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

six years later.
    But the tobacco workers were not alone and in the 1920s the city was hit by a wave of stoppages. After a nationwide general strike in August 1923, the government responded nervously by temporarily dissolving all unions. The following June the docks came to a standstill. Key services such as water, railways and trams were also hit; printers, leatherworkers, bakers, butchers and even civil servants took industrial action while the Union of Ex-Servicemen shouted pacifist slogans and got into fights with the nationalists of the Macedonian Youth movement. In short, throughout these years the city streets saw incessant protest, and the White Tower, the Pantheon cinema and even the Skating Palace—anywhere in fact where orators could harangue a sympathetic crowd—became the scene of violent clashes. In the eighteenth century, it had been the plague that brought Salonica to a standstill; in the early twenty-first, it was traffic. But for much of the twentieth, it was the strikes and demonstrations of organized labour and mass politics.
    Ironically, Venizelos himself had encouraged the formation of a nationwide Greek union movement in the hope that it would back him up at the peace talks in Paris after World War One. It was his wartime administration that had founded the Workers’ Centre in Salonica. But the wave of strikes and demonstrations which hit the countryalarmed him deeply. From 1919—with Greek troops committed to the Allied intervention in the Russian civil war—pro-government newspapers called for labour unions to be banned, and Venizelist army officers formed units against the “Bolsheviks” and “anarchists” at home. The workers themselves meanwhile were moving rapidly to the left; in Salonica the Workers’ Centre became the focus of socialist life. With a claimed twelve thousand workers under its command, the large centrally located two-storey villa had its own library and reading room, and acted as a kind of college for working men and women, where the victories of the Red Army in Poland, Ukraine and Siberia were chalked up daily on a large blackboard. In 1922, a gun battle in the street outside ended with a gendarme shot dead and after the Centre was searched for weapons, the police announced that they had uncovered thirteen boxes of explosives with which “the Bolshevik anarchists” planned to attack the authorities and “set up a state like that which the Communists have in Russia.” Later it transpired that the explosives were in fact fireworks, left behind by Serbian army engineers who had used the building during the war. 5
    C OMMUNISTS AND A NTI -C OMMUNISTS
    T HE W ORKERS’ C ENTRE testified to the potency of a Marxist sub-culture in a city where large numbers of workers were increasingly disillusioned with what they saw as the rule of the “bourgeois state.” Many were illiterate but deeply conscious of the value of self-improvement. “Take a newspaper not a coffee in the mornings,” the Workers’ Voice reminded comrades. The Biblioteka Sosyalista distributed Marx and Engels in Judeo-Spanish among the Socialist Workers’ Youth groups in the poorer quarters down by the rail stations. The KKE (Communist Party of Greece) set up its Lenin Upper School in the Café Byzantion, another pro-labour hangout with a conveniently large basement. When the First of May was celebrated in the Beshchinar Gardens, thousands of onlookers were treated to poetry recitals, gymnastic displays and speeches.
    By this point, the authorities were afraid that Salonica had turned into a major centre of communist activity in the Balkans. The police—mostly peasant boys recruited from the villages of Crete and the Peloponnese—were suspicious of the multi-ethnic character of local labour activism. “No separate activity is carried on by Jewish, Armenian,Turkish, French, Bulgarian and Greek communists,” agents observed. “All work together for the cause.” Jews as well as Orthodox Greeks were put