LITMIR.BIZ

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complex and exotic. My vantage point, like a camera obscura of the imagination, is the work room of Elias Petropoulos, a cubbyhole overlooking a tiny Parisian courtyard in the heart of the Cinquiemè Arrondissement. Rebetiko music spills, like plates being tossed in a taverna, from a tape machine wedged in among the books which line the walls from floor to ceiling, overflowing onto chairs and tables. Petropoulos can take credit for almost single-handedly resurrecting this once-scorned genre, turning his formidable talents as a researcher and popularizer to writing down the lyrics of virtually every rebetiko song ever sung. Published in a plump, richly illustrated album, Petropoulos’ compendium set the prim and proper Athenian literary establishment on its ear, and went on to become a perennial best-seller.

      Setting the Athenian establishment on its ear has been the cornerstone of Petropoulos’ career. From his twenty year self-exile in Paris—“I’ll never go back, never!” he rumbles, eyes flashing with benign malice—a steady stream of outrageous essays, provocative articles and exasperatingly accurate, often hilarious books has flowed from his prolific pen as celestial retsina might flow from the unquenchable barrels of some cosmic taverna. Subjects embraced astonish in their diversity: Greece’s traditional bean soup, complete with a sophisticated etymological analysis of the various Balkanic and Eastern terms for the common yet extraordinary white kidney bean and its many local variants; the hilarious—and vituperatively condemned—“Good Thief’s Handbook,” which posits the world of second-story men and cat-burglars as a microcosmic metaphor for bourgeois society, with its own rigorous code of behavior and social norms. Academic convention and literary propriety intimidate Petropoulos not in the slightest. He has taken on, with Olympian equanimity, the Piraeus bird market; the ubiquitous kiosque/news-stand/mini-variety store called the periptero; and Greek homosexual slang. But despite the broad range of his work and the hidden sophistication of his method, his approach has always been dictated less by intellectual considerations, more by the roiling viscera. “I’m simply not interested in writing academic books which will be read only by other academics,” he snorts.

      Today, pushing seventy, Petropoulos has mellowed slightly. His bushy white beard seems less the avenging prophet’s and more that of the veteran Parisian intello. His manner has become more expansive, perhaps even contemplative as he looks back with affection on the micro-history of his past. Petropoulos’ anecdotes evoke a state of constant temporal flux as they weave back and forth across the decades. The years of absence have pried geographic particulars from his grasp, have liberated names and events from the constraints of linear chronology, but they have produced a limpid essence that has penetrated into every crevice and hollow of his consciousness. Nowhere does this subterranean wellspring of reminiscence flow closer to the surface than when the subject is Salonica in whose teeming streets he quickly learned, as a boy, to identify each national or religious group by its appearance and its speech. “To know who you were,” he says, “you had to know who everyone else was.”

      Each could be recognized by the trades and occupations most of its members exercised, a legacy of Ottoman rule. Armenians monopolized the coffee trade; Albanians specialized as butchers; Serbs held the pastry franchise; Thracian Greeks sold milk and yogurt; porters and itinerant tobacco sellers were Jewish. Under the Turks, the Albanians, who enjoyed a reputation for indomitable toughness and devotion to their masters, had been employed as security guards. Their responsibilities included protecting private property, and accompanying children to and from school. Both duties they performed with gusto. Danger, primarily from pederasts as bold as they were numerous, was acute and constant. After the capture of Salonica by the Greeks, the armed guards vanished as the community gradually abandoned its particularities. But a few Albanians stayed on, hawking baklava made with stale bread crumbs instead of the traditional walnuts. As for the pederasts, he laughs, “We kids knew how to resist, and who to stay away from.” Shoemaker’s and tailor’s shops were to be avoided; dry-goods merchants and boatmen given a wide berth.

      In Old Salonica each of the main national groups—the Turks, the Greeks, the Jews—had their own fire brigade, which patrolled their respective communities every night, waiting for the cannon high atop the Citadel to sound the alarm. The brigades would likewise fight fires only among their own, he reminisces, slipping effortlessly across the decades. The Turkish firemen had direct connections with the underworld, and would demand payment before unrolling their hoses. In many cases, these brigades—who were little more than organized brigands—would demolish intact houses in order to reach the building in flames. The luckless owners could only avoid disaster at the hands of the fire fighters by paying a handsome on-the-spot ransom. The Jewish brigades, while less given to depredation than their Turkish comrades-in-arms, sang marching songs in Ladino, which featured obscene or insulting refrains in Greek. “Relations between the communities were not necessarily idyllic, even then,” he says with a chuckle. “But that was Salonica. That was its wealth.”

      As befitted rulers and administrators, the Turks lived in isolation, their contact with the locals restricted to the barest minimum. The Ottoman system devolved considerable powers to the religious communities whose spiritual and relative administrative autonomy was protected by Islamic law. As rulers and mandatees of God, few learned Ladino, Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian or any of the other tongues spoken in Salonica: those supplicants who wished to speak to the Pasha could bring their dragoman. The Turkish overlords would spend their days in idleness, passing time in the city’s many coffee-houses, puffing on water pipes or sipping thick, syrupy coffee from demitasses, relates Petropoulos. “Back then, Salonica was famous for its plane trees, many of whose trunks were so thick that several men had to link arms to encircle them completely. In the summer, under these trees, the Turks would play backgammon. These same trees were also home to enormous bird populations, and it often happened that the backgammon players would be spattered by droppings. But they would keep right on playing, imperturbable, waiting until the foreign material was quite dry before brushing it carefully to the ground. They were the rulers, after all.”

      THE RULERS BEQUEATHED TO SALONICA—as they did to all of Greece—a legacy both cultural and material. Extirpating the Ottoman heritage has been one of the central tasks of the fabricators of Greek national consciousness. Proto-Hellenistic language purifiers sought to return Greek to the golden age of Periclean Athens by recreating a modern-day version of the ancient Attic dialect, expunging Turkish, Arabic and Italian words as they went. City planners conspired and acted to Europeanize the Balkan cities they inherited as Greece expanded northward.

      The ethno-purist mythifiers were quick to batten onto the Hegelian doctrine of rectilinear progress, recasting it as a kind of Balkan manifest destiny from which, 100 years later, modern-day Greek scholars still seem unable to break free. “Ottoman rule in the Balkans had been identified not only as religious and political oppression” writes University of Thessaloniki professor Alexandra Yerolympou, “but also as economic and social stagnation,” and describes its institutions as obsolete, “relying on juridical distinction of its subjects on the basis of religious affiliation.”¹⁷

      These judgments seem ironic when we compare the relative harmony in which dozens of ethnic groups coexisted within an Ottoman state where distinctions were made only along religious lines, to the region’s bloody history of ethnic strife between and within tiny states organized on the Western nationalist principle. Or when we reflect on the fate of Salonica’s once-flourishing Jewish community, now reduced by the triple-headed deus ex machina of fire, urban renewal and genocide, to a tiny, fearful remnant.

      But to cast the earnest, well-meaning Greek urbanists as first the agents, then the apologists for the destruction of the old city would be to fall too easily into a perverse kind of inverted nationalism. In fact, the progress-doctrine of the nineteenth century had become the main force within the “medieval” Ottoman state as a whole, and had marshaled behind it the prestige and might of expanding colonial Europe. As the Tanzimat of 1839 signaled the political and social westernization of the Empire, so it also sounded the death knell of the medieval city with its dark, fetid, disease-breeding lanes. On imperial order, sections of the Byzantine ramparts which ringed Salonica were demolished. The harbor-side walls were removed in 1870, opening the city to the sea and strengthening its vocation as a crossroads of Balkan trade and the Empire’s gateway to the West. A grid system

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