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Histories, Spaces and Heritages at the Transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State

Under One Dome? Rituals of Transition in Ottoman/Greek Thessaloniki

Sous un même dôme ? Rituels de transition dans la ville ottomane/grecque de Thessalonique
Eleni Kallimopoulou

Résumés

Au moment de son passage de l’Empire ottoman à l’État-nation grec, Thessalonique, Selanik en turc, a connu une série de transformations en termes d’environnement humain et urbain. Cet article se penche sur différents aspects de cette transition, en les présentant sous forme de scènes de vie qui montrent les itinéraires et relations entre objets et habitants à l’intérieur des édifices religieux, ainsi que dans l’espace public. Il défend une analyse axée sur la dialectique socio-spatiale afin d’explorer de quelles manières les rituels publics et processions religieuses, en tant que performances culturelles, étaient constitutifs des communautés ethno-religieuses (juive, musulmane et chrétienne) de la ville, à la fois vis‑à‑vis de l’État (ottoman/grec) et dans les relations entre elles, dans un contexte de revendication concurrente de leur modernité. En parallèle, l’article étudie en détail l’affirmation croissante de la communauté grecque orthodoxe dans l’espace public, à travers des événements qui assimilent de plus en plus cette religion à la nation grecque.

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Introduction

  • 1 I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Panagiotis C. Poulos for their pensive comments on (...)

1During its transition from the empire to the nation-state, Ottoman Selanik/Greek Thessaloniki underwent a series of transformations in terms of its human and built environment.1 Intra and intercommunal rivalry among the city’s major ethno-religious communities (Jewish, Muslim, Christian), linked with their articulation of modernity and underpinned by rising nationalisms, penetrated all aspects of social life including taking the form of a struggle over assertion in public space. A series of vignettes of city life before and after the city’s annexation to the Greek Kingdom (1912), beginning with the Sultan Mehmed V’s imperial visit in 1911 and ending with a religious ceremony in the streets of Greek Thessaloniki six years later, provides the backdrop for an exploration of the public modalities of intercommunal competition through a dual analytical focus on their performative and spatial dynamics.

  • 2 Thomassen 2012. For an elaboration of the term in the late-Ottoman context, see Poulos, Kallimopou (...)
  • 3 Bell 1997, p. 74.
  • 4 Bell 1997, p. 73.

2Consequently, the article focuses, first of all, on the role of public ritual in the constitution of late-Ottoman/Greek subjecthood and intra and intercommunal relations during this transitory period. The encounters between the city’s inhabitants in public space in the context of imperial spectacle and religious processions are understood as performative events that actively constituted the city, its public space, and those inhabiting it. Public performance in song, parades, and ceremonies, became a field where the city’s ethno-religious communities articulated their “competing modernities”2 vis‑à‑vis one another and the state. According to the performance approach introduced in the analysis, ritual doesn’t simply express values but effects changes on people.3 Ritual activity, in a broad sense, is always emplaced and embodied and therefore sensory and affective.4

  • 5 Soja 2010; Soja 1989. See Zandi-Sayek for a socio-spatial study of 19th-century Ottoman Izmir (201 (...)
  • 6 Lefebvre 1991.
  • 7 Stavrides 2016, p. 260.
  • 8 Harvey 2003, pp. 19–20.

3Secondly, the article centres on the city’s built environment as the residual material through which ritual is performed. Streets, monuments, objects, and locales, whether symbolic or real, contributed to the articulation of intercommunal relations, enhancing some forms of sociality and solidarity while undermining others. In embracing the “socio-spatial dialectic”, my study joins a recent call from historians, geographers, urban and social theorists to “spatialize” the ways in which we think and theorise, and to rethink the social and historical through the spatial.5 In this genealogy of thought, space is understood to be socially produced, as both the medium and the outcome of social action.6 Space matters because it is not a container―or indeed the backdrop―of social life but “an integral part of its manifestations and events” and an “active form of social relations”.7 This realization, in turn, prescribes a “dialectical and relational mode of historical-geographical inquiry” which focuses on the “materiality of social processes” in order to understand “the dynamics of urban change in a particular place and time”.8

  • 9 Deringil 1999.
  • 10 See indicatively Deringil 1999; Hanioğlu 2008 and Hanioğlu 2001.
  • 11 Campos 2011, p. 65; cf. Stein 2004, Cohen 2012.

4Returning to early-20th‑century Thessaloniki, my analysis responds to current historiographical trends in the study of late Ottoman and modern Greek history and the transition from empire to nation-state. Deringil’s seminal study has demonstrated the ideological importance of moulding Ottoman subjects into “Ottoman citizens” as a means for the Ottoman state to legitimize its power in the late 19th century.9 His work opened the way for studies detailing the changing modalities of Ottomanist ideology, from civic Ottomanism during the period of reforms collectively known as Tanzimat (1839–1876), to Islamic Ottomanism in the Hamidian era (1876–1909), and to the Young Turks’ tactical evocation of civic Ottomanism during the Second Constitutional period before they shifted to a Turkist explicit rhetoric.10 Furthermore, recent late-Ottoman scholarship has highlighted Ottomanism in its various manifestations as not merely a top-down official state project but as a process that entailed, and relied on, the mobilization of Ottoman citizens, and has thus looked at “the ways in which Ottoman subjects themselves adopted, finessed, and challenged the state project from the second half of the nineteenth century until the final years of the empire”.11

  • 12 Zandi-Sayek 2012, p. 6.
  • 13 Campos 2011, p. 6.

5The accompanying emphasis on the plural ways in which the Tanzimat reforms and, one might add, their successor states “were played out in different localities and in relation to different local groups and actors who actively participated with their changing world”,12 has complicated linear historiographical narratives of transition from empire to nation-state and from imperialist to nationalist forms of belonging. Recent scholarship has especially illuminated how divergent responses to Ottomanism generated different forms of centripetal and centrifugal imperial identifications and laid the ground for a plurality of “competing ‘citizenship discourses’”, in Campos’s words, in the years before World War One.13

  • 14 See indicatively, Cohen 2014; Cohen 2012; Talbot 2016; Kechriotis 2008; Kamouzis 2013, Hanioğlu 20 (...)
  • 15 Cf. Campos 2011, p. 248.
  • 16 Clogg 2002, p. 67. On the place of the city of Selanik “amidst the Balkan storm” see especially An (...)
  • 17 Stamatopoulos 2008; Kamouzis 2013.
  • 18 Papamichos Chronakis 2014, p. 379.

6In Selanik in particular, a number of such competing discourses were historically available in the period leading from the late 19th century to World War One, depending on one’s confessional, ethnic and social/class identification, most notably: Ottomanism in its civic and Islamic manifestations, together with its elaborations into Jewish Ottomanism and Greco-Ottomanism, as well as Ottoman Jewish Zionism, Turkism as expounded by the Young Turks, and socialism by the Socialist Workers’ Federation of Salonica.14 These discourses, which allowed, for the most part, for the expression of ethnoreligious identity within―rather than outside―the frame of Ottoman imperial citizenship,15 developed in uneasy interaction with rising ethnic/separatist Balkan nationalisms (Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian), which took the form of cultural and educational propaganda and, increasingly, of armed struggle.16 The parallel subversion of the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s ideology of ecumenicity through the emergence of nationalized autocephalous Christian Orthodox churches, including the Bulgarian Exarchate (recognized in 1870),17 is a stark reminder of the central role that religion played in the late Ottoman Balkan ideological battlefield. Even so, the relative control that the Ottoman state exerted in the city (compared to the Macedonian hinterland) and the integrated character of the Salonican market, which engaged prominent Jewish and Greek merchants in commercial cooperation, could have some moderating effect on ethnic antagonisms.18

  • 19 Cf. Papamichos Chronakis 2014; Campos 2011; Molho A. 2014.
  • 20 Mazower 2005.

7Until recently, the historiography detailing the transition from Ottoman Empire to successor nation-states has not always done justice to this multi-layered terrain of imperial and national belongings in its full complexity. Selanik/Thessaloniki, in particular, has been mostly studied from the perspective of (Greek and Turkish) national histories or of individual communities (especially Salonican Jews, who formed a sizable part of the population for much of Salonica’s Ottoman history), leading to linear, homogenous narratives of the city and its communities in insulation and isolation.19 Conversely, this article makes a contribution to the growing literature on connected histories, following, in particular, the seminal work by Mark Mazower.20 It considers the city’s ethno-religious groups in terms of their historical relationships and their relations with the (Ottoman/Greek) state, and asks how these relations were (or were not) documented in a series of visual, textual and material sources, including some previously untapped Greek archival sources. In so doing, it aims to bring in communication the fields of late-Ottoman and modern Greek history with Jewish history and the study of Ottoman/Mediterranean port cities.

8From this perspective, the transformation of ethno-religious communities into national communities, much like the transition from empire to nation-state, emerges as a process replete with contradictions, unresolved ambiguities, as well as absences and silences. The analytical emphasis on public space and performative social action, it is argued, allows attention to the ways in which dominant ideologies and policies were implemented, negotiated or contested on the ground, through acts of spatialization, as well as to the embodied experience and agencies of social actors as they claimed and maintained membership to the Ottoman, the national, the communal or intercommunal, or as they enacted or envisioned alternative modes of social belonging and collective action. It can thus help undermine notions of linear, unitary and uniform transitions and contribute towards more nuanced and entangled intercommunal histories of major historical transitions.

The Emperor visits!

Sacred emotion and shivers of enthusiasm

9The 320 Salonicans on board Midhat Pasha, the navy steamer that had sailed from the port of Salonica to meet the royal fleet arriving from Istanbul in the summer of 1911, had upon their return the privilege of a rare panoramic view of their city from the sea as it welcomed, fully decorated, its emperor Sultan Mehmed V:

  • 21 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

Sacred emotion and shivers of enthusiasm overtook the viewers on board the steamer. On the one hand, the city of Thessaloniki appeared as a jeweled nymph, and on the other, myriads of people of all classes, ages and nationalities flooding the long quay from one end to the other were bursting into tremendous cheers and endless applause. The people jubilated, the people cried with joy as they welcomed their first constitutional king, Mehmet Resat V.21

  • 22 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.
  • 23 Anastasiadou 2008; on electricity, Gounaris 1993, p. 500.
  • 24 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.
  • 25 Stampoulis 1984, p. 198.

10During the days of the Sultan’s visit to Thessaloniki as part of his imperial journey to Rumelia, the European part of the Ottoman Empire, the city’s public space transformed into a spectacular extravaganza made up of thousands of flags, flowers and decorations in front of houses, shops and streets, and on top the spectacular, if ephemeral, triumphal arches that had been erected at central junctures of the city by the municipality, the various ethno-religious communities, the Railway, Gas and other major companies, and voluntary associations (especially Jewish ones) to commemorate the Sultan’s visit (fig. 1).22 This all set the stage for a resounding sense-scape, composed of firecrackers and fireworks, canons and guns firing from ships, the White Tower and other locations; of marching parades, students’ singing, music bands, cheers and applause; of the ceremonial sacrifice of lambs, of prayers, sermons, and the welcoming words and inscriptions writing “Long live our Padishah.” The ceremonial energy that animated the city cast as protagonists, besides the Sultan and his sizeable entourage, city officials, the financial and entrepreneurial elite, the religious authorities and the delegations arriving from the Macedonian provinces, and showcased as tokens of late-Ottoman modernity Salonica’s port, railway, electricity (introduced some three years earlier), and a network of public buildings newly renovated or constructed in the context of the city’s ongoing urban regeneration.23 After sunset, the myriad electric light bulbs on ships, buildings and the city walls fired the city skyline, while the arches “rose like blazing giants”.24 Behind the scenes, hectic preparations had been made as the households’ material reserves in silk flags, kilims, textiles and Persian carpets were recruited to decorate the city while “no garden was left that was not looted” for this purpose.25

  • 26 The notion of anxiety is introduced by Cohen 2014, pp. 119–122.
  • 27 Cohen 2014, p. 129.

11Yet “sacred emotion” came together with intra and intercommunal anxiety,26 as Salonicans also got ready to demonstrate their political allegiances to the Ottoman state in exchange for imperial recognition. Out of the four ships that left Salonica’s port to greet the royal fleet, to give an example, the two had been hired by Salonican Jews, one by the “assimilationist” Club des Intimes, the other by its rival Zionist Nouveau Club. In her close reading of the Jewish Salonicans’ role and participation in the Sultanic visit, Cohen notes how different Jewish parties zealously claimed their credentials as devoted imperial citizens, as part of a patriotic project which was becoming increasingly fractured.27 This section of the article offers a complementary account that focuses instead on the deliberations and actions of the Greek Orthodox community in response to the imperial visit.

Fig. 1. The triumphal arches raised by the Greek (a), the Bulgarian (b) and the Jewish community (c), on Boulevard Union/Hamidiye (today Ethnikis Amynis), Midhat Pasha (today Ag. Dimitriou) and Agia Sofia streets respectively.

Fig. 1. The triumphal arches raised by the Greek (a), the Bulgarian (b) and the Jewish community (c), on Boulevard Union/Hamidiye (today Ethnikis Amynis), Midhat Pasha (today Ag. Dimitriou) and Agia Sofia streets respectively.

Reproduced from Levy 1911.

Imperial ceremonies between the spectacular and the performative

  • 28 Sultan Mehmed V’s visit should be placed within a long lineage of sultanic visits to the provinces (...)

12Besides the needs dictated by the specific socio-political circumstances under which they occurred, imperial journeys as a genre served to legitimise Ottoman rule, to consolidate connections between the imperial centre and its peripheries, and to establish social cohesion among the Ottoman ethno-religious communities. Seen in this light, the Sultan’s visit to Thessaloniki in 1911 was a spectacular event of great symbolic value carefully orchestrated so as to glorify the Sultan and to celebrate an image of empire and loving subjects, in a period of mounting sociopolitical fluidity and tension.28

  • 29 Deringil 1999, pp. 26–35.
  • 30 Eldem 2015, p. 147.
  • 31 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.
  • 32 Cowan 2008, p. 338; on the Manaki brothers see also Arslan 2010.
  • 33 In Burke 2001, p. 84.
  • 34 Cowan, Steward (eds.) 2007, p. 20.
  • 35 Latham et al. (eds.) 2009, pp. 178–179.

13Documentation and memorialization was central to the process of legitimisation of imperial power through ceremonial acts. This was accomplished through the synergy between a series of technologies (printing, photography, film), artefacts (textual and visual genres such as photographic albums, postcards, paintings, memoirs, bureaucratic documents, etc.), social actors (photographers, cinematographers, local agents and entrepreneurs, newspaper editors, journalists, translators, directors), and mechanisms of controlling the official representations and meanings of images and texts. In the late-19th‑century Ottoman context, the documentation and memorialization of imperial pomp were significantly aided by the technology of image, itself a token of modernity and (representational) power. The Hamidian press had produced dense iconographic coverage documenting autocratic modernity and progress.29 In the years of the Young Turk revolution, Sultan Mehmed became iconic of the new order, his portrait coming to symbolise unity and stability within a broader imagery of heroism and patriotism.30 At about that time, film was also added to the political economy of imperial image as a potential mechanism of propaganda. In addition to the professional photographers from Istanbul and from the local Pathé covering the itineraries, city vistas and welcoming parades of the imperial journey,31 the Manaki brothers, the first cinematographers of the Balkans and “chroniclers of the transition from empire to nation-state”,32 were also busily at work. They produced unique footage of the Sultan’s trip to Monastir, including also his arrival and departure from the railway of Salonica. Such photographic and filmic practices actively produced the “city as artefact”33 and at the same time staged it as a visual spectacle.34 What remains elusive, nonetheless, and in need of rehabilitation, in most visual―and textual―representations of Salonica welcoming its Sultan, is the way the city was essentially a theatrical space, “a space where people interacted through complex rituals of artifice and play”.35

  • 36 Eldem 2015.
  • 37 See Cohen, Stein (eds.) 2014; Naar 2016, p. 83.
  • 38 Recent analytical attention to materiality points to the social agency of objects and their affect (...)
  • 39 Levy 1911. See Eldem 2020, p. 116, on the Ottoman notion of antiquities (asar‑ı atika), already in (...)
  • 40 Levy 1911. The use of Ottoman Turkish should be understood in the context of the broader debate ov (...)

14A singular contribution to the visual and textual documentation of the imperial visit, following the practice of displaying modernity through photography established during the reign of Abdülhamid,36 was the photographic album produced by Sam Levy, a prominent Salonican Jew and French- and Judeo-Spanish-language publisher.37 It showcased the triumphal arches constructed in the Sultan’s honour. Their photographs, printed in high-quality illustration paper, were accompanied by concise descriptions, in both French and Ottoman Turkish, of the arches. Thus, for instance, the Greek (fig. 1a) and the Bulgarian (fig. 1b) arches were seen as combining elements of Turkish and classical architecture, while the arch of the Jewish community (fig. 1c) was described as having Byzantine architectural features that alluded to the nearby mosque of Agia Sofia.38 The imperial journey and the city’s history and “ancient monuments” were also duly presented.39 A “token of Ottoman patriotism”,40 to which the employment of Ottoman Turkish would have further pleaded, the album was presented by Levy to the Sultan during his stay in the city. It is an invaluable record, not only of the material structures erected in his honour, but also of the material encounters between the Sultan and the city.

  • 41 De Certeau 1984; cf. Sennett’s elaboration of the notions of actor and spectator (Sennett 2017).

15The Plan itinéraire du cortège impérial à travers Salonique, included in Levy’s album (fig. 2), eloquently evokes the tension between a map-oriented and a tour- or itinerary-oriented spatial logic; one introduces a totalizing gaze, from above and from afar, and objectifies, the other is subjective, contextual, relational and processual; one conjures up the voyeur the other the walker,41 or, in other words, the spectacular and the performative. Read as a map, the Plan itinéraire displays the arches’ location in urban space. Read as an itinerary, it traces the Sultan’s passages through urban space. However, even in the latter case, it doesn’t fully acknowledge the performative aspect in all its multiplicity, diversity and disorderliness: the full range of spatializing actions, of actual paths and itineraries taken, of durations and stops made, of places, buildings and people connected (or not) through acts of walking, by those witnessing and participating in the Sultanic ceremonies.

Fig. 2. In the Plan itinéraire du cortège impérial à travers Salonique contained in Levy’s album, the asterisks mark the triumphal arches erected to commemorate the Sultan’s visit and the dashed line marks the Sultan’s itineraries in the city centre.

Fig. 2. In the Plan itinéraire du cortège impérial à travers Salonique contained in Levy’s album, the asterisks mark the triumphal arches erected to commemorate the Sultan’s visit and the dashed line marks the Sultan’s itineraries in the city centre.

The newly-added colours mark the Sultan’s route from the port to the Konak (orange), and from there to Aya Sofya mosque (red) in 1911, Place de la Liberté (pink), the Greek Metropolis (yellow), the White Tower (green), and the Epitaphios route in 1917 (blue).

Reproduced from Levy 1911.

  • 42 J. Crary quoted in Cowan, Steward (eds.) 2007, p. 7.

16It is this messy world of human and material agency and entanglement that this article seeks to probe. It thus approaches ceremonial and ritual practices in public space not just as projections and implementations of the ruling order, but also as instances in which the city’s communities were actively constituted as such, both vis‑à‑vis the ruler and in relation to one another. By shifting emphasis from spectatorship and “visuality” towards the study of historically determined notions of “embodiment”, one can study the “embodied subject” as “both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance”,42 at a period of mounting intercommunal tension in Salonican history.

Rank competitions

  • 43 Hanioğlu 2001, p. 261.
  • 44 Mazower 2005, p. 274.
  • 45 In the demonstration against the passing of the anti-strike law in 1909, in which some 6000 Saloni (...)

17The Young Turk Revolution, announced in July 1908 across Macedonia with canon-fire and thundering speeches, had heralded an “Ottomanist movement” that would restore a constitution under which all would be equal,43 a vision that, for a short period, seemed to unite the Ottoman non-Muslim communities. In fact, it was from the balcony of the “new Konak”―the Prefecture building where the Sultan stayed during his visit―that the Mufti together with the Greek Metropolitan (archbishop) and the president of the local Bulgarian Committee had embraced one another under an enormous flag with the words “Long live the Constitution!” and “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Justice”, in Turkish, causing the delirious response of an enthusiastic crowd of all nationalities.44 In parallel, a formidable workers’ movement was breaking out, its fierce activism occupying those very same streets in the shape of union marches, strikes and demonstrations, and offering a competing political credo that, for a short while, promised to unite Salonican Turks, Greeks, Jews, Bulgarians, Albanians under a common emancipatory cause, quite different from the Ottomanism proclaimed by the Young Turks.45

  • 46 Hanioğlu 2001, pp. 300–301.
  • 47 Petition presented by the Greek Metropolitans of Selanik to the Sultan (Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911); (...)
  • 48 Kamouzis 2013, p. 26.

18By the 1910s, competing nationalisms were also in full sway: the Greco-Bulgarian rivalry over Ottoman Macedonia was gradually turning Ottoman citizens into national subjects (“Greeks”, “Bulgarians”, etc.) who demanded privileges and regarded themselves “as distinct nationalities within a multinational empire”.46 It is in this context that the petition presented by the Greek Metropolitans of Selanik to the Sultan should be understood. The petition evoked the new Constitution and called for the impartial application of the laws and the implementation of equal citizenship among all the nationalities of the Ottoman state.47 Yet the rhetorical plea for equality quite likely disguised the high clergy’s disapproval of the Young Turk policy of homogenization of all Ottoman subjects, which was inevitably undermining the privileges of the various non-Muslim communities.48

  • 49 In his account of the schoolchildren’s parade during Abdülmecid’s visit in 1859, Sa’adi Levy descr (...)
  • 50 Minutes of the Elders Council, 24 March 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archive of (...)

19Intercommunal competition also pervaded the more “mundane” sphere of festive participations. Preparations of the Greek Orthodox Community for the Sultan’s reception were already underway in March 1911. The Elders Council (Dimogerontia) noted the need to raise more money for the construction and illumination of the Greek community’s triumphant arch and for the decoration of the communal institutions, while the churches’ illumination in honour of the Sultan awaited patriarchal authorisation. Other matters, too, needed coordination, but one matter of urgency monopolised the council’s meetings: contrary to the custom according to which Greek schoolchildren paraded right after the Muslims,49 this time the official programme left the order of appearance in front of the Sultan to be decided by lot. The Elders Council, in close communication with the Patriarch, appeared determined not to give up on their privilege: it was paramount that the rank was kept and, moreover, that Greek schoolchildren were permitted to bear their diacritics (a bay leaf)―and “to sing their own song”.50

  • 51 Although it has not been possible to identify it, the specific song should be placed within a long (...)
  • 52 Anagnostopoulou 2010, p. 82.
  • 53 Stephanov 2013, p. 11.
  • 54 Stephanov 2013, p. 24.

20The song mentioned in the council minutes was most probably an encomium to the Sultan, written in Turkish and set to music.51 Such songs were performed in the context of Sultanic ceremonies, at school festivals and religious and other communal events. They promoted “the mass establishment of a spirit of devotion to the Sultan, a spirit of Ottoman patriotism”,52 and served to “mould the Ottoman non-Muslim provincial populace into loyal subjects”.53 At the same time, as Stephanov argues, in the late Ottoman context they also served to accentuate intercommunal rivalries providing a venue for open competition through the demonstration of zealous attachment to the Sultan.54 The council deliberations are quite revealing in this respect.

  • 55 Education in general was a field of intense indoctrination of children as Ottoman but also as nati (...)
  • 56 Cf. Zandi-Sayek 2012, pp. 173–175. A case in point is the seminal printed music collection by Ioan (...)

21Educational reform, as well as closer state supervision of communal schools and their curricula, had formed part of the broader project of imperial reorganisation in the context of the Tanzimat (1839–1876), and was a key field for shaping and contesting complex religious, communal, and political identities, as well as for reconciling the values of Ottoman imperial citizenship and national affiliation.55 From the last decades of the 19th century, the ethnoreligious communities were equally investing in education as a potent tool for cultural and political indoctrination. It is quite telling in this respect that in the Greek Orthodox community, whose educational programme became increasingly attentive to the irredentist cultural policies of the Greek state, schoolchildren learned encomiums in praise of the Sultan, the Patriarch and also the Greek Κing.56

  • 57 Minutes of the Elders Council, 2 and 6 April 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archiv (...)
  • 58 Minutes of the Elders Council, 6 and 22 April and 7 May 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Histor (...)
  • 59 See Kontogiannis 1910 for a listing of non-Greek schools, and Ellinika sholeia Thessalonikis and S (...)
  • 60 Anastasiadou 2008, p. 195; Dimitriadis 1983.

22Coming back to the school-parade, the administrative authorities announced to the Metropolitan a change in the programme: instead of parading in front of the Konak, the students of the central schools were to line up on the streets through which the Sultan would pass on his way from the port to the Konak.57 This arrangement, which was accepted by the Elders’ Council,58 favoured distribution in space rather than linear alignment. This allowed the administration to get around two potential problems. Firstly, intercommunal and inter-school antagonisms over the lineup. Secondly, the congestion that would result from aligning on the rather narrow Midhat Pasha street what was by that time quite a sizeable school population. In the early 1910s, Selanik was host to an expanded network of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian (especially Greek and Bulgarian, but also Rumanian, Serb, Vlach), as well as European schools.59 This formed part of the topography of the city centre, which before the devastating fire of 1917 remained largely organised on the basis of ethno-religious criteria.60

  • 61 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.
  • 62 It was founded in 1909 and supported by the Young Turks (Kontogiannis 1910, p. 183).

23The spatial arrangement of schools along the Sultan’s route from the port to the Konak reconstructed, but also to an extent, reconfigured this topography. According to a report of the Sultan’s welcome in the Greek local press,61 the school arrangement seems to have generally corresponded to the ethno-religious communities’ geographical distribution in the city: Alliance Israelite and other Jewish schools, the Armenian school, and European schools were all stationed along the quay, i.e. the area of the commercial market, the Europeans’ quarter and the densely populated Jewish districts. The Greek schools were stationed from the White Tower up until the Greek arch on Boulevard Union, which formed the eastern border of the old city’s Christian districts. Next, in front of their schools to the left and right of the Boulevard Union respectively, were the students of the Commercial school Ittihad ve Terakki62 and the Idadiye, the school of public administration whose imposing building, iconic of late Ottoman modernity, would surely have caught the Sultan’s eye. And along Midhat Pasha street―which marked the borders of the Muslim districts in the north of the city―all the way to the Konak, the Sultan was greeted by a mixed crowd of people and students of various Turkish schools.

  • 63 Cohen 2014, pp. 17, 103, 129.
  • 64 Kolonas 2016, pp. 42–43.

24Although the positioning of most student groups corresponded either to the location of their respective schools or that of their affiliate community, the Muslim schools were an exception: the Military school and the recently inaugurated Law school, based at the Konak, were among the first to greet the Sultan at the quay, on Place de la Liberté. Apparently, this was not only a ceremonial display on the part of the administration of Ottoman completeness and cohesion through inclusion of all the city’s communities along the Sultan’s route, it was also a clear demarcation of Muslim predominance by shifting some of its prime educational institutions from their locality and showcasing them on the city front. The Jewish schools were not stationed all in one place, but were rather interspersed among the Muslim and European ones, some on the quay and some―including the Talmud Torah―at the parade that followed in front of the Konak. This may, in turn, corroborate the thesis that, by the Second Constitutional period, members of the Jewish community were both eager to consolidate their imperial loyalties and finding it increasingly hard to speak “in one voice”.63 As for the Greek Orthodox community, although reportedly absent from the parade, it seems to have scored an important symbolic victory. The Greeks had strategically positioned all their schools together in a resolute choreography of a single harmonious community. The uniform costumes, the bands and banners bearing the schools’ diacritics, and the music of the Greek Orpheus Society, would have reinforced and projected their sense of solidarity, performed under the impressive Greek arch that had been erected on the wide cosmopolitan boulevard with its two-story apartment buildings that housed preeminent Salonicans and the city consulates.64

  • 65 The prolonged pandemic restrictions have sadly inhibited research into this matter in the Bulgaria (...)
  • 66 Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 529–535; Fortna 2002, pp. 68–69; Moskof 1978, pp. 142–146.
  • 67 The Feyziye Mektebi, with a recently inaugurated commerce curriculum, received a special reception (...)
  • 68 Baer 2009, pp. 44–64, 88–89. The Freemason and former Feyziye director Mehmet Cavid served as fina (...)

25Conspicuously absent from the report in the Greek press were the schools of the Christian Slav-speaking communities, which would definitely have claimed their own place in this Ottoman ecumene spatially inscribed along the Sultan’s route―possibly on Midhat Pasha or Boulevard Union.65 In fact, although no mention is made as such in the council minutes, it must have been the case, especially given the increasing public visibility and mobility that the Bulgarian Exarchists were achieving through the establishment of their own neighbourhoods, churches and schools66―not to mention their own triumphal arch―that agitated the Greeks. At any rate, it was the Ittihat ve Terraki schools that were stationed on the quay in front of the Young Turk arch, and especially the elite Feyziye and Terraki schools of the Dönme (Ma’min) community that took pride of place during the Sultan’s visit,67 a patent reiteration of the supremacy of the Muslim community in the Ottoman context in general and in the late Ottoman context of Islamic Ottomanism in particular. The network of Dönme schools was promoting a synthesis of modern and Islamic values, and their physical proximity to the Konak may well have been symbolic of the prominent role that the Salonican Dönme played in local governance from the late 19th century and during the Second Constitutional era.68

Under one dome

Selamlık at Aya Sofya

  • 69 Skrip, 28 May 1911.
  • 70 Dimitriadis 1983.

26The Sultan performed the Selamlık (the public procession of the Sultan to the mosque at noon on Fridays) at the mosque of Aya Sofya (fig. 3). The imperial procession departed from the Konak, going past the arch of the Bulgarian community on Sabri Pasha street and the arches erected on Place de la Liberté by the Ottoman Fez and Fabric Company and the Municipality; turned left on the quay, passing the arch of the Nouveau Club Israelite and the impressive street decorations; turned left again on Aya Sofya street, going past another Municipal arch, and further up, the arch of the Jewish community, before arriving to the mosque (figs. 1c2).69 This route would have taken the Sultan from the Muslim districts located in the upper part of the city, through the market to the Jewish districts in the middle lower part of the city centre―most Christian districts lying a bit further to the east, towards Boulevard Union.70 Visual sources capture the arrival of the Sultan’s procession, the imperial carriage and the members of the guard wearing ornate uniforms and robes of office, riding or walking in ceremonial order. The banners of the Jewish community that hang on nearby buildings writing “Vive notre Sultan” in French possibly served as a self-declaration of the community’s modernity or as silent inscriptions of words meant to be vocalized, thus attesting to the soundscape of a late Ottoman public ceremony.

Fig. 3. The Sultan leaves the Aya Sofya mosque after the Selamlık ceremony.

Fig. 3. The Sultan leaves the Aya Sofya mosque after the Selamlık ceremony.

Photographic Archive, Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece.

  • 71 Cf. Ben-Naeh 2008, p. 42.
  • 72 Zandi-Sayek 2012, p. 182.
  • 73 (Tuncu), İsmail, Hâtıra‑i Seyâhat (1327 Mayıs-Haziran: Selanik, Üsküp, Priştine, Kosova, Manastı (...)
  • 74 Unlike this performative enactment of power asymmetry, religious spaces and their sensorial regime (...)

27Such spectacular processions effectively cast the Sultan as a powerful ruler of a mighty empire and a devout Muslim, thereby further enhancing his religious and secular authority.71 In line with the Ottomanist practice of enlisting the participation of non-Muslim groups in imperial feasts and state ceremonials,72 the heads and dignitaries of the city’s non-Muslim communities attended the Selamlık. In his travel memoirs, İsmail (Tuncu) Bey, brother-in-law of Sultan Reşad and a member of his entourage, noted, with reference to the “sacred mosque”, that quite possibly “people of such various religions and sects have not been united under its dome until now”.73 Indeed, during the Sultan’s one-hour stay at the mosque, which included the prayer followed by two sermons, Ottoman Salonicans engaged in a synaesthetic experience that involved their sensory and embodied participation in the Muslim liturgy. Despite their co‑existence within the religious building, however, non-Muslim Salonicans would not have experienced an instance of interfaith communication, but one of ritual subordination to the Islamic intersensorial regime.74 The buildings’ history of conversion further attests to the segregation between the ethnic-religious communities and their religious practices, a segregation that embedded competitive and power relations. I will now examine this aspect.

Church – mosque – church

  • 75 Theoharidou 1994, p. 216.
  • 76 Cf. Gradeva 1994, p. 34.

28The Aya Sofya mosque itself, carried the material marks of two distinct liturgical sensescapes, one having succeeded the other. Agia Sofia, church of the Holy Wisdom, was one of the grandest and oldest Byzantine churches and was the city’s cathedral up until its conversion into a mosque in 1523–1524.75 Its occupation had formed part of a widespread practice by the Ottoman administration to convert, upon seizing a city, its churches into mosques, a practice, that besides providing spaces of worship to the incoming Ottoman Muslim populations, was also a clear symbolic declaration of conquest and of the supremacy of Islam over Christianity in the Ottoman context.76

  • 77 Evliya Çelebi quoted in Moshopoulos 1940, p. 339.
  • 78 Navaro-Yashin 2012, pp. 11–21.
  • 79 Eldem 2020, pp. 117–120. Papadopoulos, Sichani 2021.
  • 80 Ergin 2014.

29In the context of their conversion to mosques, church buildings were modified in order to accommodate the liturgical needs of the newcomers. Consequently, the mosque of Aya Sofya had been furnished with a mihrab, reorienting the interior space from the East to the South-East, and a minbar, from which the preacher delivered the sermon. This had replaced its pulpit―the “splendid green pulpit” that had arrested Evliya Çelebi as “a work of exceptional and singular art”, “one of a kind in the whole world”.77 An important soundmark of the Christian liturgy, this particular pulpit had most likely remained silent for the rest of its stay in the building―exerting the “phantomic presence” of Christians as their thing “left behind”78―but also in its subsequent “home” in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul.79 In big mosques such as Aya Sofya, a muezzin’s mahfil80 was often added (fig. 4). The exterior of church buildings was also modified, the most emblematic transformation being the erection of imposing minarets that functioned as both physical landmarks of the Muslim places of worship; and as soundmarks of the Muslim community.

Fig. 4. The mahfil of Aya Sofya mosque, photographed in all likelihood before the 1890 fire with a müezzin or kayyım (caretaker) seated on its base.

Fig. 4. The mahfil of Aya Sofya mosque, photographed in all likelihood before the 1890 fire with a müezzin or kayyım (caretaker) seated on its base.

Courtesy of The D. Loupis Visual Archive of Islamic Architecture, Athens, Greece.

  • 81 Eldem 2020. The Hamidiye mosque is a paradigmatic example, on which see Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, P (...)

30In the late Ottoman period, the drive towards modernization pervaded all aspects of institutional practice and social life. Within the nascent field of Ottoman archaeology, an interest developed in the restoration of old mosques―especially converted Byzantine churches―and the construction of new ones.81 The expansion of monumental/public architecture in the turn of the 20th century offered the Ottoman state a means to project its power as well as to synchronize with the European interest in Byzantine architecture, which had been developing since the mid 19th century.

  • 82 In 1906, Ottoman tax records list 38 mosques in Thessaloniki, of which 11–15 were originally Byzan (...)
  • 83 For a detailed account of the restoration works see Theoharidou 1994, pp. 213–215, and for its ide (...)
  • 84 Theoharidou 1994, p. 215.
  • 85 Dimitriadis forthcoming.
  • 86 Mantopoulou-Panagiotopoulou 1989.

31Aya Sofya was among the Byzantine church buildings that formed an important part of Selanik’s network of big mosques.82 It had been severely damaged in the fire of 1890 and, like most of the other grand Byzantine churches, had remained in a semi-ruined state until the early 20th century. Its renovation started with the initiative and economic support of the French government, and was subsequently carried out by the Ottoman administration (1908–1910).83 The refurbishments of the building, which continued until the Sultan’s arrival, were part of a “broader beautification project” that included road and building constructions and the demolition of part of the city’s sea fortifications.84 Great emphasis was placed on the restoration of the Byzantine mosaics in the interior of the building, a priority characteristic of the new-acquired notion of Byzantine churches as historical monuments. Although the mosaics were “respectfully hidden” from view85 for the Sultan’s Selamlık, the Byzantine imagery would not have escaped the Sultan’s attention, since his scheduled visit to “the ancient monuments” included the Hortaç mosque (Ag. Georgios/Rotonta)―a Roman 3rd-century AD monument that had been converted into a Byzantine church and then an Ottoman mosque―and Kasimiye mosque (Ag. Dimitrios, a 5th-century Byzantine church close to the Konak), both of which had also been recently renovated.86

The Greek Metropolis: architectural battles

32So far, my analytical focus has been on public ritual, understood as a mode of cultural performance that enabled the articulation of Ottoman subjecthood and intercommunal relations through the mediating role of the Ottoman state. In this section, I will look at the city’s material canvas in order to discuss the interplay between materiality and performativity.

  • 87 As the Christian sacred soundscape gradually diminished―since as a rule bell-ringing was prohibite (...)
  • 88 Gara, Tzedopoulos 2015, p. 124.

33The Tanzimat reforms had on the whole significantly improved the status of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects―while at the same time presaging intercommunal enmities in the context of rising nationalisms. In the field of church building, new regulations were put in place. Up until then, strict restrictions had applied to the height and size of churches; the permission to build or renovate a church; and liturgical practice, bell-ringing87 and the display of visual symbols such as crosses in public space. But in the second half of the 19th century, as Gara and Tzedopoulos note, “the erection of grandiose churches and imposing bell-towers […] in all Ottoman cities with substantial Christian populations, as well as the building of luxury houses by the affluent bourgeoisie, was a characteristic mark of the political, social and economic growth and the confidence of the Christian elite in the late Ottoman period”.88

  • 89 In February 1911, the Metropolitan requested its fast completion and the members of the Elders’ Co (...)
  • 90 Mantopoulou-Panagiotopoulou 1989, p. 465.

34This emerging confidence, which in the case of the Salonican Greek Orthodox community, went hand in hand with increasing anxiety in the face of Bulgarian nationalism and Greco-Bulgarian rivalry over Ottoman Macedonia, is best exemplified in terms of religious architecture by the Greek Orthodox Metropolis. The construction of Agios Grigorios Palamas was funded by the community and supported by donations from affluent Greeks and the Greek government, a practice that was becoming prevalent during this period, and was almost complete by the time of the Sultan’s visit.89 The “neo-Byzantine” architectural style of the Metropolis reinstated the dome and the cross-in-square ground plan―key features in both Agia Sofia of Thessaloniki and of Istanbul. It also signaled a break with previous Ottoman church architecture that was characterized by humble, low and small buildings stripped of symbolic features such as roofs and bell-towers, and a shift towards a religious architecture with nationalist overtones (fig. 5).90

Fig. 5. Postcard of Agios Grigorios Palamas, the Greek Metropolis, sent in 1910.

Fig. 5. Postcard of Agios Grigorios Palamas, the Greek Metropolis, sent in 1910.

Photographic Archive, Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece.

  • 91 Anastasiadou 2008.
  • 92 Anastasiadou 2008, p. 549. Indicative examples in the 1900s are the Jewish Hirsch hospital, and, a (...)
  • 93 Dimitriadis 1983.
  • 94 Minutes of the Elders Council, 14 May 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archive of Ma (...)
  • 95 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

35The Greek Metropolis, much like the newly restored Aya Sofya mosque, formed part of what Anastasiadou has termed an “architectural propaganda”.91 At the turn of the 20th century, the tension between the various ethno-religious communities was “expressed especially by marking urban space” through the construction of communal monuments that were grandiose and visually imposing.92 This description perfectly befits the Metropolis. It was located at the Metropolis district, a Christian district amidst the Jewish districts, in one of the richest areas of the city.93 Quite exceptionally, it possessed not one or two, but four bell-towers which formed a distinctively Greek Orthodox part of the early-20th century Salonican cityscape. Turning from the quay to Aya Sofya street on his way to the Aya Sofya mosque, the Sultan would have passed right in front of it, while its illumination―following the Patriarch’s authorization94―would have secured its place among the earlier mentioned “blazing giants” on the city skyline.95

  • 96 According to oral testimonies, the Metropolis and the Greek Consulate were secretly connected and (...)

36The Metropolis formed part of a building complex that also included the Metropolitan’s residence, the Greek Consulate, and the Greek Gymnasium. In addition, this was where the meetings of the Elders Council (Dimogerontia) were held, with the Metropolitan presiding. The symbiosis of the religious authorities with the representatives of the Greek state (already almost a century-old), also inscribed spatially, indicated that a process was in place of imbuing the religious identity of Greek Ottoman subjects with nationalist qualities,96 during a period of Ottoman history when the co‑existence of distinct ethno-religious communities became increasingly problematic.

People and objects in transition

  • 97 See variously Mazower 2005; Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 142–143, 160–171; Papamichos Chronakis 2011, pp (...)
  • 98 Megas 2015; Savaidis 2017. By the winter of 1915–1916 more than 500 000 soldiers had passed throug (...)

37The Balkan Wars and the annexation of Thessaloniki by the Greek state came soon after the Sultan’s visit to Selanik. The outbreak of World War One saw the arrival of the Army of the Orient in Greek Thessaloniki; the Greek-Turkish War followed, which ended with the complete dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the formation of the Turkish Republic and the forced exchange of populations laid out by the Treaty of Lausanne. During this turbulent period, communal identities, that had been based largely on religious and geographic/ethnic affiliation, were undergoing a process of re‑articulation on increasingly nationalist terms. The 1910s were also a decade of intense population movement, with many of the city’s Muslim, Jewish and Slav-speaking inhabitants leaving the city and a counterflow of troops and refugees transiting or taking up residence for shorter or longer periods of time.97 Part of the city’s network of public buildings provided temporary housing to some of these populations, while with the arrival of the Army of the Orient thousands of soldiers camped on the western and eastern outskirts of the city.98

38Following its annexation to the Greek state, the city remained an open site and an object of intense observation, generating rich textual and visual documentation on the part of Salonicans, Greek bureaucrats, travelling cosmopolitans, the cartographic and cinematographic services of the Army of the Orient, and local entrepreneurs working for a thriving market of postcards that soldiers sent back home. All these acts of documentation actively reproduced the city and captured the visual imagination.

  • 99 Cf. Kornetis, Poulos 2021; Papadopoulos, Sichani 2021.

39The city’s materiality was constituted, not only through its sites and the routes and paths connecting them, but also through its buildings and the objects they contained. The religious buildings that were converted during this period, from mosques back into churches, and the incoming and outgoing journeys of their sacred objects and communities, bear witness to the transformation of public space, a transformation that was closely tied with the changing power relations and public visibility of the city’s communities in the passage from the Ottoman to the Greek state. Far from being obliterated, as one historiographical narrative argues, the religious sentiments and experience of citizens seem to have formed an integral part of their experience of modernity, subjecthood and nationhood. As for the objects found in the city’s mosques and churches, their adventurous careers and itineraries offer invaluable testimony to these buildings as they changed hands, inhabitants and usages.99 Through the extant visual and textual records, it is possible to reconstruct an inventory of incoming and outgoing sacred objects in the city’s Byzantine churches during their re‑conversion from mosques to churches. This inventory tracks the city’s changing sensorial and affective geographies.

The sacred and the nation in tune

  • 100 Empros 3, 4 November 1912.
  • 101 Empros 3 November 1912; Makedonia, 28 June 1913.

40Most of the churches that had been converted into mosques in the Ottoman period, were consecrated by Metropolitan of Athens, Theoklitos, during a trip to Thessaloniki in the winter of 1912.100 At that time, the church of Agia Sofia was housing Bulgarian soldiers, so its consecration was postponed for seven months when the Metropolitan of Thessaloniki Gennadios finally consecrated it.101 The ceremonial purification of churches, as set out in the Typikon of the Orthodox Church, marked their return to the Church, and inaugurated the rehousing of the liturgical sensescape of Christian worship.

  • 102 Historical Archive of the Holy Metropolis of Thessaloniki, Codices Archive 1890–1940, n. 60 Minute (...)

41The minutes of the Committee of Occupied Churches (1912–1913),102 which was placed in charge of inspecting the buildings and overseeing their re‑opening as churches, record a series of works that were carried out for this purpose in 1912–1913: cleaning, painting, repairing, carpentry, lighting, and refurbishment works; emptying the buildings from soldiers or refugees; guarding and security; appointing commissioners, priests, clerical staff, and guards; chanting, sanctification, doxologies, and baptisms. In church interiors, objects―and people―found were enumerated, and the provision of administrative and sacred objects was coordinated: registers, paper, marked envelopes, icon stands, flags, candle stands, ceremonial candelabra, sacred utensils, discs, hexapters, crosses, icons of the Virgin, candlesticks and candles, iconostases, chandeliers and vigil lamps, luxurious Byzantine imperial banners with the black eagle, baptismal fonts, screens, curtains, boxes, are among the incoming items listed.

  • 103 Historical Archive of the Holy Metropolis of Thessaloniki, Codices Archive 1890–1940, n. 60 Minute (...)

42Agios Georgios (Hortaci mosque) together with Agios Dimitrios (Kasimiye mosque)―the two mosques that the Sultan had visited in 1911―were given special priority. In Agios Georgios, fifty-nine mats were supplied to the Greek soldiers who were still staying there; on‑site inspections and repairs were carried out, and in April 1913, the church was apparently equipped with lights, a cross, two hexapters, a small icon of the Virgin, and a collection box so as to hold a doxology for Saint George. The money donated during the doxology was used for further refurbishing the church and for supplying its dome with a cross.103

43The photographs of Agios Georgios taken by Fred Boissonnas in August 1913 offer fascinating views of the building’s transformation from mosque into church. Particularly striking are two photos of the interior that, combined, show its sparse furnishings and capture a transition period of material co‑existence of the mosque and the church (fig. 6). The mihrab, the minbar and the mahfil are still in place, as are the calligraphic inscriptions on the walls of the name of God and the four Caliphs. Alongside these, are the newly installed hexapters, the candle stands, a Greek flag, icons, and other sacred objects of the Christian liturgy. Boissonnas’ photos can be read as documents of the changing affective regime and religious identity of the building.

Fig. 6. One of the two photographs taken by Boissonnas in August 1913 that show the interior of Ag. Georgios.

Fig. 6. One of the two photographs taken by Boissonnas in August 1913 that show the interior of Ag. Georgios.

The other one also shows a priest at the church entrance; his appointment was among the Committee’s priorities.

Folklife and Ethnological Museum of Macedonia and Thrace.

  • 104 Constantinidis (ed.) 1989, p. 17; Wilson 2019.
  • 105 On the history, politics and poetics of this mission, sponsored by Albert Kahn and supervised by h (...)

44Boissonnas and his friend Daniel Baud-Bovy’s tour of the Byzantine churches and other Salonican locations was conducted in the course of their philhellenic mission, upon the request of the Greek King, to produce a photographic album recording the Macedonian victories of the Greek army over the Bulgarian and Turkish armies.104 At about the same time that the two friends were strolling around the city, two other foreigners arrived with a rather different mission, to capture the city’s colourful polyethnic fabric. Despite their different ideological approaches, the photographs of Agia Sofia and other churches taken by Auguste Léon and Léon Busy respectively in two successive trips (in 1913 and 1918),105 further demonstrate European fascination with Byzantine monumental/public architecture. Combined with Boissonnas’ photographs, they also allow a visual reconstruction of the process of material reconversion of the religious buildings so as to house the Christian faith and its liturgical sensescape, following the annexation of Thessaloniki to the Greek state.

  • 106 Unlike its green pulpit, that survived in one piece but in exile, these were destined to stay “at (...)
  • 107 Velenis 1999, pp. 141–144.
  • 108 Burke 2001, p. 183.

45Thus, the mihrab niche, the mahfil and the minbar of Agia Sofia, that had been lavishly refurbished and showcased by Léon in 1913, are absent in Busy’s photographs of 1918 (figs. 7 and 8 respectively).106 A low iconostasis, a light bishop’s throne, and two plain psalteria (the special place reserved for cantors) are now seen. It seems, as Velenis observes, that the ecclesiastical authorities had given priority to the liturgical needs rather than the display of the monumental character of the building:107 the floor has been covered with rugs, short bronze columns indicate the passage to the main gate of the sanctuary, two large candelabra stand in front of the icons and numerous fine crystal chandeliers have been strategically placed. Nonetheless, the scattered chairs alert us also to the photographer’s agency in producing the image, underlining the importance of seeing images not as reflections of social reality but of “the changing ways in which individuals or groups view the social world”:108 were the chairs left scattered by the photographer on purpose, in disapproval of the priority given by the Greek clergy to the liturgical over the monumental character of the building?

Fig. 7. Church of Agia Sofia. Sanctuary mosaics.

Fig. 7. Church of Agia Sofia. Sanctuary mosaics.

The mihrab niche and the minbar are still in place.

Auguste Léon, 1913, A 2033, Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn/Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

Fig. 8. Church of Agia Sofia. Interior of the monument following its reconversion from mosque to church.

Fig. 8. Church of Agia Sofia. Interior of the monument following its reconversion from mosque to church.

Léon Busy, 1918, A 16895, Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn/Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

  • 109 See Kallimopoulou, Poulos 2015.

46The removal of the structures that had been added by the Ottoman administration to the church exterior, was also in progress. The building’s minaret would only be demolished in 1925, together with the other 24 minarets of the city (except the one of Ag. Georgios) which had been constructed by the Ottomans as part of the conversion of Byzantine churches into Islamic mosques. Their demolition would culminate the gradual silencing of Muslims in the urban public space following the annexation of the city to the Greek state.109

Helleno-Christian Rituals

  • 110 De Certeau 1984, pp. 91–110, 118–122.
  • 111 Tilley 1994, pp. 30–31.

47Although the ceremonial purification of the churches inaugurated the rehousing of the liturgical regime of Christian worship, this hardly signaled a return to the past: the meanings and effects of the Christian Orthodox liturgy were changing as it increasingly resonated with the nation. In this final section, I detail this shift in the liturgical sensorial regime and the increasingly vocal presence of the Greek Orthodox community in the public space. This reinstates the article’s original focus on public ritual and the performative negotiation of intra and intercommunal relations, through what de Certeau terms an operational mode of pedestrian street acts that, in fact, temporarily constituted the city through a process of symbolic demarcation of urban space.110 Such acts also forged social paths, spatiotemporal linkages that once established provided templates for future movements and the maintenance of social relationships of precedence and power.111

  • 112 See indicatively, Michailidis 2015; Veremis, Dimitrakopoulos (eds.) 1980, and Tsironis 2010.

48Detailed below is an account in the Greek daily press of a memorial service held in the church of Agia Sofia, where most official services took place following its return to the Christian faith, at Easter in 1917. Five years had passed since the annexation of Thessaloniki to the Greek Kingdom. The National Defense movement (1916) was in full swing, with Eleftherios Venizelos having formed a Provisional Government in Thessaloniki, in effect, splitting the country in two, with the support of Gennadios, Metropolitan of Thessaloniki and Head of the churches of the New Countries.112 World War One was also in progress, and the multinational Army of the Orient was stationed in the city of Thessaloniki. The catastrophic fire of August 1917 was about to destroy much of the historic city centre, offering a unique opportunity for a redesign according to international European standards, while accelerating its Hellenization to the detriment, in particular, of its Jewish population that occupied the city centre.

  • 113 Gregorios Palamas, vol. 1, 1917, p. 94.

49The column Ecclesiastical Chronicles of the ecclesiastical journal Gregorios Palamas offers vivid descriptions of the liturgies and religious services of the Passion Week: The Epitaph ceremony was held majestically in Agia Sofia, in the presence of President Venizelos with members of the national Government, other Greek and foreign officials, and thousands of people. In front of the temple, the Metropolitan prayed for the pious members of the national Government, for the national army and fleet, and for the blessed memory of the late King George (who had been assassinated in Thessaloniki in 1913) and for all those who perished on land and at sea. The imposing religious procession lasted one hour. It started from the church of Agia Sofia, led by a military music band, and headed from Agia Sofia street to Niki street on the coast, and along the quay, all the way to the White Tower, before returning to the church of Agia Sofia from Pavlou Mela and Tsimiski streets (fig. 2). The report ends by stating that “thousands of foreigners attended with vivid interest”.113 Commander General Sarrail and the other military authorities of the allied army regularly attended such events, as did the Mufti and chief Rabbi. The European presence in particular added further legitimacy, as the purpose of the procession was to demonstrate the Greekness of Thessaloniki not just to the locals, but also to its foreign visitors.

  • 114 Gregorios Palamas, vol. 1, 1917, pp. 94–95.

50The procession of the Epitaph in the main streets of the city, along part of the route that the Sultan had taken only six years earlier, with the sonic accompaniment of Greek Orthodox chants and military music, with the political leaders walking along with the priests and the congregation in a spirit of religious exaltation, in effect validated the synergy between the Greek religious and secular authorities ritually re‑inscribing public space. A few days later, the members of the Provisional Government attended the Resurrection ceremony that took place at the church of Agia Sofia: “The music of the guard greeted the resurrected Christ through the national anthem, and the bells of the Churches in the stillness of the night announced throughout the city the resurrection of the Lord.” Then Metropolitan Gennadios addressed the “pious congregation” with “Christ is risen” and added the following words, in a way that legitimized the Provincial Government and Greek rule over Salonica without leaving any doubt about the political and national allegiances of both Gennadios and the ecclesiastical journal: “I wish from the bottom of my heart and ask you to wish with me that the resurrected Christ our God resurrect, save, and glorify our blessed Nation, blessing its holy struggle and support its leaders. Long live the nation, long live the army, long live the Provisional Government.”114

Fig. 9. Another religious ceremony on the quay of Thessaloniki, with Venizelos participating: The diving of the cross and blessing of the waters on Epiphany.

Fig. 9. Another religious ceremony on the quay of Thessaloniki, with Venizelos participating: The diving of the cross and blessing of the waters on Epiphany.

Photographic Archive, Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece.

Epilogue

51This article advocates an engagement with the performative and the spatial in cultural history. I focused on the ways in which rituals understood as cultural performances played a role in the active constitution of ethno-religious communities (Jewish, Muslim, Christian) both vis‑à‑vis the (Ottoman/Greek) state and in relation to one another, in the context of their competing modernities. Illuminating the Greek Metropolis, lobbying for the second position in the Sultanic school parades, attending the Selamlık procession, constructing a triumphal arch, singing a song to welcome the Sultan, printing an album in his honour, were all performative events, rituals through which Salonicans performed their Ottoman subjecthood and their membership as Ottoman citizens, with all the tensions, silences, and ambiguities that intercommunal relations entailed in late Ottoman Selanik. Likewise, through participation in religious rituals such as the Epitaphios in Greek Thessaloniki, a new sensory regime was imposed on Salonican public space, in which the Hellenochristian predominated and the Muslim and Jewish communities became increasingly less visible.

  • 115 On the concept of “rhizome” see Deleuze, Guattari 1987.

52These acts mediated the Salonicans’ asymmetrical experiences and positions of Ottoman and Greek subjecthood as their city and society changed. These experiences varied depending on one’s social, ethnic and religious allegiances, commitments, and positions of power. Nonetheless, their study also reveals general trends, such as the precedence of Ottoman Muslims over the other Ottoman ethno-religious communities, or the gradual fusion of Orthodox Christianity and Greek nation in the Greek context. More importantly, it also reveals subjects engaging space in embodied, affective ways. Attention to the spatial and the performative introduces a rhizomatic rather than linear perspective,115 a perspective of both/and rather than either/or. What emerge are more plural regimes of material co‑existence, of hierarchization, embodied presence and contestation in the public space, of people, objects and buildings. An emphasis on the spatial and the performative tends to challenge monolithic narratives of linear transition from the empire to the nation-state, paving the way for more nuanced cultural histories of transition.

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Notes

1 I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Panagiotis C. Poulos for their pensive comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also go to the staff of the Historical Archive of Macedonia, the Historical Archive of the Holy Metropolis of Thessaloniki, and the Thessaloniki History Centre.

2 Thomassen 2012. For an elaboration of the term in the late-Ottoman context, see Poulos, Kallimopoulou 2021.

3 Bell 1997, p. 74.

4 Bell 1997, p. 73.

5 Soja 2010; Soja 1989. See Zandi-Sayek for a socio-spatial study of 19th-century Ottoman Izmir (2012).

6 Lefebvre 1991.

7 Stavrides 2016, p. 260.

8 Harvey 2003, pp. 19–20.

9 Deringil 1999.

10 See indicatively Deringil 1999; Hanioğlu 2008 and Hanioğlu 2001.

11 Campos 2011, p. 65; cf. Stein 2004, Cohen 2012.

12 Zandi-Sayek 2012, p. 6.

13 Campos 2011, p. 6.

14 See indicatively, Cohen 2014; Cohen 2012; Talbot 2016; Kechriotis 2008; Kamouzis 2013, Hanioğlu 2002; Ilicak 2002; Baer 2009.

15 Cf. Campos 2011, p. 248.

16 Clogg 2002, p. 67. On the place of the city of Selanik “amidst the Balkan storm” see especially Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 527–580; Mazower 2005, pp. 253–290.

17 Stamatopoulos 2008; Kamouzis 2013.

18 Papamichos Chronakis 2014, p. 379.

19 Cf. Papamichos Chronakis 2014; Campos 2011; Molho A. 2014.

20 Mazower 2005.

21 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

22 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

23 Anastasiadou 2008; on electricity, Gounaris 1993, p. 500.

24 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

25 Stampoulis 1984, p. 198.

26 The notion of anxiety is introduced by Cohen 2014, pp. 119–122.

27 Cohen 2014, p. 129.

28 Sultan Mehmed V’s visit should be placed within a long lineage of sultanic visits to the provinces and Selanik in particular. These included, among others, Mahmud II’s 1837 tour of Rumelia, Abdülmecid’s 1846 tour of Rumelia and his 1859 tour of Selanik (mentioned further down), and Abdülaziz’s 1867’s diagonal shortcut of Rumelia on his way back from Europe (see Yazici 2015, pp. 31–33).

29 Deringil 1999, pp. 26–35.

30 Eldem 2015, p. 147.

31 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

32 Cowan 2008, p. 338; on the Manaki brothers see also Arslan 2010.

33 In Burke 2001, p. 84.

34 Cowan, Steward (eds.) 2007, p. 20.

35 Latham et al. (eds.) 2009, pp. 178–179.

36 Eldem 2015.

37 See Cohen, Stein (eds.) 2014; Naar 2016, p. 83.

38 Recent analytical attention to materiality points to the social agency of objects and their affective charge, i.e. their ability to discharge feeling through their interaction with humans. Indicatively, Gell 1998, pp. 17–23; Navaro-Yashin 2012.

39 Levy 1911. See Eldem 2020, p. 116, on the Ottoman notion of antiquities (asar‑ı atika), already introduced with reference to Selanik’s monuments in the official almanacs (salname) of 1870–1871.

40 Levy 1911. The use of Ottoman Turkish should be understood in the context of the broader debate over the linguistic and cultural identity of Ottoman Jews in the late imperial period and following the annexation of the city to the Greek state (Stein 2004; Naar 2016, pp. 139–188, and Ginio 2002). Sam Levy championed both the use of Judeo-Spanish and the need for Jews to become fluent in Ottoman Turkish, as he himself had done as a student at an imperial high school in Salonica (Cohen, Stein [eds.] 2014). It is noteworthy that during Abdülmecid’s visit in 1859, the language of communication between the Sultan and the city’s leading Jews was French, and Sa’adi Levy, Sam’s father, had composed his three children’s encomiums to the Sultan in Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish (Rodrigue, Stein [eds.] 2012, pp. 68–76, 145–148). In 1911, by contrast, the Jewish schoolchildren also sang in Turkish while the chief Rabbi of Salonica included in his address to the Sultan a prayer in Arabic, thereby scoring “an enormous symbolic victory”, as Cohen notes (Cohen 2014, p. 130).

41 De Certeau 1984; cf. Sennett’s elaboration of the notions of actor and spectator (Sennett 2017).

42 J. Crary quoted in Cowan, Steward (eds.) 2007, p. 7.

43 Hanioğlu 2001, p. 261.

44 Mazower 2005, p. 274.

45 In the demonstration against the passing of the anti-strike law in 1909, in which some 6000 Salonicans had participated, a pamphlet was distributed in five languages―Judeo-Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian and French―reflecting “the multi-ethnic structure of the city and its proletariat”, Ilicak 2002, pp. 124–125; cf. Mazower 2005, pp. 286–287; Moskof 1978, pp. 167–188. On Salonica under the Young Turks see also Dimitriadis 2020.

46 Hanioğlu 2001, pp. 300–301.

47 Petition presented by the Greek Metropolitans of Selanik to the Sultan (Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911); a similar petition was presented to the Sultan by the Metropolitans of Monastir (To Fos, 12 June 1911, Monastir); the two petitions were also reproduced in the Greek press of Istanbul (Politiki Epitheorisi, 5 and 19 June 1911).

48 Kamouzis 2013, p. 26.

49 In his account of the schoolchildren’s parade during Abdülmecid’s visit in 1859, Sa’adi Levy describes a line‑up of Turkish, Greek, and finally Jewish schoolchildren (Rodrigue, Stein [eds.] 2012, pp. 70–71).

50 Minutes of the Elders Council, 24 March 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archive of Macedonia, GRGSA-IAM_REL004.02.F000001).

51 Although it has not been possible to identify it, the specific song should be placed within a long practice among non-Muslim Ottomans of composing encomiums for the Sultan, in the case of Greek Ottomans in Turkish and Greek. For a musicological analysis of such encomiums, see Andrikos 2012.

52 Anagnostopoulou 2010, p. 82.

53 Stephanov 2013, p. 11.

54 Stephanov 2013, p. 24.

55 Education in general was a field of intense indoctrination of children as Ottoman but also as national subjects in the late Ottoman period (Fortna 2002; Deringil 1999).

56 Cf. Zandi-Sayek 2012, pp. 173–175. A case in point is the seminal printed music collection by Ioannis Zografos (Zografos 1873) written in Turkish with Greek characters. Its section of Greek songs, also intended for instruction at schools (Zografos 1856, prologue), includes an encomium to the Sultan, one to the former Patriarch Gregory VI (1835–1840, 1867–1871), and one to George I, King of Greece (reigned 1863–1913).

57 Minutes of the Elders Council, 2 and 6 April 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archive of Macedonia, GRGSA-IAM_REL004.02.F000001).

58 Minutes of the Elders Council, 6 and 22 April and 7 May 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archive of Macedonia, GRGSA-IAM_REL004.02.F000001).

59 See Kontogiannis 1910 for a listing of non-Greek schools, and Ellinika sholeia Thessalonikis and Sholeia ellinika, boulgarika, roumounika, servika for schools of the Greek Orthodox and other Christian Orthodox communities. On the subject of Salonican schools and/or the content and role of education, see Molho R. 2014, pp. 137–224; Naar 2016, pp. 139–188; Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 256–261; Dimitriadis 1983, pp. 389–402.

60 Anastasiadou 2008, p. 195; Dimitriadis 1983.

61 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

62 It was founded in 1909 and supported by the Young Turks (Kontogiannis 1910, p. 183).

63 Cohen 2014, pp. 17, 103, 129.

64 Kolonas 2016, pp. 42–43.

65 The prolonged pandemic restrictions have sadly inhibited research into this matter in the Bulgarian Salonican press, on which see Vlasidis 2020.

66 Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 529–535; Fortna 2002, pp. 68–69; Moskof 1978, pp. 142–146.

67 The Feyziye Mektebi, with a recently inaugurated commerce curriculum, received a special reception at the Konak (Yazici 2015), and an inaugural ceremony was held for the Feyziye girl’s school (Politiki Epitheorisi, 5 June 1911, Istanbul); while the Sultan was greeted by the Terakki schoolgirls and viewed an exhibit of their handiwork (Baer 2009, p. 52). In 1859, it was the Greek schoolgirls who had presented an embroidered pillow to the Sultan, for which he, in turn, had donated money to them (Rodrigue, Stein [eds.] 2012, pp. 73–75).

68 Baer 2009, pp. 44–64, 88–89. The Freemason and former Feyziye director Mehmet Cavid served as finance minister between 1909-1912, while Semsi Efendi, who taught at the Feyziye and whose own school had formed the model for the Terakki and Feyziye schools, was awarded (besides previous sultanic honors from Sultan Murad V and Abdülhamid II) the Mecidi 2nd degree during Sultan Mehmed V’s visit to Salonica (Baer 2009, pp. 53–54).

69 Skrip, 28 May 1911.

70 Dimitriadis 1983.

71 Cf. Ben-Naeh 2008, p. 42.

72 Zandi-Sayek 2012, p. 182.

73 (Tuncu), İsmail, Hâtıra‑i Seyâhat (1327 Mayıs-Haziran: Selanik, Üsküp, Priştine, Kosova, Manastır), TTK Kütüphanesi, Y.I/266, quoted in Yazici 2015, p. 40.

74 Unlike this performative enactment of power asymmetry, religious spaces and their sensorial regimes in the Ottoman context also allowed some limited room for horizontal intercommunal and interfaith interaction. A notable example of religious syncretism in Ottoman Selanik is the Byzantine church of Ag. Dimitrios that during its lifetime as Kasimiye mosque had remained an important topos of Christian pilgrimage, so much so, that a religious functionary was also tasked with overseeing matters related to the Christian pilgrims (Kallimopoulou, Poulos 2015, pp. 253–254). The classic study on religious syncretism in the Ottoman Balkans is Hasluck 1929; for a critical contemporary perspective see Hayden 2002 and Hayden et al. 2011.

75 Theoharidou 1994, p. 216.

76 Cf. Gradeva 1994, p. 34.

77 Evliya Çelebi quoted in Moshopoulos 1940, p. 339.

78 Navaro-Yashin 2012, pp. 11–21.

79 Eldem 2020, pp. 117–120. Papadopoulos, Sichani 2021.

80 Ergin 2014.

81 Eldem 2020. The Hamidiye mosque is a paradigmatic example, on which see Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2020.

82 In 1906, Ottoman tax records list 38 mosques in Thessaloniki, of which 11–15 were originally Byzantine churches (Mantopoulou-Panagiotopoulou 1989).

83 For a detailed account of the restoration works see Theoharidou 1994, pp. 213–215, and for its ideological context see Dimitriadis forthcoming and Eldem 2020, pp. 117–120.

84 Theoharidou 1994, p. 215.

85 Dimitriadis forthcoming.

86 Mantopoulou-Panagiotopoulou 1989.

87 As the Christian sacred soundscape gradually diminished―since as a rule bell-ringing was prohibited in areas of religiously mixed populations (Gradeva 1994; Mantopoulou-Panagiotopoulou 1989)―the overlapping calls to prayer, performed from the top of the minarets on a daily basis appropriated the Ottoman public soundscape empowering the Muslim acoustic community.

88 Gara, Tzedopoulos 2015, p. 124.

89 In February 1911, the Metropolitan requested its fast completion and the members of the Elders’ Council donated money to this end (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archive of Macedonia, GRGSA-IAM_REL004.02.F000001). The church was inaugurated in 1914.

90 Mantopoulou-Panagiotopoulou 1989, p. 465.

91 Anastasiadou 2008.

92 Anastasiadou 2008, p. 549. Indicative examples in the 1900s are the Jewish Hirsch hospital, and, at a lesser scale, the Bulgarian Exarchist church at the Transvaal district (Anastasiadou 2008, p. 532), and the Armenian church at the Hamidiye district (Kontogiannis 1910). The latter was built by Vitaliano Poselli, an iconic architect of Hamidian Selanik (Kolonas, Papamattheaki 1980) whose buildings also included the new Konak, the Idadiye, the Hamidiye mosque, the villa Allatini (where Sultan Abdülhamid, Mehmed V’s brother, was held in captivity following his deposition by the Young Turks) and the Allatini Mills, a major landmark also referenced by the arch of the Allatini Mill Company during the visit of Mehmed V.

93 Dimitriadis 1983.

94 Minutes of the Elders Council, 14 May 1911 (Greek General State Archive – Historical Archive of Macedonia, GRGSA-IAM_REL004.02.F000001).

95 Nea Alithia, 27 May 1911.

96 According to oral testimonies, the Metropolis and the Greek Consulate were secretly connected and in the late 19th century Greek nationalists would use this secret passage to take guns and coordinate the military and propaganda actions aimed at incorporating Macedonia into the Greek Kingdom (Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 551–552). Even if inaccurate, the story is indicative of the symbolic value attributed to the Hellenochristian, i.e. the synthesis of Greek nation and religion.

97 See variously Mazower 2005; Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 142–143, 160–171; Papamichos Chronakis 2011, pp. 297–299; Glavinas 2013, pp. 47–96; Michailidis n.d. At any rate, up until the great, definitive, demographic shifts brought about by the arrival of Greek Christians and the departure of the Muslims following the Treaty of Lausanne and the extermination of the Jews during World War Two, the characteristic feature of the city centre was the presence of its three main ethno-religious communities, Greek, Jewish and Muslim.

98 Megas 2015; Savaidis 2017. By the winter of 1915–1916 more than 500 000 soldiers had passed through or camped in Thessaloniki, creating a “second parallel (and temporary) city” (Savaidis 2017, p. 17).

99 Cf. Kornetis, Poulos 2021; Papadopoulos, Sichani 2021.

100 Empros 3, 4 November 1912.

101 Empros 3 November 1912; Makedonia, 28 June 1913.

102 Historical Archive of the Holy Metropolis of Thessaloniki, Codices Archive 1890–1940, n. 60 Minutes of the Committee of Occupied Churches 1912–1913.

103 Historical Archive of the Holy Metropolis of Thessaloniki, Codices Archive 1890–1940, n. 60 Minutes of the Committee of Occupied Churches 1912–1913.

104 Constantinidis (ed.) 1989, p. 17; Wilson 2019.

105 On the history, politics and poetics of this mission, sponsored by Albert Kahn and supervised by human geographer Jean Bruhnes, see Yerolympos 1999; Beausoleil 1999; Amad 2010.

106 Unlike its green pulpit, that survived in one piece but in exile, these were destined to stay “at home” but in pieces; some of their fragments are today found in the collections of Agia Sofia and Rotonda (Theoharidou 1994).

107 Velenis 1999, pp. 141–144.

108 Burke 2001, p. 183.

109 See Kallimopoulou, Poulos 2015.

110 De Certeau 1984, pp. 91–110, 118–122.

111 Tilley 1994, pp. 30–31.

112 See indicatively, Michailidis 2015; Veremis, Dimitrakopoulos (eds.) 1980, and Tsironis 2010.

113 Gregorios Palamas, vol. 1, 1917, p. 94.

114 Gregorios Palamas, vol. 1, 1917, pp. 94–95.

115 On the concept of “rhizome” see Deleuze, Guattari 1987.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. The triumphal arches raised by the Greek (a), the Bulgarian (b) and the Jewish community (c), on Boulevard Union/Hamidiye (today Ethnikis Amynis), Midhat Pasha (today Ag. Dimitriou) and Agia Sofia streets respectively.
Crédits Reproduced from Levy 1911.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 638k
Titre Fig. 2. In the Plan itinéraire du cortège impérial à travers Salonique contained in Levy’s album, the asterisks mark the triumphal arches erected to commemorate the Sultan’s visit and the dashed line marks the Sultan’s itineraries in the city centre.
Légende The newly-added colours mark the Sultan’s route from the port to the Konak (orange), and from there to Aya Sofya mosque (red) in 1911, Place de la Liberté (pink), the Greek Metropolis (yellow), the White Tower (green), and the Epitaphios route in 1917 (blue).
Crédits Reproduced from Levy 1911.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 331k
Titre Fig. 3. The Sultan leaves the Aya Sofya mosque after the Selamlık ceremony.
Crédits Photographic Archive, Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 558k
Titre Fig. 4. The mahfil of Aya Sofya mosque, photographed in all likelihood before the 1890 fire with a müezzin or kayyım (caretaker) seated on its base.
Crédits Courtesy of The D. Loupis Visual Archive of Islamic Architecture, Athens, Greece.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 473k
Titre Fig. 5. Postcard of Agios Grigorios Palamas, the Greek Metropolis, sent in 1910.
Crédits Photographic Archive, Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 583k
Titre Fig. 6. One of the two photographs taken by Boissonnas in August 1913 that show the interior of Ag. Georgios.
Légende The other one also shows a priest at the church entrance; his appointment was among the Committee’s priorities.
Crédits Folklife and Ethnological Museum of Macedonia and Thrace.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 292k
Titre Fig. 7. Church of Agia Sofia. Sanctuary mosaics.
Légende The mihrab niche and the minbar are still in place.
Crédits Auguste Léon, 1913, A 2033, Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn/Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 317k
Titre Fig. 8. Church of Agia Sofia. Interior of the monument following its reconversion from mosque to church.
Crédits Léon Busy, 1918, A 16895, Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn/Département des Hauts-de-Seine.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 251k
Titre Fig. 9. Another religious ceremony on the quay of Thessaloniki, with Venizelos participating: The diving of the cross and blessing of the waters on Epiphany.
Crédits Photographic Archive, Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive, Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/813/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 483k
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Eleni Kallimopoulou, « Under One Dome? Rituals of Transition in Ottoman/Greek Thessaloniki »Bulletin de correspondance hellénique moderne et contemporain [En ligne], 4 | 2021, mis en ligne le 22 mars 2022, consulté le 08 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/813 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/bchmc.813

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