Leon Sciaky - Farewell to Salonica: City at the Crossroads

City at the Crossroads

PAUL DRY BOOKS
Philadelphia 2003

To Frances and Peter
with my love

First Paul Dry Books Edition, 2003

Paul Dry Books, Inc.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
www.pauldrybooks.com

Copyright1946, renewed 1974, Peter Sciaky
All rights reserved

Text type: Hiroshige Book
Display type: Barbedor family
Composed by P. M. Gordon Associates, Inc.
Designed by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sciaky, Leon, 1893

Farewell to Salonica : city at the crossroads / by Leon Sciaky.1st Paul Dry Books ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-58988-259-1 (alk. paper)

1. Selnik (Turkey)Social life and customs. 2. TurkeyEthnicrelations. 3. SephardimTurkey. 4. JewsTurkey. 5. Thessalonik (Greece)Social life and customs. 6. TurkeyHistory. I. Title.

DR432 .S34 2003

305.892'4049565dc21

2003007214

ISBN 978-1-58988-259-1

The memoir you are about to read documents a lost city. The Salonica of Leon Sciakys childhood no longer exists. Today the city is Thessaloniki, a Greek city with a Greek name and a mostly Greek population. When Leon Sciaky was a boy, however, in the years just before and after 1900, the city still belonged to the Ottoman Empire. The Salonica of Sciakys youth was a remarkably polyglot world. Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian, French, Spanish, and Hebrew were all spoken regularly in the citys busy streets and quays, with these last two languages holding a clue to one aspect of Salonicasand Sciakysunusual history. In 1890, roughly half of the citys one hundred thousand inhabitants were Jewish, many of them merchants and bankers to the citys robust overland and overseas trade. Descendents of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, from Italy in 1493, and from Portugal in 1497, the Jews of Salonica spoke a fifteenth-century Spanish dialect known as Ladino.

In Sciakys memoir, the integration of Jews into the life of the city is complete. The Sciaky family living room, the varandado, half eastern and half western in decoration, represented a microcosm of the city, and the city mirrored back this sophisticated mixing of languages and cultures. Sciakys classmates at the Petit Lyce Franais were French, Greek, Spanish-Jewish, Serbian, Armenian, Turkish, and Montenegrin. This peaceful diversity was made possible in part by the citys location on the far edges of the decaying Ottoman Empire, along with the relatively liberal attitudes of that Empire toward its minority inhabitants, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.

However, this tranquil coexistence was not to last. In 1908, the ambitious but inexperienced Young Turks sought to restore constitutional rule to the Ottoman Empire. By 1911, it was clear that these idealistic young men had failed to bring anything but a narrow nationalism into the land. Former coalitions across ethnic groups began to collapse as Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks, Slavs, Albanians, and Vlachs increasingly asserted their own territorial ambitions during the Balkan Wars of 191213. These wars resulted in the formation of the modern state of Turkey and the transfer to Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia of almost all of the former Turkish holdings west of Constantinople. Salonica, and most of the region known then as Macedonia, went to Greece. (See maps, pp. xiixiii.) These changes ended a time of relatively benign neglect for Salonica. Rapid Hellenization of the newly Greek territories, the further unrest of World War I, and the destruction by fire of a significant portion of the city in 1917 sealed off fin-de-sicle Salonica forever in the memories of former inhabitants like Sciaky.

By the time the twenty-three-year-old Leon Sciaky and his family left Salonica in 1915 to establish themselves in the more stable business environment of New York, Salonica had already become a different cityone less comfortable in its diversity. Like the Sciakys, many non-Greeks, Jewish and otherwise, left Salonica following the Balkan Wars and World War I. All but sixteen hundred of the citys fifty thousand Jewish inhabitants perished in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Today, fewer than twelve hundred Jews live in Thessaloniki.

In Farewell to Salonica, Leon Sciaky brings to life an alluring world where people of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds lived in unselfconscious acceptance of their differences and true appreciation of their common concerns and aspirations.

All the miracles and victories

that the Lord performs are by

virtue of the plain people.

Midrash on Psalms, Chapter 119

From the minaret of the mosque down the street comes the sunset call to prayer:

Allahu ekber, Allahu ekber,

Laillah illAllah...

On the balcony overlooking the garden a little boy of five stands entranced. His hands grasp the railing, his blond, tousled head is pressed between two of the round columns of the balustrade. He listens intently to the muezzin, away up in the sky. The melancholy chant settles down on the neighborhood like a soft summer shower. The little boy sees the turbaned head linger for a moment after the call, to glance at the west.

A few minutes before, the sun had glowed fiercely crimson behind the olive trees and splashed the vine-covered walls of the garden with huge bloody streaks. The windows on the other side of the street had caught the fire and spilled it on the flower beds and on the graveled paths between the shrubs. For a moment the conflagration in the west and its reflection in the east burned with equal fierceness. In that short moment the shadows in the garden seemed to vanish as if by enchantment, and every object lost its solidity. The masses of ferns near the well, the roses and borders of vervain, the patches of multicolored portulacas became a velvety carpet of fantastic pattern which an eccentric dyer had dipped into a vat of red tint.

Now only a narrow gash remains behind the olive trees. And the lone cottony cloud in the eastern sky holds all that is left of the radiance. For yet another moment it seems as if the dying day were to dawn anew.