I
An important feature of the Fifth Mediterranean was the discovery of the First Mediterranean, and the rediscovery of the Second. The Greek world came to encompass Bronze Age heroes riding the chariots described by Homer, and the Roman world was found to have deep roots among the little-known Etruscans. Thus, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entirely new perspectives on the history of the Mediterranean were opened up. An early lead was given by the growth of interest in ancient Egypt, discussed in the previous chapter, though that was closely linked to traditional biblical studies as well. In the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour introduced well-heeled travellers from northern Europe to classical remains in Rome and Sicily, and Englishmen saw it as an attractive alternative to time spent at Oxford or Cambridge, where those who paid any attention to their studies were more likely to be immersed in ancient texts than in ancient objects.1 On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation of ancient works of art was renewed in the late eighteenth century, as the German art historian Winckelmann began to impart a love for the forms of Greek art, arguing that the Greeks dedicated themselves to the representation of beauty (as the Romans failed to do). His History of Art in Antiquity was published in German in 1764 and in French very soon afterwards, and was enormously influential.
In the next few decades, discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which Nelson’s cuckolded host, Sir William Hamilton, was closely involved, and then in Etruria, further enlarged northern European interest in ancient art, providing interior designers with rich patterns, and collectors with vast amounts of loot – ‘Etruscan vases’, nearly all in reality Greek, were shipped out of Italy as the Etruscan tombs began to be opened up. In Greece, it was necessary to purchase the consent of Ottoman officials before excavating and exporting what was found; the most famous case, that of the Parthenon marbles at the start of the nineteenth century, was succeeded by other acquisitions for northern museums: the Pergamon altar was sent to Berlin, the facings of the Treasury of Atreus from Mycenae were sent to the British Museum, and so on. The survival of so many sculptures of naked men and women aroused aesthetic and, not surprisingly, erotic passions. It became possible to make proxy visits to the ancient sites of the Mediterranean by wandering through the great museums of England, France and Germany, where the ancient collections were suffused with the principles of Winckelmann: to understand classical art, it was vital to appreciate its beauty.2 The Mediterranean world was also imported into northern Europe by way of the imaginative reconstructions of the classical past painted by artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and J. W. Waterhouse in England. Alma-Tadema’s almost photographic attention to carefully researched detail made him extremely popular, as, undoubtedly, did the inclusion of naked young women in several of his canvases.3
It was not considered important to tread the soil of ancient Hellas. The legends of Troy were myths about nonexistent gods and heroes, but romantic assumptions about Greece and the Greeks gained strength as the Greeks emancipated themselves from Ottoman rule. The most famous exponent of this romantic view was Lord Byron, who died of fever in 1824 in Greece while campaigning against the Turks. He had been fully exposed to the classical past a decade earlier, while he was engaged on a Grand Tour that encompassed much of the northern Mediterranean – Italy, Albania, Greece. Yet it would be hard to argue that his interest in Greece was motivated by a profound attachment to its classical past, rather than a romantic belief in liberty. Indeed, the British could be quite unromantic about Greece. Between 1848 and 1850 Lord Palmerston, who had favoured Greek independence, unleashed his fury on the Greek government after it failed to compensate a Gibraltarian Jew, Don Pacifico, for damage done to his property by a rioting mob. The Royal Navy blockaded Athens until the Greeks gave way, to the fury of the French and the Russians, who, with Great Britain, were the co-guarantors of Greek independence. But Palmerston knew best, resoundingly appealing to the classics against, not in favour of, the behaviour of the Greeks:
As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.
Something of the spirit of ancient Hellas could be assumed to have persisted in the Greek love of liberty, but it was not easy to see the descendants of Perikles and Plato in the Greeks of the early nineteenth century. And if one wanted true Romans, one needed only to turn to the British.
II
There were a few who believed literally in the tales of Troy. The discovery of the civilizations of the Aegean Bronze Age began, as has been seen, with the literalist obsessions of Heinrich Schliemann, who first visited Troy in 1868 and who, five years later, unearthed what he declared to be the ‘Treasure of Priam’. At a time when the principles of stratigraphy and dating were still undeveloped, Schliemann happily applied instinct in the identification of whatever he found. Passing through Ithaka, he pulled out of the ground a score of ancient urns; the problem was not whether they were the urns of Odysseus’ family, but which member’s ashes lay in which urn.4 In 1876 he was already digging at Mycenae, which was easier to identify than Troy, for the Lion Gate had remained partially visible over the millennia. There, predictably, he found the tombs of Agamemnon and family. He was more interested in validating Homer than in the political implications of his discoveries, but racial theorists soon began to capitalize on his revelations, arguing that the founders of the first Greek civilization, and therefore of high European culture, had been blond, blue-eyed Aryans.5 In scholarly circles, though, it took a long while – eighty years – to convince anyone that the Mycenaeans were closely related to later Greeks and even spoke an early form of Greek. And here the arguments turned on the peculiar scripts that excavators began to find in Greece and Crete: it was tiny hieroglyphs to which his short-sighted eyes were well suited that drew Sir Arthur Evans to Crete, and led him to uncover and, no less importantly, reconstruct what he called the ‘palace of Minos at Knossos’.
Evans’s career in Crete is best understood against the background of political and social changes that were taking place on the island at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. By 1900 around 30 per cent of Cretans were Muslim, mostly Greek-speaking and of Greek descent. The Muslims included the major landholders and a high proportion of merchants, and the Muslim population was concentrated in the towns, while the Christians were traditionally scattered in the countryside.6 The winning of independence by the Greeks of the mainland raised hopes among Christian Cretans that they would be able to enter the new kingdom. Their aim was enôsis, ‘union’; and following a Greek rebellion against the Ottomans in 1821, which lasted a good nine years, trouble simmered in Crete throughout the century. Greek historians note the ruthless reprisals of the Turks, though neither side had clean hands – at the end of the century the Muslims of eastern Crete suffered horribly. The European powers recognized that Crete could not simply be added to the Greek kingdom; with Turkish consent, it was conferred on Muhammad Ali, and for ten years from 1830 the island was governed from Egypt. A committee of Greeks offered the island to Great Britain, which had no interest in governing Crete or in upsetting the eastern Mediterranean apple-cart.7 The Ottomans were perfectly aware of the need to compromise, and permitted the Cretans ever greater autonomy from 1868 onwards, though this did not satisfy the advocates of enôsis, and by 1897 they were recruiting volunteers to their cause from as far away as Scandinavia, Britain and Russia.
In 1898 the war-torn island was finally granted complete autonomy under a High Commissioner, Prince George of Greece, under French, Italian and British protection, but the sultan in Constantinople remained the nominal suzerain, for he simply would not let go of his lands, still less when the beneficiaries would mainly be Greek Christians. The island government, on which both communities were represented, tried with all its energy to stimulate the economy, but many Muslims left Crete now peace had come, and many had already fled while civil war was being waged. Reconstructing the economy was understood to involve a reconstruction of Cretan identity as well. In 1898 Arthur Evans required plenty of hands to help him excavate Knossos, and among its first acts the Cretan government obligingly passed a series of laws encouraging foreign archaeological projects and even permitting the export of artefacts.8 The Cretans saw this as a public relations exercise, a chance to make Crete’s presence known through revealing its past in the museums of the protecting powers.
Here was an island in search of peace, and, as his diggers exposed Knossos, Evans conjured up an image of a peaceful Crete in his attempt to interpret the puzzling ruins that he found. Evans’s Crete was a kingdom ruled by someone he assumed to be named Minos. His interpretation reflected his sincere wishes for the future of Crete as much as his assumptions about its past; he viewed Minoan Crete as a gentle, nature-loving matriarchal society, in which even the king’s male courtiers became feminized: dedicated followers of fashion whose delight, like that of the court women, was in pirouetting on the great ‘Dancing Floor’ he had identified. He made his workmen dance for him in an attempt to recover the magic of Minoan Crete.9 Out of small fragments of Minoan frescoes big, bold paintings of peace-loving princes and chattering court ladies were reconstructed. The reconstructed palace at Knossos, which owed so much to his fertile imagination, was thus a modernist temple of peace.
III
Cyprus, whose history in many respects mirrored that of Crete, was another island where the Turks found themselves under increasing pressure, although the Muslim proportion of the population remained a little lower. There, events within mainland Greece had a great impact: from 1821 onwards the Greek Cypriots became restive, and the Turkish governor prohibited non-Muslims from carrying arms. Up to 25,000 Cypriots left for Greece in the 1830s, aiming to acquire Greek citizenship before returning to the island as subjects of the Greek king, which brought them the protection of the British, Russian and French consuls as guarantors of Greek independence, to the irritation of the Ottoman authorities.10 Even so, the sense of ‘Greekness’ of the Orthodox majority on Cyprus should not be exaggerated: ideas of union with a Greek motherland were generated more in Greece than in Cyprus, where for long periods inter-community relations had been quite peaceful. The British consulate in Cyprus cooperated with the Turkish authorities to ensure that Greek advocates of enôsis were kept under control: in 1854 the British vice-consul supplied the governor with information about a treasonable pamphlet attributed to the principal of the Greek high school in Nicosia. The warm ties between the vice-consul and the governor were also expressed in an invitation from the governor to a party in honour of his son’s circumcision in 1864: ‘I beg to invite you for the whole duration of the festival, which will begin on Monday and continue until Thursday, and also to dinner on the four days.’11 Given its position between Anatolia, Syria and Egypt, the value of Cyprus was primarily strategic. It produced a surplus of some basic agricultural goods such as barley, exported to Syria, and carob, exported to Alexandria, but the standard of living was not high, and – to cite a late eighteenth-century visitor – ‘imports were of very small consequence, because Cyprus imported just enough for the wants of its own scanty inhabitants’: some fine cloths, tin, iron, pepper and dyestuffs.12 By the late nineteenth century dyes were put to good use in local industry: white English calico cloths were brought across from Beirut and dyed in local workshops, and quite an active silk industry developed. But Cyprus formed part of a local, eastern Mediterranean, network, and its international connections were rather limited.13 However, with the growth in interest in antiquities, a new and largely illicit trade out of Cyprus began to grow. Between 1865 and 1875, the American consul, General Louis Palma di Cesnola, was one of the most assiduous collectors of what he called ‘my treasures’; much of his plunder from the magnificent site at Kourion reached the Metropolitan Museum in New York.14
The weakness of Ottoman power in the eastern Mediterranean became ever more obvious when the British prevailed upon the sultan to cede the administration of the island to Great Britain in 1878. The sultan, Abdülhamid II, understood that he needed British support if he were to keep the Russians at bay, for the Russians still hoped to establish a permanent presence in the Mediterranean, which could be achieved only if they were able to maintain free access through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. British support for the Ottomans was ebbing away as news reached Great Britain of massacres of Armenians and others who opposed Turkish authority; British sympathy for the Greeks living beyond the boundaries of the independent kingdom also remained very strong.15 So Cyprus was seen as a down-payment for continuing friendship. In the typical Ottoman style, the Sublime Porte retained notional sovereignty over the island, and the British were supposed to remit any profits from their administration to Constantinople (it was only when Britain and Turkey faced one another on opposite sides during the First World War that the island was annexed by Great Britain, and only in 1925 that Cyprus became a Crown Colony). British interest in Cyprus was purely strategic, following the acquisition of the massive British share in the Suez Canal, and its value was enhanced when Great Britain established its ascendancy over Egypt in 1882. Tenure of Cyprus granted Britain control of bases all the way from Gibraltar to the Levant, by way of Malta, but Britain had acquired a cauldron in which anatagonism between Cypriots of the two faiths was not eased but exacerbated by living under the rule of a third party: the Greek islanders became increasingly insistent that the destiny of the island lay within Greece, while the Turkish islanders feared that what was happening to the Turks in Crete would begin to happen in Cyprus as well. By the start of the twentieth century, Turkish Cypriots were following with avid interest the reform movement of the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire, and a sense of national identity began to develop, which was further accentuated by competition with Greek nationalism.16 The erosion of the Ottoman Empire was, then, accompanied by increasingly assertive expressions of national identity that threatened to tear apart societies where once different ethnic and religious groups had lived in some degree of harmony.
IV
National identities were developing in Ottoman lands where ethnic and religious groups were scattered and intermingled. It is no surprise that the greatest jumble of peoples and faiths could be found in Mediterranean port cities such as Salonika, Alexandria and Smyrna. Salonika, in particular, became the battleground between Turks, Slavs and Greeks, even though the Jews were the largest single group in the city in 1912, and there were so many Jewish stevedores that the docks closed on Saturdays.17 As Mark Mazower has observed, four main scripts were in use in the city, and four calendars, so the question ‘At what time is noon today?’ made a sort of sense.18 In large parts of the city the main language was Judaeo-Spanish, brought by the Sephardic exiles after 1492. The names of the synagogues still recalled the places of origin of the Salonika Jews: there was a synagogue of the Catalans, of ‘Saragossa’ (in reality Syracuse in Sicily), and one nicknamed Macarron, because it was frequented by Jews of Apulian descent, who were believed to share the Italian love of macaroni.19
It would be a mistake to romanticize Salonika. In 1911 the view was expressed in a Ladino newspaper, La Solidad Ovradera, that
Salonika is not one city. It is a juxtaposition of tiny villages. Jews, Turks, Dönmehs [followers of Shabbetai Zevi], Greeks, Bulgarians, westerners, Gypsies, each of these groups that one today calls ‘nations’, keeps well away from the others, as if fearing contagion.20
Admittedly, a newspaper entitled Workers’ Solidarity might not have been offering the most objective view of relations between ethnic groups, wishing, rather, to transcend national feeling and to create a single proletarian community. Some sense of easy daily interaction between Jews, Turks and others can be gathered from Leon Sciaky’s account of his childhood in late nineteenth-century Salonika; here, a prosperous Jewish family is shown enjoying warm relations with Bulgarian peasants who supplied Sciaky’s father with the grain he traded, while on the streets of the city the young Sciaky received many kindnesses from Muslim and Christian neighbours, who were often willing to help members of other communities when rioting broke out.21
Sephardic Judaism has always been more open to surrounding cultures than the often stricter forms of Judaism practised in Ashkenazi eastern Europe, and, as western European influences became increasingly powerful within the Ottoman world, the Jewish elites became westernized in manners and speech. There was ambivalence about Sephardic identity. Ideally, it would combine western sophistication with a touch of eastern exoticism, a view shared by Disraeli in Britain. Even as a child, Leon Sciaky wore western clothes, a clear sign of his family’s social and economic status and of their cultural aspirations, while Salonika’s wealthiest Jewish family, the Allatini, surrounded themselves at home with the finest furnishings from both East and West.22 From 1873, channelled through the new schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, French began to make massive inroads among the Salonika Jews, edging out Ladino, which some saw as the language of the lower classes (in Alexandria too French was becoming de mode, even de rigueur, among the Jewish elite). By 1912 the AIU possessed over 4,000 pupils, more than half the children in the city’s Jewish schools.23 The Salonikans and Alexandrians were unworried about the French cultural imperialism to which they were succumbing; not just Jews but all prosperous city-dwellers across the Ottoman Empire saw French as a badge of distinction.
While they still ruled Salonika, the Turks knew that, though a minority, they had the upper hand. Sciaky reported how in 1876 riots broke out when a Bulgarian father appealed to the foreign consuls to prevent the wedding of his daughter to a Turk; the French and German consuls made the cardinal error of entering a mosque while tempers were flaring, and were lynched.24 Unrest among the different communities became more intense by 1900. The Greeks were fired by the spread of education: children were now taught their own language in proper schools, and they could look southwards and observe the fact that their brethren lived in an independent Greek kingdom. The Slavs became very restive. In the 1890s radical Macedonian Slavs, who spoke a form of Bulgarian, organized themselves around the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), seeking autonomy for the wide swathe of Ottoman provinces between Salonika and Skopje, but they saw Salonika as the obvious capital, and they were intent on giving these lands a Bulgarian cultural identity. This was intolerable to the Greeks of Salonika, who obliged the Turks with information they picked up about the activities of IMRO.25 Before long IMRO decided that the time had come for drastic action. In January 1903 its agents acquired a small grocery shop opposite the Ottoman Bank, staffed by a dour Bulgarian who seemed unwilling to sell the exiguous stock he displayed. At night, though, the shop came to life, as an IMRO team burrowed under the road, placing mines under the handsome edifice of the Ottoman Bank. The tunnellers were almost caught, because they had blocked off one of the city sewers that lay across their path, and the Hotel Colombo, nearby, complained that its plumbing had ceased to work. On 28 April they set off their bombs, demolishing the bank and several neighbouring buildings.26
Salonika felt the strong ripples of change within the Turkish government, as the Young Turks asserted themselves and political reform was in the air. Political troubles in the Mediterranean were depriving Salonika of its livelihood: Italian goods were boycotted after the Italians invaded Tripolitania in 1911, and trade with Trieste was boycotted because the Austrians had, controversially, taken control of Bosnia. The wealthy Allatini had had enough and decamped to Italy. Ottoman power was crumbling faster than ever, and it was no great surprise when the Greeks marched into Salonika in 1912, claiming it for the motherland. Unfortunately, Bulgarian troops also arrived, and were unwilling to leave; even when they were persuaded to depart, skirmishes broke out between Greek and Bulgarian units beyond the walls. So the Greeks held Salonika, but the Bulgarian threat was real, and the city was deprived of the fertile hinterland from which Leon Sciaky’s father had obtained grain. In 1913, the city was still home to nearly 46,000 Muslims and over 61,000 Jews, as against 40,000 Orthodox Christians, but Greek activists intended to make them feel unwelcome.27 Cemeteries were desecrated and shops were ransacked. The prime minister, Venizelos, a hero of the Cretan revolution, was a strong believer in the idea of a Greece populated by Orthodox Greeks. Quite where this left the Jews, of whom Venizelos remained suspicious, was unclear. In August 1917, a great fire destroyed vast tracts of the city, wrecking the Jewish and Muslim districts. The fire, along with increasing Jewish and Muslim emigration, gave the Greek authorities the opportunity to forge ahead with the rebuilding of Salonika as a Greek city, populated by Greeks. The aim was clear: Salonika would again become the Christian city of St Demetrios. Salonika would be reborn as Thessaloniki.