girl from Thessaloniki . . . Marigo you’ll go crazy when you hear Tsitsani
In Salonica not one, but several layers of the past lie poultice-like, so superposed, so interlocked, their lines of demarcation so blurred that they can hardly be distinguished. The shards of the ancient Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine city lie intermingled, at peace now, with the rubble and the ruin left by Venetians, Ottomans, Sephardic Jews, and Modern Greeks. What is true of historical artifact is true, too, of the mercurial substance of culture, the mist of memory. Adjacent to my neighborhood stood, at some point in its life, a Muslim cemetery of which not a trace remains. This was natural enough, considering its proximity to the White Tower, the main prison which then formed the south-easternmost apex of the city’s walls. Over time the graveyard fell into disuse, and by the late nineteenth century the shoreline around the Tower became the center of passenger and cargo traffic in the harbor, and home to the independent boatmen who plied their craft between the shore and the caïques and steamers anchored offshore. It was a place of constant din, where the cries of the waterfront mingled with the screams of tortured prisoners. With the boatmen came whores, hashish and liquor—the essential components of a mariner’s shore leave. And when the boatmen disappeared with the construction of a modern harbor, the whorehouses and hashish dens stayed on as incubators of rebetiko, hybrid offspring of Turkish and Byzantine musical traditions that expresses, far better than any Greek author with the possible exception of Nikos Kazantzakis, the country’s divided soul.
Tsitsanis, its master, made his home in these mean streets for 17 years, a spectator to the upheavals which wracked Salonica during and after World War II: Nazi occupation, the deportation of the Jews, liberation by the Communist-led guerrillas, civil war and political repression. Rebetiko music was far too subtle to allow itself to become immersed in the contentious political particularities of the moment, though; to speak, as the Greeks elegantly put it, of rope in the house of the hanged. It told, instead, the quotidian stories of people caught in the meat-grinder of social and economic stress; sang of the flight of misery from reality; celebrated the mundane and the commonplace, the carnal and the banal—the better to transfigure them. The more abyssal the sadness evoked, the greater the cathartic effect obtained. Divine intercession of art. “Cloudy Sunday”, Tsitsanis’ four-minute masterpiece of the rebetiko repertoire (and unofficial national anthem of Greece), exudes urban melancholy compounded by the emptiness of that day of the week when, alone, we must endure the company of ourselves:
Cloudy Sunday, how much you’re like my heart Always clouds, nothing but clouds Holy Jesus, Mother of God . . .
Rebetiko music, now squirreled away in tiny basement clubs in Athens where it has been reduced to a diversion for aging purists is still alive and well in Salonica. At the head of my street is a hole-in-the-wall restaurant which serves the neighborhood’s auto mechanics at noon before metamorphosing each night into a place where students and mature couples from what used to be called the working class can rub elbows, quaff cheap resinated wine, and order their favorite songs as they nibble from plates of grilled sausage, spicy meat-balls or lemony joints of roast lamb.
The house act is a guitar-bouzouki (a long-necked relative of the mandolin) duo which performs from a stage consisting of two straw-bottomed chairs shoved up against the wall next to the toilet door. No amplification is necessary in these cramped, resonant confines where tolerance of good-natured intimacy, a forgiving ear and winey nostalgia are the sole criteria for enjoyment. Kostas, the bouzouki player, makes up in enthusiasm what he lacks in pitch, and his enthusiasm is as substantial as it is contagious. But his sideman Theodoris, the guitarist, plays like a man battling for the fundamental values of rhythm and intonation against all but hopeless odds, speeding up or slowing down in an effort to keep pace with his surging, impetuous partner.
Late one midday Theodoris and I strike up an acquaintance. I’m wolfing down a portion of spaghetti in the restaurant after my daily labors in the library of the Institute for Balkan Studies while he and the proprietor discuss arrangements for the evening’s program. Indiscreetly I join the conversation (indiscretion in conversation is the rule in Greece where the most intimate details of your life are soon the stuff of well-meaning banter, clicking tongues and empathetic ‘po po po’s’), my eyes straying to the guitar case resting, resonant with potential, on the table next to mine. His business completed, Theodoris snaps open the case, pulls out his instrument and asks me what I would like to hear. Luxury of an autumn afternoon with no pressing engagements; with no engagements whatsoever. Play me Tsitsanis’ “Beautiful Salonica” . . .
You are the pride of my heart Thessaloniki my beauty, my sweet; I may live with Athens, that beguiler But it’s you I sing for every night . . .
ACROSS THE SQUARE, glaring into my living room, stands the White Tower: the massive, enigmatic cylindrical structure that is the emblem of Salonica. At dawn the sun’s first soft rays give it contour and depth. At noon it stands out in stark, almost one-dimensional relief against the sea and sky. On clear days when the biting north wind the Salonicians call the Vardari whistles down from the Balkans you can see it against the distant peak of Mount Olympus whence the old Gods, driven away by the monotheists, have fled to take up their stations as constellations in the night sky.
And at night, brightly lit by floodlights which obscure those faint constellations, it squats, stocky and self-assured and immovable, as opaque and inscrutable as the history of this darkly ancient town that smells still of the raw concrete that encases memory in an impenetrable shroud. But no matter how thick the concrete, that which it seeks to confine contrives to seep free, to ooze osmotically into the soil and the air.
The White Tower is to Salonica what the Acropolis is to Athens: a concentrated presence that does triple duty as identity, trade mark, and symbol. Like the Acropolis, it is every bit as ambiguous. Perhaps even—as talisman and expression of that most highly prized of contemporary values now that righteous indignation has become risible—ironic. Athenians in their millions file daily beneath the sharply etched rock crowned by the Parthenon, in the inescapable, overbearing shadow of one luminous moment of civilization far greater than their own could ever be. And, height of indignity, the emblem of a civilization since appropriated by the West in its inclusive frenzy to define itself against an Oriental Other of which modern Greece unwillingly partakes.
Here in Salonica, the White Tower functioned for almost five centuries not simply as symbol, but as the thing itself: the palpable material presence of that Other, the Ottoman Empire. But the Ottomans, who ruled the city with what cultivated misconception holds to have been the distillation of tyranny, also—inevitably—infused modern Greece with a repressed Oriental self, a hidden “soul” whose denial, concealment and effacement is the unifying thread of official modern Greek historiography as it attempts to fashion for itself, ex nihilo, a Western identity. For without such an identity, runs contemporary conventional wisdom, there can be no modernity and thus no existence.
The White Tower, say what historians call the sources, was probably built by the Venetians during their brief tour of duty as Salonica’s last Christian masters, before the Turks under Murad II, took the city for good in 1430. Its brutal yet sophisticated stone construction and crenellated battlements resemble nothing else: not the remains of the Byzantine walls nor the surviving Islamic monuments which possess none of its brooding power. Some say that when Sultan Soleiman I, “the Magnificent,” undertook repairs in the mid-sixteenth century, his skilled masons left an inscription which read “Tower of the Lion,” probably in reference to the lion of St. Mark, emblem of the Serenissima Repubblica, which up until then had marked the structure.3
During the early years of the Turkish regime the tower housed the Janissaries, the elite corps which forcibly recruited its members in early adolescence from among the non-Muslim population. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century it was transformed into a prison, and rapidly became known as the “Tower of Blood,” for the tortures and executions which were practiced there. Late in the nineteenth century, on the order of Sultan Abdulhamid II, but at the behest of the Western Powers, it was whitewashed, renamed the White Tower, and relieved of its carceral functions. Irony, did you say? Abdulhamid, the “Red Sultan” whose reputation for brutality went hand in hand with an equally firm resolve to shake