Читать книгу Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews - Mark Mazower - Страница 27

In 1926, an eminent Albanian Bektashi sheykh, Ahmad Sirri Baba, stopped for a rest in Salonica during arduous travels which took him from Albania to Cairo, Baghdad, Karbala and back. By this point, the city’s Muslim population had been forced to leave Greece entirely as a result of the Greco-Turkish 1923 population exchange, and the tekkes had been abandoned. The sheykh’s journeys, as he moved between the worlds of Balkan and Middle Eastern Islam, were a last indication of channels of religious devotion which had once linked the city with extraordinarily diverse and far-flung parts of the world.

For centuries, Muslims from all over the Balkans congregated in Salonica to find a sea passage to Aleppo or Alexandria for the haj caravans to Mecca. Christians followed their example, acquiring the title of Hadji after visiting their own holy places. Others came to visit the remains of St Dimitrios before travelling onwards to the Holy Mountain. A Ukrainian monk, Cyril, from Lviv, arrived to raise money for the monastery in Sinai where he worked, and brought catalogues of the library collections there which he passed on to the head of the Jesuit mission in the city, Père Souciet, whose brother ran the royal library in Paris. For Muslim mendicant dervishes and Christian monks, the region’s network of charitable and hospitable religious institutions offered a means of permanent support, especially in the cold winter months when work and money were hard to come by. ‘One monk, almost a vagabond, came from Kiev to Moldavia,’ noted a Salonica resident who met him in 1727, ‘and from there wandered aimlessly through Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Venice, then returned from that unnecessary peregrination to Moldavia, and from there to the Zaporozhian Sich whence, by way of the Black Sea, he came to Constantinople and to Mount Athos.’⁵⁶

In short, the city found itself at the intersection of many different creeds. Through the Sufi orders it was linked to Iran, Anatolia, Thrace and Egypt; the Marranos bridged the Catholicism of the Iberian peninsula, Antwerp and Papal Italy; the faith of the Sabbataians was carried by Jewish believers into Poland, Bohemia, Germany and eventually North America, while the seventeenth-century Metropolitan Athanasios Patellarios came to the city via Venetian Crete and Ottoman Sinai before he moved on to Jassy, Istanbul, Russia and the Ukraine, his final resting-place. Salonica lay in the centre of an Ottoman oikumeni, which was at the same time Muslim, Christian and Jewish. Perhaps only now, since the end of the Cold War and the re-opening of many of these same routes, is it again possible to calculate the impact of such an extensive sacred geography and to see how it underpinned the profusion of faiths which sustained the city’s inhabitants.⁵⁷

*Frank, a messianic figure in his own right, was a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and Barouch Russo (see below).

*In Hebrew, the term is Maminim; in Turkish Mümin. Ma’min was a Salonica derivation.