as people of all religious groups were authorized to purchase property and build houses, offices, theaters and restaurants. Salonica, show-window of the Empire, was marching double-time toward its European destiny with the kind of inevitability the latter-day high-priests of Structural Adjustment could recognize, maybe even identify with. The spectacle was as pathetic as it was grandiose.
Istanbul itself had established the precedent. Where once the Empire’s architects were commissioned by the Sultans to build mosques which gave material depth and contour to the Qur’anic dispensation, and in whose beauty the Sultans could accessorily bask, they now turned their talents to lavish sea-front palaces, state structures, and commercial buildings. In both the capital and in its second city the Empire proclaimed to all who could read the signs embodied in these new buildings that Islam, the cement which had held it together for six centuries, had turned frail and brittle, had become irrelevant.
PETROPOULOS SHOWS ME A SKETCH of the Salonica skyline in triptych: at the end of the nineteenth century; shortly after the Greek conquest during the First Balkan War of 1912; and today. The first panel shows a field of minarets, scattered like wild-flowers against a backdrop of hills; the second, rows of low-lying buildings minus the minarets against the same background; the third, a wall of high-rise apartments obliterating the background. The Ottomans’ attempts to transform it into a modern European city reflected the confluence of political power, speculation and high desperation that characterized the Empire’s last days. The project was short-lived: the change of masters amputated Salonica from the Macedonian hinterland, and rapidly reduced it to a bustling provincial town which would have to reinvent itself through the erasure of five centuries, a process some Greeks describe as “awakening from a long nightmare.”
Thus Salonica’s fleeting glory as the bridgehead of Ottoman modernity met its brutal end in early November, 1912, when the Greek army led by the Glucksbergs, père et fils—King George I and Crown Prince Constantine—entered the city in a driving rain. Symbolically, their route followed the Via Egnatia and beneath the triumphal arch of Galerius, in the footsteps of the legions of Rome and Byzantium. Popular acclaim was less than delirious; the occasion well short of triumphant. As the bandy-legged, unshaven, dark-skinned, mud-spattered infantrymen marched through the heart of the commercial district led by their mounted officers they encountered not happy throngs but indifference, locked shops and closed shutters. Small knots of enthusiastic Greeks looked on, of course, cheering and waving Greek flags. But the majority, the Jews, not only considered themselves loyal Ottoman citizens; they remembered how they had celebrated the victory of 1897, which had seen Turkish armies humiliate the Greeks and thrust far south into Greece. They remembered, too, that the Sultan had given them a new home more than four centuries before when a Christian monarch had expelled them from Spain. “The Greeks claim they liberated Salonica,” snorts Petropoulos. “But exactly whom did they liberate?”
The putative liberators of Salonica may have had more on their minds than the release from bondage of their unredeemed brethren, for the city’s Greek minority was relatively small. The first census carried out by the occupation authorities, in 1913, showed 61,439 Jews, 45,867 Turks, 39,956 Greeks, 6,263 Bulgars and nearly 5,000 of diverse other nationalities.18 As interpretation of census figures in defense of national interests has provided much of the ammunition for Balkan bloodshed, extreme caution must be employed in their use. The most reliable rule of thumb is to consider all ethnic-based census reports as flawed and suspect. The problem is, that in this region, there are none other.
Greece, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, was in the throes of the Megali Idea (the “Great Idea”) an aggressive strategy of national expansion designed to “restore” the Byzantine Empire and establish the capital of Greece in Constantinople. If this meant removing the infidel Turks, and blocking the equally exalted national aspirations of the Balkan states to the north, so be it. Athenian intellectuals dreamed of a Greece of “five seas and two continents,” while Greek military intelligence officers disguised as consular officials subverted the previously law-abiding minority communities scattered throughout the faltering Ottoman state. As the greater subversion of Ottoman Turkey was the principal aim of the Great Powers, they found it useful to flatter Athens’ megalomaniac aspirations, now letting the horse gallop ahead, now reining it in, to suit their own political and geostrategic designs.
King George was to pay the ultimate price for his ostentatious public support of Hellenic nationalism. Instead of retiring to the safety of the royal palace in the countryside near Athens, he chose to stay on in Salonica. The desire to calm increasingly vociferous anti-monarchical sentiments directed against the German-Danish royal family by the pro-British republican faction led by an ambitious Cretan politician called Eleftherios Venizelos may also have been a consideration. The King was wont to stroll unguarded through the streets, a living demonstration as much of his concern for the realm’s newly acquired subjects as of his foolhardiness. On one such constitutional, in early March, 1913, he was shot and killed on a quiet street in the eastern suburbs by a lone gunman, a Greek. The alleged killer, a mental defective, was said to have killed himself—conveniently—shortly after his arrest.
Crown Prince Constantine, liberator of Salonica and victor over the Turks, quickly ascended the throne. Unlike his cautious, diplomatically-minded father, the blustering, headstrong but mental light-weight Constantine fancied himself as a Supreme Commander. He was also an ardent Germanophile, who affected the spiked Prussian helmet as he participated in military exercises with his friends of the imperial German general staff. No one had failed to notice that King George had enjoyed close relations with the Entente, one member of which, France, had trained and equipped the victorious Greek army. Greek historians, asserts Petropoulos, have handled the assassination with an uncustomary lack of curiosity. Though no links between the killer and the pro-German lobby in Greece have ever been established, the regicide poisoned Greek domestic and foreign politics for decades, pitting the pro-German royalist faction against the pro-British supporters of Venizelos.
Nowadays Greece is a republic, of course, though the playboy grandson of the King, former heir apparent Constantine Glücksberg, still flirts with posing as a national unifier for a populace increasingly disgruntled with the cupidity of elected politicians, a concept copied from dusty British and American Cold War manuals. In the modishly nondescript Euro-capital, Athens, royalty has vanished both as memory and concept. In parochial Salonica, however, both monarchs still linger on in statue form. George I, the father, slumbers in leafy, marbled obscurity, remembered in a bust set in a mini-park marking the spot where he was shot, surrounded today by the indifference of pizza parlors, ice-cream shops and green-grocers. But Constantine the son, he of martial mien, can be seen astride his war-horse on the southern flank of Vardar Square. It was not always, however, thus.
For years, the monarch’s equestrian statue—Salonica’s marble horseman which has inspired, as far as I know, no local Pushkin—was hidden shamefully away in an obscure square named for the pre-war fascist dictator Metaxas. But during what the Greeks now call “the miserable seven years” of the Junta, the statue was installed at the foot of the Via Egnatia where it stands today, torso facing due eastward toward Constantinople, ultimate goal of Greek national fantasy, head turned harborward, toward the red-light district.
GREECE WAS NOT ALONE, of course, in pursuing an expansionist national policy. Its Balkan neighbors were assiduously pressing their own claims to all, or a portion, of European Turkey, at the heart of which lay Macedonia. Bulgaria, which had been brief master of most of the territory following Istanbul’s defeat in the 1877 Russo-Turkish war, had never abandoned its claim. Serbian extremists, stung by the Austrian occupation of Bosnia, founded an organization called “Black Hand” which was to provide exemplary leadership in the sacred struggle for Greater Serbia.
By early 1912, Austrian designs on the Balkans had become unmistakable. Serbia and Bulgaria, under Russian patronage, joined forces to block Austro-German expansion toward the Adriatic and the Aegean. A month later Greece and Bulgaria entered into a defensive alliance. The Russian scheme was a brilliant success. So brilliant that its creature, the Balkan League, soon began to act as though it had its own agenda. In the event, it did: the military defeat of Turkey and the partition of Macedonia.
In early October, Moscow and Vienna, those erstwhile adversaries,