sought shelter and work, transforming the remains of the Jewish-Ottoman city of Selanik into Salonica, “poor mother” of the ingathering of the Greeks, metropolis of the scorned and the downtrodden, a seed-bed for communist agitation. The coup de grace was administered by the second boom, which was touched off by the Colonels’ junta. Architecturally, Salonica is their legacy: an anarchic gimcrack hodge-podge of concrete, speed and acquisitiveness which surpasses in its caricatural excess even the matrix from which it sprang.
As it was a monastic property, the Holy Apostles’ was one of Salonica’s wealthiest churches. For this reason its frescoes and mosaics—for both techniques were used in this graceful building erected in the waning years of the Byzantine Empire—bear the scars of time and human depredation, the worst of which came at the hands of fellow Christians: Catholics, schismatics, barbarians. In 1185, marauding Normans from Sicily sacked Salonica. A detailed account of events by Eusthathios, the Archbishop who witnessed its capture, survives in the form of a funeral oration for the sufferings of the city brimming with indignation at the abandonment of the defenseless citizenry by the Byzantine military who had been sent to rescue them in their hour of need.
. . . now the city, after our opponents had burst into it, was subjected to the usual ravages of war. Our own men . . . fled without turning round, with no exceptions except for a few who could be counted easily. (. . .) The barbarians, having filled the whole city, beginning with the eastern gates, now mowed down our men and heaped up those sheaves in many stacks to make the fodder beloved of Hades . . . no house could be found in which mercy was shown to the inhabitants.36
The Normans, who Greek historians of today liken to the Nazi occupiers of 1941-1944, stripped the icons and wall paintings of the Holy Apostles’ of their gold leaf and melted it down as booty before departing. The great mosaics were added later, on the eve of the Turkish conquest when, under the Paleologue dynasty, religious art reached new summits of expressiveness. In their fluid, harmonious interplay of form and color, the works resemble those of the anonymous masters who created the masterworks of the Monastery of Chora, in Constantinople, the pinnacle of late-Byzantine iconography.
The Holy Apostles’‚ like most of Salonica’s main churches, was transformed into a mosque by the conquering Ottomans who, it is said, methodically pock-marked fresco-bearing surfaces to prepare them for a coating of new plaster which would hide the religiously offensive images. Or so the resident byzantinologist suggests, although it was common enough Byzantine practice for church frescos to be plastered over to provide a fresh surface for an improved version of the religious scenes depicted, to make room for a portrait of the church’s benefactor, or to display its patron saint in a more flattering or martial light. Providentially, the church’s mosaics, while superficially damaged, are intact. They are breathtaking.
The Ottomans must have been, in the eyes of Salonica’s pious Orthodox population, a reincarnation of the iconoclasts, the image-smashers they had despised. The city of Saint Demetrius owed its reputation as Protector of the True Faith to its staunch opposition to the Iconoclast movement that swept the Empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The iconoclasts, driven by the hot winds of emergent Islam (a chronicler of the imagesmashing emperor Leo III called him “the Saracen-minded”37) denounced the veneration of images as idol worship, and sought to strip the church walls bare. For more than eighty years, divided by a brief interval of icon-worship, their writ was law until rescinded by the “restoration of orthodoxy.”
Leo’s motives for attacking images are as obscure as the history of the movement he led, since the victorious icon-worshippers violently suppressed its works. Some historians speculate that the Emperor, an Easterner himself, wished to accommodate the Jews and the Muslims, the better to convert them; others claim he wished to remove education from the hands of the clergy, attack the entrenched feudal power of the monasteries and so consolidate secular rule—a “progressive” reformer far ahead of his time. His much excoriated successor Constantine V Copronymus (“he whose Name is Excrement”) was a model of intolerance who sought to smash not only all depictions of the sacred, but the monastic orders which had perverted and commercialized them. But no religious strictures, no public humiliation of monks could overcome the deep-rooted semi-pagan attachment of the simple folk to the images which depicted, while at the same time they embodied, the saints and holy martyrs, themselves re-embodiments of the ancient cthonic deities of the earth and sky and sea. In 787, the seventh and last ecumenical council of the Eastern Church was convened. At its final meeting, in Constantinople, it reinstated image worship and pronounced anathema on those who refused to accept its fiat. In Salonica, stronghold of a monastic power that would violently reassert itself centuries later in the struggle of the Hesychastes against the Zealots, there was rejoicing.
As the victorious Ottomans consolidated their rule over the second city of Byzantium, the venerated images, the mosaics were once again covered over. But the plaster of the devout conquerors preserved many from destruction. When revealed by cautious restoration, the brilliant reds and golds shone forth in unadulterated glory, as they do to this day in the Church of the Holy Apostles, preserve of the specialists, ignored by the feckless, impious man on the street for whom only the warlike Saint Demetrius holds attraction.
Feeling a touch feckless and impious myself, I sit down in the shade on a low wall as the group hurtles off to its next destination. Salonica’s past is mute, but not of its own volition. No, it has been all but reduced to silence. What remains of its voice is obscured by the ambient cacophony of traffic resounding in the narrow streets. So if you think you hear a whisper—perhaps it was only the afternoon breeze off the water humming through the high embrasures of a church wall, or the flutter of women’s voices from a neighboring balcony—stop to listen.
A MONTH LATER—it’s early December now but the weather is indolent and tepid—I embark on one of my periodic forays into the upper town, crossing the Via Egnatia and Saint Demetrius street. Leaving Kemal’s house behind I amble uphill along the cobbled lanes past the compound of the church of Saint Nicholaos Orphanos, a walled, weed-grown garden-oasis, thick with cypresses and orange trees, in the heart of the city. This afternoon my destination is the Acropolis, the walled citadel crowned with its lowering Byzantine-Ottoman fortress, perpetual refuge of the city’s defenders, ultimate rampart against invading barbarians. Here, more than anywhere else in Salonica, the two empires converge, dominating the skyline to this day.
Derelict land occupies much of the space within the citadel precinct: A no-man’s-land of thistles and wild grass, a neutral zone littered with halfdecomposed garbage and discarded plastic water bottles. Along the far borders of this inhospitable ground, as though far enough removed from the shadow of the fortress to avoid its contagion, stands a scattering of modest dwellings, some of them built right into the inner walls of the citadel, survivors of the first wave of refugees which settled in Salonica after being uprooted from Anatolia in 1922. Suddenly there is a rush, more felt than heard, of many small wings. A flight of trained pigeons circles overhead, then homes in on a courtyard. I mosey over to the fence and strike up a conversation with the householder, a stocky, balding man who doubles, he explains, as pigeon trainer. “It’s the only hobby we can afford up here,” he says, waving his hand about him in a half-circle. “And we can always eat ‘em if we have to.”
We exchange a few words of regret at the Swiss army’s decision to disband its carrier pigeon corps, and I wander upward, scuffing along the weedclogged footpaths which ring the fortress. Two adolescent boys lounge on a stone wall—surely an early Byzantine relic—puffing cigarettes and talking soccer. The sky has clouded over; dampness rises from the ancient earth. The late afternoon has turned distinctly melancholy. The hour is propitious for my encounter with the Zealots, here on the ground where they made their last, heroic stand.
TOLIS KAZANTZIS, WHO LOVED TO TELL STORIES that cut sharply against the grain of authority, stories that probe like a scalpel for posturing and hypocrisy, first told me of these hard-bitten communalists over a late-night meal in one of the psarotavernas that line the shore. Impossible to remember how we’d gotten onto the subject. The meal had ended, our table was littered with fish bones, bread crumbs and olive pits; bits of spicy cabbage salad floated in watery puddles of oil and lemon dressing, our stubby wine glasses were