial visit, “on the following day, Sunday, in the morning, we had the honor of presenting to him a copy of this album. The Caliph deigned to leaf through our work, with which he was well pleased, and which caused him to bestow upon the publisher of the Journal de Salonique, Daout effendi Levy, an imperial gift consisting of a set of diamond cuff-links.”16

      The beloved sovereign was, alas, little more than a figurehead; proof that for all their martial bravado, the Young Turks—like all reformers—lacked both confidence and audacity. Their objective had never been to abolish the Empire, but to rescue it. Instead of killing Abdulhamid, they held him as insurance. You never knew what might happen: revolutions are notoriously unpredictable. In the event, the hard-headed imperial dedication of Enver and Talat proved their undoing, and was soon to precipitate Salonica into another maelstrom. In Athens, Sofia and Belgrade the carving knives were being sharpened. London, Paris, Moscow and Vienna watched with ill-concealed glee as their general staffs drew up mobilization plans. If Macedonia was to be the meal, Salonica would be the plat de résistance.

      FROM

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