Читать книгу Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews - Mark Mazower - Страница 15

In modern Salonica, where classical and Byzantine monuments have been shorn of the houses that surrounded them to make them stand out more prominently, one has to search for remains of the early Ottoman years. Most mosques perished in the great fire of 1917 and the surviving minarets were torn down shortly afterwards. Nevertheless, at the busy central junction of Egnatia and Venizelos streets, small shops, a disused cinema, and tourist boutiques still cling to the sides of an elegantly domed mosque, one of the last in the city. Hamza Bey was one of Murad’s military commanders, and his daughter built a small neighbourhood prayer hall in his memory in 1468. But as the city expanded and prospered, Hamza Bey’s mosque grew too: it acquired a minaret [now gone] and a spacious columned courtyard.¹¹

One other fifteenth-century mosque survives, similarly impressive in scale, though in better condition. This is the Aladja Imaret, which peeps out of a gap between rows of concrete apartment blocks above the bus stop on Kassandrou Street. The Aladja complex served as school, prayer-hall and soup-kitchen for the poor and illustrates the way older Muslim architectural forms were reworked by Ottoman builders in territories which lacked any tradition of Islamic architecture. In the original Arabic-Persian type of medrese, or religious school, students and teachers took their lessons in rooms arranged around an open-air courtyard. The Seljuk Turks adapted this model for the harsher conditions of central Anatolia by covering the courtyard with a dome, often adding a small prayer room at the back. Over time, the domed prayer-hall became larger still and was integrated into the main body of the building – the shape chosen by the unknown architect of the Aladja Imaret. A large airy portico runs the length of the façade, and once sheltered refugees and beggars, though it is now abandoned and covered with graffiti. The multi-coloured minaret, ornamented with stones in a diamond pattern, which gave the whole building its name [Aladja = coloured] has long gone, though visitors to the nearby town of Verroia will find a very similar one, half-ruined, in a side-street off the main road. This style of minaret was a last faint Balkan echo of the polychromatic glories of central Asian and Persian Islam whose influence, as the historian Machiel Kiel points out, extended from the towns of Macedonia in the west to the north Indian plains and the Silk Road to the east.¹²

Fifteenth-century records identify other newly founded mosques by the names of local notables – Sinan Bey, the fisheries owner Mehmed, the teacher Burhan, Mustafa from Karaferiye, the pilgrims Mehmed, Hasan, Ismail, Kemal, Ahmed and the judge Abdullah. Their neighbourhood mosques or mescids must have been relatively humble sites, and the main Friday services for the city were held in ‘Old Friday’ – the name given to the mosque founded by Sultan Murad in the Acheiropoietos Church where he had held his victory service. More substantial foundations, like the Aladja Imaret, usually required the kind of financing affordable only by notables. In this case the benefactor was another of Murad’s commanders, Inegöllü Ishak Pasha, whose illustrious career ended as governor of Salonica. Ishak Pasha spent his fortune on many noble edifices including several mosques, a hamam, a bridge over the Struma river, fountains and a dervish tekke. He was not alone. Koca Kasim Pasha, who started life as slave of an Egyptian scholar, before rising in the imperial civil service to become grand vizier, founded another mosque-imaret in the city. Yakub Pasha, a Bosnian-born vizier renowned both for his poetry and for his victories against the Austrians and Hungarians on the Croat border, endowed a mosque named after himself.

What is striking about these large-scale building projects – especially when compared with western Europe – is the speed of their construction. Often only a few years were necessary for their completion. Such efficiency implied not only plentiful skilled labour and highly developed architectural traditions, but the means to accumulate and concentrate funds for such purposes much more quickly than most European states could manage at this time. The highly centralized nature of Ottoman authority helped, but the real vehicle of urban renewal was the pious charitable foundation known as the vakf.

The vakf was a well-established Muslim institution. By endowing a property with revenues from rents on shops and land, the founder of a vakf relinquished his ownership of the property and its endowments but in return received compensation in the afterlife, and the blessings of later generations. For the tenants of the properties and lands involved, vakf status was no hardship: on the contrary, exempted from the often burdensome irregular state taxes, vakf properties thrived and contributed to the city’s prosperity. For the donor, turning his [or her – the donors included many wealthy women] possessions into a vakf was also a way of ensuring that wealth passed down through the family, since relatives could be nominated as managers and trustees of the foundation, and receive payment. Benefactors spelled out the running of their institutions down to the smallest details – saffron rice and honey on special holidays, a (lavish) evening meal of meat stew with spices and onions, boiled rice and bread for students attending school regularly.¹³

The imperial family set the example: Murad II himself, despite the distractions of almost incessant campaigning and his focus on the old capital Bursa and the great mosque he was building in Edirne, commissioned the construction of several fountains in the upper town, as well as the great hamam complex on Egnatia. He also repaired the city’s old Roman and Byzantine aqueduct system and settled colonists to look after it. His son, Mehmed the Conqueror, although hostile to the vakf idea in theory because it alienated land and resources from the control of the state, encouraged his viziers to build market complexes and other buildings of public utility. Bayazid II, who wintered in Salonica during his Balkan campaigns at the end of the fifteenth century, erected a new six-domed stone bezesten [market building], for the storage of valuable goods. Still in use across the road from the Hamza Bey mosque, this elegant structure quickly became the centre of commercial life. The sultan endowed it with rents from premises selling perfumes, fruits, halva and sherbet, cloth, slippers, knives and silks, and also used the income to support the mosque he created when he ordered the church of Ayios Dimitrios to be turned over to the faithful in 1492.¹⁴

In addition to numerous chapels, schools, soup kitchens and Sufi lodges, vakfs financed the spread of the wells and fountains necessary both for performing ablutions and for keeping the city alive. Public baths were constructed near places of worship and religious study so that people could fulfil their obligation to make sure they were clean before entering the mosque to pray. Murad II built the sprawling Bey hamam as a place to prepare for the city’s main mosque, only a stone’s throw away. Its steam-filled rooms and private suites, where young masseurs pummelled and oiled their clients as they stretched out on the hot stones, were also a place for sexual and social interaction in an urban environment with few public spaces. Bath-attendants always had an ambiguous reputation, but work in the hamam offered access to the powerful and a step onto the ladder of imperial service. Salonica’s Bey hamam, with its separate baths for men and women is one of the outstanding examples of early Ottoman architecture in the Balkans. Until the 1960s, travellers could still wash themselves in what were latterly called the Paradise Baths. Today the constant flows of hot and cold water mentioned by seventeenth-century travellers have dried up, but thanks to the Greek Archaeological Service it is possible to walk through the narrow passages from room to room, and admire the intricacy of its internal decorations, the marble slabs where clients were massaged, and the cool vaulted rooms with their stucco honeycombed muqarnas illuminated only by bright shafts of light which burst through holes cut deep into the domed ceiling.¹⁵ Vakfs also fostered trade. In addition to Bayazid’s central market building, and quarters for flour, textiles, spices, furs, cloth and leather goods, there was the so-called ‘Egyptian market’ just outside the gate to the harbour, which (according to one later traveller) contained ‘all the produce of Egypt, linen, sugar, rice, coffee’. Nearby were the city’s tanneries, which were already flourishing by the late fifteenth century. Ship’s biscuit was produced here, and later on coffee-houses and taverns sprang up to cater to the needs of sailors, travellers, camel-drivers, porters and day-labourers. At the heart of this bustling district lay the Abdur-Reouf mosque – ‘a beautiful and most lovely sanctuary, a place of devotion, respite and recovery’ – founded by a mollah of the city, who built it to serve the traders, since there was none other outside the walls, and endowed this too as a vakf. ‘Day and night,’ reports a seventeenth-century visitor, ‘the faithful are present there, because Muslim traders from the four corners of the globe and god-fearing sailors and sea-captains make their prayers in that place, enjoying the view of the ships in the harbour.’¹⁶

It is worth pointing out that Christians could form vakfs as well as Muslims and indeed had had a similar institution in Byzantine times. In 1498, the canny monks of the Vlatadon monastery, for example, owned properties throughout the town: they had one shop in the fish market, (next door to that owned by ‘the bey’) as well as another seven nearby, (adjacent to the premises of ‘Kostas son of Kokoris’). They also had three stalls in the candle-makers’ market, and two cobblers’ workshops next to those owned by ‘Hadji Ahmed’ and ‘Hadji Hassan’. They owned cook-shops, wells and outbuildings in the old Hippodrome quarter, water-mills outside the walls, and a vineyard on the slopes of Hortiatis. With the revenues from these, they supported the life of the monastery and acquired yet more properties.¹⁷

Further afield, vakfs financed the construction and maintenance of bridges, post-houses, stables, caravanserais and ferries, all of which were essential both for trade and for the speedy military advances through which Ottoman power was projected into south-eastern Europe. Robert de Dreux, a seventeenth-century French priest, was impressed by the khans, hostelries as large as churches, ‘which the Bachas and other Turkish signors build superbly to lodge travellers, without care for their station in life or religion, each one being made welcome, without being obliged to pay anything in return.’ As the key naval, mercantile and military strong-point for the fifteenth-century advance westwards, Salonica benefited from the pacification of the countryside and the consolidation of Ottoman authority along the old Via Egnatia. For the first time in centuries, after the acute fragmentation and instability of the late Byzantine era, a single power controlled the region as a whole.¹⁸