Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower

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СКАЧАТЬ Imams [akin to the twelve apostles], and many other features of their rites all bore a close resemblance to Christian practice. In southern Albania, according to Hasluck, legend claimed that Haji Bektash was himself from a Christian family – he had converted to Islam before coming to recognize the superiority of his original faith, whereupon he invented Bektashism as a bridge between the two. The lack of any basis in fact for the story should not disguise its symbolic truth. As one close observer of the movement explained: ‘It is their doctrine to be liberal towards all professions and religions, and to consider all men as equal in the eyes of God.’³²

       The Powers of the City

      Beneath the confessional divides and helped by such creeds, there existed a kind of submerged popular religion, defined by common belief in the location and timing of divine power. Take the calendar itself: whether under their Christian or Muslim titles, St George’s Day in the spring and St Dimitrios’s Day in the winter marked key points in the year for business and legal arrangements affecting the entire society, the dates for instance when residential leases expired, shepherds moved between lowland and upland pastures, and bread prices were set by the local authorities.

      Salonica’s Casimiye Mosque, which had formerly been St Dimitrios’s church, saw the cult of the city’s patron saint continuing under Muslim auspices. Casim himself was an example – one of many in the Balkans – of those holy figures who were Islamicized versions of Christian saints. Dimitrios’s tomb was kept open for pilgrims of both faiths by the Mevlevi officials who looked after the mosque. Near the very end of the empire, a French traveller caught the final moments of this arrangement and described how it worked. He was ushered into a dark chapel by the hodja, together with two Greeks who had come for divine help. This conversation followed:

      ‘Your name?’ asked the Turk …‘Georgios’, replied the Greek, and the Turk, repeating ‘Georgios’, held the knot in the flame, then commented to the Greek with an air of satisfaction that the knot had not burned. A second time. ‘The name of your father and your mother?’ ‘Nikolaos my father, Calliope my mother.’ ‘And your children?’ And when he had thus made three knots carefully, he put the sacred cord in a small packet which he dipped in the oil of the lamp, added a few bits of soil from the tomb, wrapped it all up and handed it to the Greek who seemed entirely content. Then he explained: ‘If you are ill, or your father, your mother, your children, put the knot on the suffering part and you will be cured.’ After which, turning to me, the Turk asked ‘And you?’ I shook my head. The Greek was amazed and believed I had not understood and explained it all to me. When I continued to refuse he seemed regretful. ‘Einai kalon’ [It is good] he told me sympathetically … and the two Greeks, together with the Muslim sacristan, left the mosque happily.³³

      These rituals were not especially unusual, though the setting was. ‘If your heart is perplexed with sorrow,’ the Prophet Mohammed is said to have advised, ‘go seek consolation at the graves of holy men.’ Muslims – especially women – made the ziyaret at times of domestic need, and the Arabic term was taken over by Salonica’s Jews, who spoke of going on a ziyara to pray at the tomb of rabbis or deceased relatives. Christian women used both the Jewish cemetery and Muslim mausoleums when collecting earth from freshly dug graves to use against evil spirits. Mousa Baba, Meydan-Sultan Baba and Gul Baba gathered pilgrims to their tombs, even after the twentieth-century exodus of the city’s Turks. In the 1930s, Christian women from nearby neighbourhoods were still lighting candles at the tomb of Mousa Baba and asking his help [against malaria], to the surprise of some Greek commentators who could not understand how they could do this ‘in a city where hundreds of martyrs and holy saints were tortured and martyred in the name of Christ’. The answer was that for many of those who came to seek his help, Mousa Baba was not really a Muslim holy man at all. Rather he was Saint George himself, who had metamorphosed into a Turk with supernatural powers: ‘I heard this when we refugees first came here from Thrace, from a Turkish woman, who told me she had heard it from elderly Turkish women who had explained it to her.’ Why had Saint George assumed this disguise? For the same reason that Sabbatai Zevi had converted, according to his followers: to make the unbelievers believe.³⁴

      Power to keep the dead at rest was one of the chief attributes of religious authority, the reverse side of the power to curse or excommunicate. Both powers formed a key weapon in the armoury of the city’s spiritual leaders but also transcended the bounds of religious community. According to a local story an archbishop converted to Islam and became a leading mollah. While he was still a Christian he had, in a moment of anger, cursed one of his congregation: ‘May the earth refuse to receive you!’ The man died and after three years passed his body was exhumed. Of course it was found in pristine condition ‘just as if he had been buried the day before’ – the power of the excommunication had evidently endured even though the cleric himself had since converted, and only he could revoke it, even though he was now a Muslim: ‘Having obtained the Pasha’s permission, he repaired to the open tomb, knelt beside it, lifted his hands and prayed for a few minutes. He had hardly risen to his feet when, wondrous to relate, the flesh of the corpse crumbled away from the bones and the skeleton remained bare and clean as it had never known pollution.’ Christian, Muslim or Jew, one looked wherever it was necessary to make the spell work and bring peace to the living and the dead.³⁵

      For the city was peopled by spirits – evil as well as good. ‘There are invisible influences everywhere in Turkey’, writes Fanny Blunt, a long-time resident of Salonica, in her classic study of Ottoman beliefs and customs – vampires in cemeteries, spirits guarding treasures buried in haunted houses, djinns in abandoned konaks, and enticing white-clad peris who gathered anywhere near running water. Fountains were dangerous, especially at certain times of the year, and antiquities like the Arch of Galerius were well known to possess evil powers, if approached from the wrong angle. Church leaders tried to draw doctrinal distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of the supernatural, but Salonica’s inhabitants did not bother. If the rabbi or bishop could not help them, they appealed to witches, wise men or healers. The religious authorities never felt seriously threatened by such practices, and it is a striking difference with Christian Europe that there were never witchcraft trials in the Ottoman domains. Devils, demons and evil spirits – euphemistically termed ‘those from below’, or ‘those without number’, or more placatingly, ‘the best of us’ – were a fact of life.³⁶

      ‘De ozo ke lo guadre el Dio – May God guard him from the Eye’, elderly Jewish ladies muttered. Was there anyone in the city who did not fear being jinxed by the evil eye – to mati for the Greeks, the fena göz for the Turks – and sought remedies against it? All avoided excessive compliments and feared those who paid them, cursing them under their breath. Moises Bourlas tells us in his wonderful memoirs how his mother was sitting out in the sun one fine Saturday with her neighbours, gossiping and chewing pumpkin seeds when some gypsy fortune-tellers passed them and shouted: ‘Fine for you, ladies, sitting in the sun and eating pumpkin seeds!’ To which his mother instantly and prudently replied – sotto voce in Judeo-Spanish, so that they could not understand: ‘Tu ozo en mi kulo’ [Your eye in my arse].³⁷

      Fanny Blunt lists accepted remedies: ‘garlic, cheriot, wild thyme, boar’s tusks, hares’ heads, terebinth, alum, blue glass, turqoise, pearls, the bloodstone, carnelian, eggs [principally those of the ostrich], a gland extracted from the neck of the ass, written amulets and a thousand other objects.’ She tried out the ass gland on her husband, the British consul, when he was ill, and reported it a success. For keeping babies in good health, experts recommended old gold coins, a cock’s spur or silver phylacteries containing cotton wool from the inauguration of СКАЧАТЬ