Read Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 for Free Online Page A

“Mauritarian-Islamic” and even the occasional glimpse of Bauhaus—alongside the rather stolid Byzantine-Italian mode that Hébrard had deemed most suitable for the city asa whole. There were also gaps and lags: the central waterfront square, Plateia Aristotelous, was finished only in the 1950s and 1960s, and Plateia Eleftherias was just one of the planned open spaces to be turned into a car-park.
    Even the city’s Byzantine character was emphasized in a slightly absent-minded fashion, as if the planners were more interested in the future than the past. Mosques were converted back into churches, and restored—or, in the case of the fire-ravaged Saint Dimitrios, rebuilt—in a way that cleansed them of the accretion of centuries and brought out what the architects regarded as their “highest value.” Sheds, shops and other unworthy elements were removed from the main sites, allowing them to be appreciated in a sanitized environment stripped of all distractions and encumbrances. Yet apart from the use of a few well-known churches as visual reference points, the planners appear to have attached little importance to the city’s monumental past. The Arch of Galerius still sits as an afterthought near the eastern end of Egnatia; had Hébrard had his way, it would have been dwarfed by an entirely new colossal Arch of Triumph—never, as it turned out, to be built. To the fury of the inspector of antiquities, no provision was made for an archaeological museum, and he had to struggle to get permission to house his collection in the Yeni Djami, the Ma’min mosque.
    Downtown, the basic layout of streets remained surprisingly close to the plan’s original conception. But outside the city centre the plan’s impact fell away sharply. Grand schemes for garden towns remained on paper, and many refugees either housed themselves in shacks made of beaten-out tin, planks and board, or were housed in the army barracks and military hospitals left by the departing French, Italians and British. A model workers’ settlement was only half-finished. Mawson’s vision of a new university campus adjacent to the eastern walls would have to wait till after the German occupation in the Second World War. And, as we shall see, with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of new refugees in 1922–23, the city expanded rapidly in all directions, too quickly and too haphazardly for the hard-pressed municipal and national authorities to do much more than monitor what was happening.
    But back in 1917 the planners could have been forgiven for failing to anticipate the new challenges the city would face. Between 1917 and 1923 the Greek-Turkish antagonism reached a new pitch, climaxing in a further war, the Greek landing and occupation of Izmir, and the invasion of Anatolia; this was followed by catastrophic defeat at the handsof Mustafa Kemal’s new Turkish army, and a forced movement of populations without any precedent in history. More than thirty thousand Muslims were obliged to leave the city. At the same time, nearly one hundred thousand Christian refugees arrived from eastern Thrace, Anatolia and the Black Sea, and turned Greeks back into a majority of Salonica’s population for the first time since the Byzantine era. In 1913, Greeks had been a minority of the city’s 157,000 inhabitants; by 1928 they were 75% of its population of 236,000. Thanks to war, the fire and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, this was now a new city, organized on new principles and populated by newcomers. By 1930, only a small proportion of Salonica’s inhabitants could remember the city as it had existed in the days of Abdul Hamid. 12

19
Workers and the State
    P ROSPERITY HAD ALWAYS COME to Salonica through its command of far-flung trading routes. At one time, these linked it to Venice and Egypt; later, to France, Russia, Britain and central Europe. It was, wrote William Miller in 1898, “one of the most flourishing commercial towns of Eastern