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Europe … intended by nature to be the outlet for the trade of the whole Peninsula on the Aegean.” Any partition of the region among the nation-states of the Balkans threatened to cut it off from its key markets. Economic self-interest therefore helps explain why the city’s Jewish population in general, and its mercantile class in particular, remained loyal to the Ottoman sultans. Like many at the end of the nineteenth century, Miller thought that empires fostered trade more successfully than small states. He was one of the first commentators to suggest that as Ottoman power waned, so Austria-Hungary should “ ‘run down’ to Salonica and occupy Macedonia as she has already occupied Bosnia and the Hercegovina, to the general advantage of mankind.” But the nation-states of the Balkans proved more powerful than the great empires of the past, and Greece’s triumph left interwar Salonica in the unfavourable position many commentators had feared—cut off from its Balkan hinterland, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and the Levant, and enclosed within the confines of a small country. The timing too could not have been worse: opportunities for emigration—a regional safety-valve before 1912—were curtailed by American immigration quotas; the country was bankrupted by the war and struggling to regain international financial respectability, and to add to the gloom, the global economy was growing more slowly than ever before or since. The result was proletarianization, poverty and political unrest. 1
    With the coming of the refugees, the city acquired a new workforce, desperate for jobs, expecting help now not from its communal or religious leadership as in Ottoman times, but rather from the highly bureaucratic if disorganized state. The Greek government turned itself into a major employer, and the number of civil servants rose. But it found itself too in the middle of a series of increasingly bitter conflicts between workers and management. To the north the Bolsheviks were triumphant, and a new vocabulary of agitatsia, lockoutarisma and provocatsia started to be heard. For interwar Salonica was the cockpit of violent class struggle and a powerful labour movement built on the foundations laid by the old Workers’ Solidarity Federation. Venizelos and his generation, one-time revolutionaries, now became guardians of what they themselves called “the bourgeois status quo.” Labour militancy threatened the authority of the state, brought the city to a standstill, and eventually provided the pretext for the establishment of an anti-communist dictatorship in 1936.
    A C ITY OF W ORKERS
    A FTER HALF A CENTURY of industrialization, Salonica had become a city of workers. Two-thirds of the labour force of 105,000 recorded in 1928 worked for someone else; another 25,000 were self-employed or assisting relatives. But this was a world of tiny operations and small family firms, not giant combines or industrial plants. The manufacturing sector was mostly producing foodstuffs, textiles and leather goods just as under Abdul Hamid. Only 5000 men belonged to firms of any size. The rest were shoemakers, bakers or confectioners—much prized in the city—tailors, metal-workers and carpenters, odd-job men who owned carts and, later, cars. Heavy industry was virtually non-existent and regular wages the privilege of a few.
    Too many hands and changing tastes made most of the old trades precarious and uncertain. Jewish hamals still shouldered huge loads for shoppers and traders, and carters stabled their oxen and horses in the burnt-out ruins in the fire zone. But furriers, fez makers, organ-grinders and tinsmiths were on the way out. The lamplighters, street-butchers, sellers of salted fish and Albanian halvades slowly disappeared; so did the wandering vendors of salep and lemonade. Refrigeration and electrification eliminated the ice-sellers of Hortiatis. As a result, state-run soup kitchens at the bottom of the slump were feeding as many as