Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 by Mark Mazower Read Free Book Online

fifty thousand people daily.
    As early as February 1922, before the flight from Asia Minor had begun in earnest, businessmen in Athens were already being alerted to the fact that refugees in Salonica, unable to find work there, were “ready to come to Piraeus, Athens or other cities in Greece to work in factories at a wage advantageous to their employers.” Thousands of men were sitting in the kafeneia waiting for a job to turn up. “I turned right and left looking for work. There was nothing,” recalled Petros Pasalides, a shepherd from Konya in Asia Minor. He worked on the railways for a time, tried the mines, then fell in with a market gardener. Over the next few years he tramped all over Greece, partly driven by the need to earn his living, partly in the hope of finding relatives and “compatriots” from his birthplace. 2
    Some refugees set themselves up as traders, pedlars and shopkeepers. But once mild inflation gave way to prolonged deflation the real value of their debts increased and many faced bankruptcy. Not coincidentally, there were fires at the oil storage depot of the Asiatic Oil Company in 1923, while another the following year in the commercial district destroyed sixty shops. A wary bank manager in the city noted in 1929, at the onset of the real commercial crisis, that there were “frequent, almost daily fires in shops, several of which proved to be not casual.” The local Lloyd’s agent reckoned that 90% were caused deliberately. 3
    Politicians in far-away Athens, having fought so hard to conquer the New Lands, were too busy to pay much attention to their economic needs: they were overwhelmed by the refugee issue, and obsessed by constitutional arguments between republicans and royalists. The horizons of the “political world” in the capital seemingly petered out before they ever reached the city. Few Salonican firms were listed on the Athens Stock Exchange and no minister of national economy was ever appointed from Macedonia: the paucity of figures from northern Greece in the upper echelons of power in Athens was a constant local complaint. An International Fair was founded in the city in 1926, but although it provided publicity for regional firms, its benefits were limited, its flashy kiosks good for a day out but little more. The city’s businessmen felt marginalized and ignored. 4
    Tobacco processing was still the most important “industry,” just as it had been in Ottoman times. By 1940 at least one hundred companies, mostly Greek but including Jewish, American and Armenian houses, were based in Salonica and traded in the preparation and export of tobacco leaf, and in a few cases, the manufacture of cigarettes themselves. For a brief period, the market boomed, and in the mid-1920sproduction soared well above the levels known in former times. But Greek tobacco was an expensive commodity, and as world prices began to fall, they took tobacco with them. By the end of the decade, the sector was in serious crisis.
    Even before the slump kicked in, the well-organized tobacco workers were the main source of labour militancy in the city. The Tobacco workers Federation of Greece fought hard over pay, working conditions, unemployment benefits and the regulation of exports and in 1919 they won the right to an eight-hour day. These gains were the fruit of more or less constant struggle with employers—demonstrations, shut-downs, factory occupations and lock-outs, punctuated by clashes with police and army. In August 1924, workers intercepted deliveries of tobacco bales to the docks which exporters were trying to ship before they had been processed: the bales were cut open and the bundles of leaf tossed into the sea. Three months later, strikers occupied the Florentin warehouse and fortified it against the police. Even though the Federation was forcibly disbanded in 1930 as a communist front, the power of its members was far from broken, as would be seen most impressively in their nationwide strike