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

Moving Objects, Images, and Memories: Hamza Bey Mosque/Alcazar Cinema as an Affective Archive of Thessaloniki

Objets, images et mémoires en mouvement : la mosquée Hamza-Bey devenue cinéma Alkazár, archive émotionnelle de la ville de Thessalonique
Kostis Kornetis et Panagiotis C. Poulos

Résumés

Cet article s’intéresse à la matérialité de la mosquée Hamza‑Bey, surnommée Alkazár et transformée en cinéma, et à la manière dont ce bâtiment a façonné les expériences subjectives et collectives de la cité. Il suit son évolution à travers une période historique de profonds bouleversements, caractérisés par une succession de changements démographiques à plus large échelle et de transformations politiques et sociales majeures. Plutôt que d’analyser la mosquée et son statut ambivalent de monument historique dans le contexte politique imposé par le pouvoir central en matière d’héritage culturel, cet article vise à restaurer une strate de l’histoire de la ville, en étudiant l’interaction entre les éléments matériels, l’intersensorialité et les réactions émotionnelles à la transition que connaît la ville de Thessalonique, de l’Empire ottoman vers l’État grec.

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Notes de l’auteur

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers. A special thanks also goes to Ipek Celik-Rappas and Nick Poulakis for their valuable comments and suggestions, and to Kostis Karantzas (Ianos Publishers) and Dimitris Loupis for granting us permission to reproduce certain images. Finally, we would like to dedicate this article to the memory of the late Giorgos Anastasiadis, city historian and old cinema aficionado.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Boyer 2001, p. 65.
  • 2 This publishing outcome includes both academic and works that address wider readership. For a rece (...)
  • 3 Heath Lowry provides a historical documentation of the mosque based on past major studies and new (...)

1“How do bricks and mortar generate memories, tell stories and relate to myths? These are questions to which the advocates of collective memory seldom reply.”1 These were the words of urban historian M. Christine Boyer back in 2001. The recent publishing boom on the history of Thessaloniki that followed the commemoration of the hundred years since the city’s annexation by the Greek Kingdom in 1912, revealed an impressive list of historical sources and studies. This material is related to all aspects pertaining to the city’s vast political and social transformations in the 20th century.2 Yet, the affective history of the processes through which Thessaloniki’s urban space was Hellenised is still waiting to be pieced together, facing the very questions that Boyer posed. This would include the effects of the vital demographic shifts caused by key conflicts including the Balkan Wars, the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish war that led to a dramatic population exchange, and the Nazi occupation, resulting in the quasi-extinction of the city’s once thriving Jewish population. The life-story of the 16th century Ottoman Hamza Bey Mosque which, after the departure of the Muslim population of the city, was turned into a cinema dubbed “Alcazar” and which is currently being restored into a monument, is telling. Alcazar screened mostly Turkish melodramas that attracted, among others, Turkish speaking refugees from Asia Minor. However, this article is not about the history of the building per se3 and the subsequent changes in its use. It is rather about the knots linking transformations on the material level and the lives of historical subjects intertwined with the Hamza Bey Mosque/Alcazar cinema. Exploring these knots can provide a framework for a preliminary affective history of the transitions of 20th-century Thessaloniki.

  • 4 For an overview of the material turn in anthropology see Yalouri 2012, pp. 11–74.
  • 5 For a key publication in this genealogy of studies see Birtek, Dragonas (eds.) 2005.

2This article focuses on the materiality4 of the Hamza Bey/Alcazar cinema and its role in shaping the subjective and collective experiences of the city. It uses as its main sources an array of diverse material comprising archival documents, photographs, film footage and written memoirs, and thus contributes to a fast-growing body of work on the complex relations between Greece’s “Ottoman past” and the politics of the formation of the Greek nation state.5 The affective dimension involves the imprint of state nationalism and the processes of social and cultural integration and exclusion on the lives and bodies of historical subjects within the limits of the urban centre. Rather than exploring Hamza Bey Mosque and its ambivalent status as a historical monument in relation to the top‑down state policy on cultural heritage, this article aims to activate the interface between memory and materiality and approach the past as a lived experience. This is a way to unearth a layer of the history of the city (hitherto concealed in the current “readings” of its modern history) through the study of the interplay between materiality, inter-sensoriality and the affective responses to transition.

  • 6 On ruination, see Stoler 2013, pp. 1–35.
  • 7 Raptıs forthcoming 2022.

3Current histories of the building, told from the point of view of archaeologists and heritage specialists, situate its post-1923 transformation within the framework of state neglect, degeneration, and even ruination.6 These interpretations are based on the inefficiency of the state to prevent illegal alterations and additions to the building’s physical structure.7 Consequently, by approaching Hamza Bey’s reincarnation as Alcazar cinema as an “abjected” space, we intend to reveal the ambivalence and contradictions at play in the building’s afterlives. We further intend to point to its entanglements with the life trajectories of those who force-migrated to and from Turkey. These interactions and affiliations, we argue, are the proof of connected points and continuities with the building’s past sensorial regime. We thus underscore the potential of a new materialist approach to social history and to the study of transitions, particularly those from empire to nation state.

Collective memory and historical voids

  • 8 Pentzıkıs 2008, p. 69. Here we are using the translation by Astrinidou 2010, p. 215. Also see Stav (...)

At different levels, times utilize one and the same building, which, while at first might have been a church, it then became a mosque, coffee shop, pharmacy, telephone centre, tobacco storage, restaurant, office, cabaret and cinema. This last phrase clearly refers to the building known as “Alkazar,” in front of Caravan Serai, where need forced the dense co‑existence of massive populations.8

4This excerpt from the book Mother Thessaloniki by the novelist and painter Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis published in 1970, demonstrates the way Hamza Bey Mosque is now registered in the city’s collective memory as a cinema by the name of “Alcazar”. In Pentzikis’ narrative the “building” appears somehow neutralized and estranged from its inhabitants, and resembles a vessel that contains an entangled genealogy of successive functions from the mid-1920s onwards. However, rather than the building itself, in the end, it is the “populations”, namely its historical subjects, who are subtly given pride of place in this extract and who are indirectly responsible for its diverse history. This vague refence to the “populations” in the text begs the question as to who gives his place to whom and to what extent these shifts of “residences” also constitute definite ruptures in the building’s biography. Furthermore, Pentzikis stresses the communal character of the building’s usage, often connecting contradictory past functions, such as that of a mosque with that of a movie theatre. The presumed continuity of the communal or convivial character of the building raises further questions about the social change and transformation of the historical subjects related to it. Overall, however, Pentzikis’ description aptly conveys the ambivalent and hazy history of Hamza Bey Mosque.

  • 9 Lowry 2010, p. 4.
  • 10 Lowry 2010, pp. 5–11.
  • 11 In late 16th century Hamza Bey Mosque is mentioned in Menâzırü’l‑Avâlim by Âşık Mehmed’s (Âşik M (...)

5By the time Pentzikis wrote his monumental work on Thessaloniki, the memory of Hafsa, the female endower of the mosque and more significantly that of her father, Hamza Bey,9 had long passed into oblivion. The mosque was built in 1467–1468 originally as a mescit (small prayer house), later enlarged (1592–1593) and rebuilt in 1618–1619.10 As one of the few originally Ottoman-built mosques of the city in a rather prominent location at the centre of the city, Hamza Bey Mosque is mentioned in all major Ottoman narrative sources on Salonica.11

  • 12 Hekimoglou 1995. For the different professions situated around Hamza Bey Mosque see also Anastasia (...)
  • 13 Dimitriadis 2008, p. 412.
  • 14 Dimitriadis 2008, p. 136.
  • 15 Selânik Vilâyeti Salnâmesi 1902, 1905–1907.
  • 16 Selânik Vilâyeti Salnâmesi 1902, 1905–1907, pp. 315–316.
  • 17 BOA, ŞD, 180/40, 12/R /1325.
  • 18 Ginio 2006, p. 287.

6The neighbourhood of Hamza Bey Mosque, namely Tahtakale, had always been a rather modest, yet commercial quarter of downtown Ottoman Thessaloniki. The mosque formed a network with the nearby public bath, namely Tahtakale Hamamı as well as two dervish convents, one of which was the zaviye of Kara Baba of the Bektashi order. Earlier sources document the presence of saddle-makers and other handcraft professions in the quarter.12 The commercial identity of Tahtakale was further intensified by the Kervan Saray13―the Büyük Han―, built at the north side of the mosque, as well as the famous Bezesten covered market on the north-south axis, towards the port. At the beginning of the 20th century, the neighbourhood’s commercial function was strengthened, with shops outnumbering houses.14 At that time, according to the Yearbooks of the Province of Selanik (Salnâmes)15 that listed Hamza Bey Mosques alongside the city’s major mosques, the annual income of its endowment was not that high, compared to other central mosques in the city, like for instance, the one founded by Numan Paşa, located near the Telli Kapı of the eastern city walls (where the Τρίτο Γυμνάσιο Αρρένων is located today).16 Part of this income covered the monthly salary of Osman Bey the caretaker (kayyım) and müezzin of Hamza Bey in 1906,17 who thus participated in the sonic ecology of the neighbourhood.18

  • 19 On a registry (no. 1456) dated in 1924 recording the confiscated properties of the Muslim communit (...)
  • 20 ΦΕΚ 191/Α/11‑6‑26. For correspondence between the Greek state and the owner with regard to various (...)
  • 21 Mazower 2005, p. 426.
  • 22 For a genealogy of the term see Mazower 2005. Also note that “Alcazar di Salonicco” was an infamou (...)

7Following the annexation of the city in 1912 by the Kingdom of Greece, it carried on functioning for the remaining Muslim population of the city.19 Upon the implementation of the Exchange of Populations, Hamza Bey Mosque, together with other Ottoman public buildings acquired the status of “exchangeable property” and came under state authority management. In 1926, the building was officially pronounced a “historical and archaeological monument” by royal decree20 and was sold in 1928 to a merchant by the name of Omiros Pizanis. While under his ownership, Hamza Bey Mosque and its attached premises retained various usages,21 some of which are mentioned by Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis, the most prominent being that of the cinema. A graphic advertisement from 1936 depicts the building itself, recently renamed to what it is still known today: Alcazar (form Arabic “al‑qaṣr”, meaning “castle”) (fig. 1).22

Fig. 1. Alcazar’s advertisement, 1936.

Fig. 1. Alcazar’s advertisement, 1936.

The caption reads: “Why are they running like mad? Simply, they run to watch ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ in Alkazar!”.

Reproduced from Anastasiadis 2000.

  • 23 Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 152. Cf. Kristeva 1982.
  • 24 Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 150.

8The vivid impression that emerges out of Pentzikis’ aforementioned narrative of successive changes in Hamza Bey’s function is coupled with the sense of the building’s ephemeral use. This is intensified by the building’s more recent history, following its forced abandonment in 1923 by the Muslims of Thessaloniki, the community for which it was built in the first place. The contrast between its monumentalisation by the Greek state, on the one hand, and the ephemeral sense that its historical trajectory reveals, on the other, resonates with the notion of “abjected space”, as formulated by anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin. Navaro-Yashin makes an anti-psychoanalytical reading of the abject, looking at it, not as a constitutive element in opposition to the ego as its filthy, counterpart, but as a domesticated, accepted and incorporated element in the new social order after violent ruptures.23 The de facto negation of the building’s monumental status proclaimed in 1926 by its later legal owner and his tenants, and its successive re‑incorporation into multiple new orders, have shaped the subjectivities, social class, and public sphere of the post-WWII Thessaloniki more broadly.24 In fact, it is on the grounds of this and other similar “abjected spaces” of Thessaloniki that affective narratives about past cohabitation and conviviality unfold and are established. As seen in the case of Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis, these narratives capture the collective feeling of post-WWI Hellenised city. Essential to this narrative is the author’s ambivalence about its original use as a church, a reference to Orthodox Christianity which constitutes a fundamental feature of his. As Pentzikis stated in a documentary film:

  • 25 Monogramma. Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis (Monogram. Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis), S. Lampropoulos, 1984.

The church is the time and the place where space-time dimensions meet, the scary ones for the individual, where there is no death because the past is present. Where there is no present because it is the future […] This is the chorus of the church.25

  • 26 Bergson 2010.
  • 27 Bergson 2010, pp. 76–77.
  • 28 Hamilakis 2013, pp. 126–127.

9Hamza Bey Mosque is thus appropriated in the narrative of Hellenized Thessaloniki through the ahistorical condition forged by this collapse of time and space. Henri Bergson’s idea that on the skin of our bodies lies the interface between “pure” memory and the material world as the very locus of subjective sensations,26 poses a great challenge to historical enquiry into the past as lived experience. This idea resonated with the ways people whose lives were somehow entangled with that of the building remembered the city’s past. Memories in the form of testimonies, as well as material fragments of the past remain “powerless” and “inactive”, disassociated from the sensations and the movements that constituted them back in the past.27 Foregrounding the bodies of the historical subjects and all that is embedded in them can be an empowering act in historiographic narratives, as we will try to show in the following sections regarding the “sensorial flows”28 and memories around Hamza Bey/Alcazar.

Moving objects

  • 29 The emerging interest of the Archaeological Section of the Armée in the Islamic art and architectu (...)
  • 30 Navaro-Yashin 2012, pp. 167–168.
  • 31 For a full overview of the state of Muslims in Greece throughout the 19th and first quarter of the (...)
  • 32 Rigney 2017, pp. 475–476. See also Gell 2013. For an interesting approach, along the same lines, t (...)

10A rare photo of Hamza Bey offers a snapshot of the building’s late Ottoman history prior to its monumentalisation (fig. 2). The stamps on the back, attributed to the French Section photographique de l’Armée, indicate that the photo dates from 1914–1918, while the mosque was still functioning. The photo captures a highly transitional moment in the building’s history, but also previous layers of its interaction with the city’s material culture. Most importantly, it captures the figures of men sitting on the floor of the mosque’s atrium. Some of them are looking towards the praying hall, facing the qiblah, while others are talking to each other. A few men, aware of the photographer are staring the camera. The note on the back of the photo reads “prayers in honour of Muslim soldiers who lost their lives in the field of honour” (prières en l’honneur des soldats musulmans tombés au champ d’honneur). Despite being mediated by the “colonizing gaze” of the Section photographique de l’Armée,29 this labelling points at the voids in history of spaces as “emotive domains”.30 In this case, the sense of loss or fear, but also the collective response triggered by warfare, are conveyed by the praying subjects within the “building”, that is to the exterior, actively encapsulating and maintaining its sacredness. The actual event that this note refers to is not specified, yet it was obviously part of the First World War.31 This photo, a primarily material artifact, foregrounds some of the emotive qualities of the relationship between the space and the subjects. It is a trace of an emotive domain at the threshold of a forthcoming radical change. The following section draws on post-humanist materialism and attempts to put forward the “truly ecological approach” of the Hamza Bey Mosque and its wider social and physical environment. Our aim is to focus on the “multi-sited dynamic interplay” resulting from the interactions and mediations between humans and non-humans.32

Fig. 2. View of the atrium of the Hamza Bey Mosque.

Fig. 2. View of the atrium of the Hamza Bey Mosque.

Section photographique de l’Armée, D. Loupis Visual Archive of Islamic Architecture, Athens, Greece.

  • 33 Raptıs forthcoming 2022.
  • 34 Raptis, Vasılıadou 2013, p. 65.
  • 35 Dimitriadis 2008, pp. 27–28.
  • 36 Dimitriadis 2008, pp. 295–300.
  • 37 Eldem 2020, pp. 117–118.
  • 38 Eldem 2020, pp. 116–117.

11This same photo depicts the mosque’s enclosed courtyard, an impressive later addition to the original structure that dates from the end of 16th century.33 Shifting focus from the people to the surrounding materials, the column capitals provide evidence of the ways in which material had moved around within the city, as well as within the limits of Hamza Bey’s broader neighbourhood. Recent archaeological research34 shows that the majority of the columns used in the peristyle of the courtyard were spolia dated from the Late Antiquity and Early Byzantine era and originated from different religious buildings in the city. The earliest among them are column capitals extracted from the church of Saint Minas,35 located in the neighbouring Christian parish of the same name and from the church of Hagios Georgios, the emblematic Rotunda, that was converted in 1590–1591 into Hortaç Efendi mosque.36 These spolia are evidence of the primary materials out of which the religious spaces of the city were reshaped and reconstituted at different historical eras. While this process of extraction and reuse of materials occurred on a local level, that is among constructions within the city, there were parts of monuments preceding the Ottomans that followed itineraries beyond the city’s limits. In 1900, the historical ambo of the church of Hagios Georgios was moved to Istanbul and entered the collection of the Imperial Museum.37 Unlike the column capitals from the same church that laid in the courtyard of Hamza Bey Mosque, the ambo and its historical significance were not lost on the Ottoman bureaucracy that was starting to take an interest in the city’s Byzantine monuments. Together with other important Byzantine monuments and their sculptures the ambo found its way into the Ottoman yearbooks, the salnâmes, under the section “ancient monuments” (âsâr‑ı atika).38

  • 39 On the concept of “cultural afterlife” see Rigney 2012, pp. 1–16.
  • 40 Hekimoglou 1995, pp. 377–385.
  • 41 On Ali Sami Bey and his political credentials see Tsitselikis 2020, p. 249.
  • 42 For the Muslims of Thessaloniki who managed to be exempted from the exchange of population see Tsi (...)
  • 43 Tsitselikis 2020, pp. 380–381.

12While these sculptures survived the building’s later transformations, including its “cinematic” afterlife39 post-1925, other components of the mosque’s material culture captured by this photo followed different itineraries. These include the mosque’s carpets, on which the men praying are sitting in the photo. These carpets ended up enmeshed in another troubling event, that led to a public dispute within the Muslim community: the implementation of the Treaty of Lausanne in Thessaloniki.40 In 1924, a Muslim photographer by the name Ali Sami Bey41 addressed a letter of complaint to the Prefect about the Mufti’s plan to take the Hamza Bey Mosque’s carpets to Turkey upon his departure. Ali Sami Bey based his argument on legal grounds, claiming that according to the sharia, it was illegal to remove them from the mosque, as the carpets were part of the property of the pious endowment (vakıf). His primary concern was the future of Muslims of foreign citizenship in the city who chose to remain as they were anti-Kemalist.42 However, the Treaty of Lausanne designated that all movable property of religious foundations was to be moved along with the people to their respective country of destination (Article 8).43 Ali Sami Bey, and those whose rights he defended, found themselves in limbo due to the change in the legal status of religious spaces in cities. This change directly affected the very materiality of their daily religious practice.

  • 44 Adıyeke, Adıyeke 2010.
  • 45 Adıyeke, Adıyeke 2010, p. 26.

13Unlike the mosque’s carpets, the story of the afterlives of other objects captured by the abovementioned photo remains untold. This includes the Islamic calligraphic inscription plates, the levhas, four of which are pictured hanging on the south-east wall of the mosque’s courtyard. The levhas also fell into the category of the movable property of a pious endowment and, according to the Treaty of Lausanne, could be removed by those departing from Greece to Turkey. Whether these levhas, as well as the abovementioned carpets, were, in the end, taken by the those who departed from Thessaloniki to Turkey is not known. According to a recent study, four surviving registers in Turkey dated between 1924 and 1928 record the property of the Muslim community in Macedonia that was either confiscated by the Greek state or left behind during the departure of the Muslim population of the city.44 The inventory of movable properties of Thessaloniki’s pious endowments that include mosques, tekkes, schools and guesthouses, lists 103 levhas together with 358 carpets (halı) and 1474 small carpets (kilim). These are listed, among other things, alongside candles, lamps, mirrors, clocks, curtains, chests, mats, cushions and blankets.45

  • 46 Gell 2013, p. 222.
  • 47 Ergin 2008, p. 208.
  • 48 Hamilakis 2013, pp. 126–127.
  • 49 Hamilakis 2013, p. 127.
  • 50 Mazower 2005, p. 348. See also Tsitselikis 2012, pp. 378–379.

14The itineraries of the column capitals, the carpets, the calligraphic plates, but also the hanging chandelier, the lamps and the candle box of Hamza Bey Mosque, whether documented or not, form an assemblage that mediates between materials, people and affective responses among them. This network of humans and non-humans alludes to Alfred Gell’s notion of “distributed objects”.46 From this perspective, these objects, as well as the various documents relative to their existence (photographs, archival documents, etc.), are traces of events or performances that shape and transform them. Tracing their itineraries and compiling their histories is a means of constructing an archive of this assemblage. In addition, these objects are embedded with inter-sensorial qualities. For instance, the calligraphic inscriptions, apart from the obvious visual impact, also had a significant acoustic aspect as they often functioned as visual cues for recitation practices.47 Thus, as distributed objects in time and space they formed a “sensorial assemblage”48 that “produces place and locality through evocative, affective, and mnemonic performances and interactions”.49 The communal prayers for the loss of the Muslim soldiers and the petition by Ali Sami Bey to prevent the removal of the mosque’s carpets are but a few of the performances of this type that construct subjectivities over the very space of the mosque. The case of the last mufti of the city who was accused by Kemalist Muslims of holding prayers and sermons in the Hamza Bey Mosque in favour of the deposed Sultan, should be added to the list.50 The underlying feature in all these complementing and competing performances is the precariousness caused by the transitional political conditions that challenged the notions of communal identity and citizenship.

  • 51 Ginio 2006, p. 273.
  • 52 Hastaoglou 1997, p. 317; Astrinidou 2010, p. 207.

15It is on the basis of these interactions that objects and people get to move or to be moved from one place to another, altering the ecology of late Ottoman Thessaloniki. In addition, this sensorial assemblage constituted affective regimes that defined the mosque as an emotive space, right in the course of transition. The photographic depiction analysed so far is a strong visual trace of these affective regimes whose shifting nature, however, is foregrounded only when the stories of individuals are being told. The sonic ecology of the Hamza Bey Mosque that consisted of the prayers, the Ottomanist sermons and the everyday recitation practices, were about to be altered and silenced. This ecology became entangled with other sensorial aspects, such as the visual qualities of the Islamic calligraphy and the Arabic script, as well as the olfactory after-effect of the lighting media of the time that was grounded in the socio-economic basis of both the central authorities and the local community. In addition, based on the management of the endowment system the latter often constituted “a vital civic society that could act independently of the central authorities’ intervention”.51 The 1923 Exchange of Population challenged such sensorial and emotive domains head‑on, alongside the civic society’s socio-economic structures. In a single year, the city took in 117,000 Greek-Orthodox refugees, while 25,000 Muslims left following the exchange mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne.52

Moving images

  • 53 Kallimopoulou, Poulos 2015.
  • 54 For an overview of the city in the local literary production see Bastéa, Hastaoglou-Martinidis 202 (...)

16In the years that followed the Exchange of Population, the Greek state demanded the requisition of public buildings, including those with the status of exchangeable properties, as a temporary measure for dealing with the urgent issue of housing of the newly arrived refugees. The new sensorial regime that was established in the city’s various religious buildings, including mosques, out of the urgent conditions of this humanitarian crisis had its stakes in the gradual alterations of the city’s public space.53 When the urgent condition of refugee settlement started being somehow regulated, iconic exchangeable properties such as the Hamza Bey Mosque or the Hamidiye Camii (aka Yeni Camii) emerged thoroughly transformed, socially, culturally and property-wise. Their new status was often characterised by a certain ambivalence that revealed the inefficiency of state bureaucracy. Hamza Bey Mosque, despite being an officially proclaimed monument, had many functions, with that of a cinema being at the top of the list. The monument would be assimilated in Thessaloniki’s collective memory as an ultimately abjected space, as is sustained by distinguished exponents of the city’s literary circles.54

  • 55 Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2020.
  • 56 Astrinidou 2010, p. 212.

17Recent studies of sensorial history on this transition have argued that a shift in focus to the sensorial, and consequently affective, domain sheds light on certain aspects of this transition, elucidating the abovementioned ambivalence on the history of the buildings and their functions.55 In the following section, we trace the history of Alcazar cinema and the community that surrounded it in order to retrieve the building’s function as an emotive space. To do so, we explore the experiences of the people who remember the cinema in their writings, combined with a preliminary reconstruction of the Turkish film repertoire at the cinema in the period 1947–1955. Here, we follow the lead of architect Pelagia Astrinidou, chief restorer of the nearby Ottoman covered market (Bezesteni), who notes that in order to find an alternate discourse on such spaces, and get away from the dominant architectural vision of the city, one needs to resort to lived experience and personal memory.56

  • 57 Mazower 2005, p. 370.

18Alcazar cinema, both in terms of its repertoire and overall function in post-war Thessaloniki, acted as a nostalgic space. According to Mark Mazower, in the 1930s, “a nostalgia for another faraway Ottoman past” emerged among refugees from Asia Minor, while the last remaining signposts of Ottoman Salonica were now being discarded en masse. As an example of everyday life Mazower indicates that tavernas, ouzerís and cafes were now renamed as “Smyrna Betrayed” or “Dreams of Nicomedia”.57 Under the pressure of this kind of nostalgia, he adds, “the Alcazar di Salonico was long gone”―meaning the scandalous late 19th century brothel on the city’s quays which bore this orientalist name. The new Alcazar was here to stay, however, tapping into this refugee-fuelled nostalgia in intriguing ways. We must note here that the name of a former brothel was now given to a hitherto sacred space.

  • 58 We are grateful to Aliki Arouh, Archive director of the Historical Archive of the Jewish Community (...)
  • 59 Mazower 2005, p. 426. Also see Dordanas 2002, p. 202.
  • 60 Kornetis 2018, pp. 236–237.

19During the war, the fate of Alcazar was similarly adventurous. In 1942, during the Nazi occupation, the cinema celebrated its tenth anniversary. Cinema owner Benico Segoura (1900–1976),58 however, was Jewish (often referred to by the Hellenized name Nikolaos Sigouras), and was arrested and thrown into the Pavlos Melas camp, run by the SS, to be shot in a reprisal execution. As Mark Mazower observes, “[Segoura] was told that he would be released only if he appointed new managers nominated by the press and propaganda office; indeed the cinema was rented out to a refugee from Serres”.59 This brutal transfer of Jewish property to beneficiaries of the Germans was, in fact, to initiate an entire cycle of property expropriation that reached a climax in the winter and spring of 1943.60 Segoura survived the war and recovered the cinema soon after the city’s liberation and consolidated it as one of the most popular movie theatres in the city. He played a central role in the distribution of mainly melodramas, as will be shown later on, importing film material directly from Turkey. His partners in Alcazar were his relatives Moses and Isaak.

20After the war the city was irreversibly altered, with its, once prominent, Jewish community almost entirely wiped out. Alcazar started to serve as a space of recognition for the now thriving refugee community from Asia Minor and beyond, alongside yet another Ottoman remnant: the Yeni Hamam, turned into the emblematic “Aigli” (Glamour) cinema already in 1925. Aigli stood just a few blocks away from Alcazar, offering similarly “oriental” surroundings and repertoire. According to city chronicler Kostas Tomanas:

  • 61 Tomanas 1993, p. 13

Since the customers were refugees from the nearby neighbourhoods and the Ano Poli, the owner often screened Turkish movies.61

21Alcazar was a popular space, as it was an early screening cinema (“κινηματογράφος πρώτης προβολής”) and provided a cheap source of entertainment. In the early post-war years, it attracted an audience that would mostly attend screenings right after work, eventually forging new subjectivities through a renewed sense of togetherness and socialization. Novelist and city chronicler Giorgos Ioannou’s described it as a primarily male space. In his detailed overview Ioannou commented on the outlook of people who frequented the cinema in the immediate post-war period, as follows:

  • 62 Ioannou 1964, p. 196.

The popular cinemas par excellence (Pantheon, Attikon, Ilion and Alcazar) were situated in the big commercial roads next to the markets and the car retailers. In the mornings women did normally not frequent these spaces, which were replete with men. During weekdays they were full of people, especially after dark. Then builders, blacksmiths, chauffeurs, small clerks and soldiers would arrive.62

  • 63 On Indian films in Greece, see Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998 and Eleftheriotis 2010. On Turkish melodrama (...)

22Initially drawn into the grand American movie epics of the time, Alcazar quickly shifted its repertoire to melodramas of all kinds, thus expanding its audience. Melodramas were defined nationally and chronologically: Indian and Egyptian ones in the late 1940s, Turkish ones mainly the early 1950s, Indian again in the mid-1950s, and Greek ones in the 1960s.63

Moving memories

  • 64 Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 46.
  • 65 Gell 2013, pp. 256–257.

23The screening of Turkish films in Thessaloniki points to a certain degree of continuity in sensorial flows after 1923, coming this time from Turkey. The fact that Benico Segoura was himself importing the movies from Turkey64 implies the existence of certain business networks between Thessaloniki and Istanbul. It is not known whether these were newly established networks, or if their origins can be traced back to the era prior to the Exchange of Population. Certainly, this circulation of the movies from Turkey to Thessaloniki can be registered in the genealogy of distributed objects that partake in various performative events related to the shaping of Alcazar’s afterlife.65 A detailed history of the distribution and screening of Turkish films in Greece and Thessaloniki in particular remains to be written, and one can only speculate about the commercial, linguistic and social aspects of this intriguing phenomenon.

24In one of the earlier screenings, in 1948, an advert for the film dubbed as “Woman in the Desert” (Οriginal movie production unidentified) is presented as a “diamond from the Orient”, while the blurb goes:

  • 66 Greek vocal improvised genre based on the modal system of makams. The term is used here to refer c (...)
  • 67 Μακεδονία, 5 October 1948. The dancer can be possibly identified with Mediha Gürsü.

Passionate love affairs. Turkish songs and amanes66 which will bring about sevda. Music which will move every oriental soul. Exotic dances with the famous dancer Maticha Yursoy.67

  • 68 In Greek the words “hanoumisa” and “hanoum” (after the Turkish hanım) has orientalist connotations (...)
  • 69 Μακεδονία, 25 March 1949.
  • 70 Μακεδονία, 2 April 1949.
  • 71 Μακεδονία, 28 January 1951.

25The focus on the exotic element, oriental dances, odalisques68 and amanes is present in almost every single blurb involving a Turkish film. In Istanbul, City of Lust (Kilibiklar) (1947, dir. Seyfi Havaeri), the latter is presented as a “free voyage to magical Constantinople right after Halima. Filmed entirely in the unforgettable isle of Bosporus with the endless beauties, the passionate women, the legendary hanums that bring about sevdas (longing) and the santouria (dulcimers) are on fire”.69 It is particularly important to note that these movies were used as vehicles of escapism right at the very climax of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). Evidently, specific networks sensed the potential of a local audience, ensuring the flow of relevant movies to be screened. The repertoire of Turkish films was greatly enhanced―and in the insert for Harmakkaya (Aise Hanoum) (Harmankaya, 1948, dir. Sami Ayanoğlu, Kadri Öğleman) the blurb reads “Alcazar: Always first in the selection of good Turkish films”.70 Another blurb boasts that “Alcazar shows us one Turkish film, but it's the best one!!!” (Το ΑΛΚΑΖΑΡ μας παρουσιάζει ένα Τουρκικό, αλλά το καλύτερο Τουρκικό).71 Writer Nina Kokkalidou-Nachmia notes:

Refugees would spend day and night in Alcazar. They would laugh, they would weep and mourn, as they watched oriental movies, Turkish ones. They brought along their food, their elderly, their kids.

  • 72 Kokkalidou-Nachmia 1996.

26Nachmia quotes her interview with Segoura’s wife, Io Philipaki, who feels nostalgic for the movie theatre’s boom period: “These were glory days”, says Mrs Segoura, “Three thousand tickets everyday”.72

  • 73 For a concise historical timeline of Turkish cinema see Özgüç 1988 and for a recent periodization (...)
  • 74 For the linguistic controversies involved in the Exchange of Population, see Glavinas 2013.

27The way the movies were selected was of particular importance. An initial review of the blurbs of Turkish movie screenings on local press between 1947–1959 reveals a line‑up of commercial Turkish productions mainly of the 1940s and the early “Yeşilçam” period.73 Among the films listed were those by significant directors of the formative era of Turkish cinema, like Muhsin Ertuğrul (1892–1979), Vedat Örfi Bengü (1900–1953), Faruk Kenç (1910–2000) and Adolf Körner. Likewise, the films shown featured popular actors and actresses, including celebrated musicians like Müzeyyen Senar (1918–2015), Malatyalı Fahri Kayahan (1914–1969) and Münir Nurettin Selçuk (1900–1981), who starred in the thriving genre of melodrama. Although, at a first glance, popularity seems to be the main criterion in the selection of movies evidence suggests that there were other factors involved as well. Testimonies attest that the films were shown in Turkish, primarily addressing Turkish-speaking refugees settled in Thessaloniki. This theory is also supported by some of the blurbs in the press which, in certain cases, indicated “Türkçe” (Turkish language). Such an indication would have been redundant in the screening of the movie in Turkey (fig. 3). However, in the case of Thessaloniki’s many Turkish-speaking Christians who were “exchanged” in 1923 and who in fact painstakingly learned Greek upon their arrival in Thessaloniki, this precise linguistic element was a major source of attraction to watch these movies as it brought them into contact with the sonic environment of their lost homelands.74

Fig. 3. Adverts with the indication of “Türkçe” and the title of the movies in Arabic script.

Fig. 3. Adverts with the indication of “Türkçe” and the title of the movies in Arabic script.

Μακεδονία, 1951 and 1949.

  • 75 Μακεδονία, 12 February 1949.
  • 76 We are thankful to Edhem Eldem for bringing this point to our attention. Similar case is the adver (...)

28Regarding the linguistic context, a rather bizarre example of advertisement is that of the film Kerem ile Aslı (1942) which appears in Greek as “Κιερέμ. Ο τραγουδιστής του τραγουδιού” (Kierem. The singer of the song) and whose original title is noted in Arabic script. The blurb advertises the film as the great Turkish musical which will awaken bursts of passion with its passive amanes and nostalgic songs (fig. 3).75 The implication at this point is that the note was meant to address readers who were familiar with the old (Ottoman) script and consequently, were older in age.76 These included Turkish speaking, literate refugees from Asia Minor. On the other hand, the predominance of music in the majority of these films, and the familiarity of the viewers with melodramas’ scenarios could suggest that language was not a significant barrier in watching the films. Novelist Stella Vogiatzoglou remembers her grandmother―imitating her Pontiac dialect:

  • 77 Vogiatzoglou 2011, p. 32.

When did we arrive in front of Alcazar? “Alcazar screens good Turkish movies!”, I hear the voice of my father’s stepmother say―she stemmed from the farlands of Anatolia. And on top of this I can recall her description: “The girl was highly troubled, but she also danced and sang all too well.” For Granma all those movies had the same plot. And this may very well have been the case.77

Πότε κιόλας φτάσαμε μπροστά από το Αλκαζάρ; «Αλκαζάρ, ιστέ βάζει καλά τούρκικα έργα», ακούω τη βαριά προφορά της μητριάς του πατέρα μου – καταγόταν από τα βάθη της Ανατολίας. Και έπειτα καπάκι μου ‘ρχεται η περιγραφή... «Το κορίτσι μπακαμ, πολλά τραβούντανε, τούτο και τ’άλλο, αλλά και πολύ ωραία χορευούντανε και τραγουδούντανε». Όλα εκείνα τα έργα íδια υπόθεση είχαν για τη γιαγιά. Και μήπως δεν είχαν;

29Here, the sound of Pontic Greek dialect, “dubbing” Turkish melodramas adds a further sonic layer to the auditory landscape of Alcazar. Like a number of aspects related to the screening of Turkish films in Greece, the precise demographic, linguistic and age profile of filmgoers requires further research. Yet, the films’ sound properties point to the existence of a certain degree of cultural and linguistic intimacy.

  • 78 Hirschon 1998, p. 28.
  • 79 Atakav 2012.

30Turkish films in Greece for spectators mainly made up of refugees from Asia Minor were evidently not limited to Thessaloniki and to Alcazar cinema. Anthropologist Renée Hirschon offers similar observations regarding refugee cinemas in the Kokkinia district in Piraeus. In a chapter of her much-acclaimed book Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe entitled “The Ottoman Past in the Refugee Present” she recounts how Smyrniot refugees regarded Turkish films: “Cinemas […] regularly showed Turkish films, which were especially popular among the elderly women, who praised them for their high moral tone (σεμνότητα). Outings to the cinema provoked nostalgic reminiscences, providing glimpses of the countryside and landmarks of their former homes. I heard Turkish proverbs quoted and in some families naughty children were threatened with the ‘stick of Sultan Mehmet.’”78 The gender aspect of her analysis is noteworthy as it contrasts with the one mentioned by Ioannou, and is more in line with a stereotypical image of (elderly) women attracted to melodramas and their “mother-maiden-mistress” narratives, crucially enhanced, in this case, by the added element of nostalgia for the lost homelands.79 Moreover, the typical suffering of the female protagonists on screen, mostly due to patriarchal structures, often resonated with women refugees and amplified their own sense of betrayal, eradication and loss.

  • 80 Μακεδονία, 31 January 1947.

31Asia Minor’s landmarks and generally the evocation of place is a frequent feature in the short captions that often accompanied the film advertisements. The blurb for Nazli (Οriginal movie production unidentified) apart from the usual repertoire of “sevntalidika songs, amanes, gazelia, zeibekika and tsiftetelia” framing the movie, alongside “loves, hatreds, oriental dances”, crucially introduces the background scenery of the “beautiful landscapes of Asia Minor”.80 Another one goes:

  • 81 Μακεδονία, 11 May 1952.

For many centuries now people sing the praises of Bosphorus and the City. Istanbul – Bebeki [Bebek] and all the enchanting beaches that instill nostalgia […] In a fresh and joyous Turkish film, with the collaboration of Greek and Turkish artists.81

  • 82 For details on this Greek-Turkish co‑produciton and the screening of the movie in Greece, see Tsia (...)

32The above excerpt accompanies the blurb of the historical 1933 film Cici Berber directed by Muhsin Ertuğrul with soundtrack by composer and director of the first Turkish state radio station Mesud Cemil Tel (1902–1963) co‑signed by the Greek composer Giannis Kyparisis.82 Similarly, the caption for the film that was shown in Alcazar cinema in 1951 by Suavi Tedü Zehirli süphe (Poisonous Doubt), dubbed as “Hartbroken Hanoum”, apart from referring to the melodramatic plotline and the lustful belly dances and sweet, ends in the following way:

  • 83 Μακεδονία, 28 January 1951. Emphasis and capitalisation in the original.

THE PONTIC LYRA with the LAZ DANCES […] shot in the most beautiful landscapes of the unforgettable SMYRNA, ANKARA and KÜTAHYA.83

  • 84 For a parallel “transferring of homeland” in the case of the Zionist Jews of Thessaloniki in the 1 (...)
  • 85 Μακεδονία, 11 May 1952.
  • 86 Μακεδονία, 10 April 1952.
  • 87 Μακεδονία, 26 February 1955.

33Singling out the places featured in the movies functions as a powerful advertising strategy. The places named are identified with the “lost homelands” back in Asia Minor of the Greek refugees who settled in Thessaloniki with the Population Exchange: Pontus, Smyrna, Kütahya and of course “Poli” (the City) that is Istanbul.84 Although the latter’s Greek population was excluded from the exchange, Istanbul retained a strong symbolic status as the centre of (eastern) Hellenism. Similarly, in the blurb for the movie “The Flower of Smyrna” we read about the “unforgettable magic landscapes of POLIS and SMYRNA with their 1000 beauties”,85 while only a month earlier Alcazar was showing a documentary film on “The Destruction of Smyrna” based on “unknown episodes of the Asia Minor War”.86 Similarly, the blurb for “The Avenger of Pontus” (Gizli Yara, 1953, dir. Sami Ayanoğlu) reads “filmed in the Black Sea and the magical shores of Efxeinos Pontos, where nostalgia surrounds the remembrance of thousands of Greeks!”87

  • 88 Harvey 1989, p. 308.
  • 89 Zelepos 2010, pp. 80–81. For Asia Minor nostalgia in Greek fiction see Mackridge 2003.

34Rather than offering sheer oriental flair, these evocations of specific spaces tapped into Greek “memorial geography”. This combined nostalgia with orientalism (and self-orientalism), entangled with both understated nationalist sentiments about the “lost homelands” of Asian Minor and modernist expectations evoked through cinema as a powerful technological medium. The interplay of these imaginary representations is attributed to cinema’s “most robust capacity to handle intertwining themes of space and time in instructive ways”.88 Moreover, as historian Ioannis Zelepos points out, the exoticisation of Istanbul/Polis, which so often turns into a mystical, exotic space straight out of 1001 Nights, despite the ongoing presence there of the Greek community, seems to be at polar opposites with the growing integration of Smyrna within the national imaginary, despite―or maybe precisely because of―the eradication of Greek inhabitants after the 1919–1922 war. For Zelepos, this was a way to imaginarily integrate the lost space into the new national one, mixing escapism, lived experience, orientalist fantasies and a certain fictionalisation of the “old fatherlands”.89

  • 90 Gürata 2006, pp. 250–251.
  • 91 Harvey 1989, pp. 308, 322.
  • 92 Harvey 1989, p. 308.

35The purposeful foregrounding of these places, on behalf of the local agents, stands out when contrasted with the actual cinematic function of space in most Turkish melodramas. Public spaces in these films have a predominantly narrative, highly gendered function, as they were male dominated, and were juxtaposed with the domesticity and female exclusivity identified with family life.90 The contrast between the films’ spatial evocations and the expectations that the blurbs cultivated for the spectators can be ascribed to the time-space compression, as described by David Harvey.91 Accordingly, the historical time of individual, lived experiences of space in Asia Minor was condensed within filmic time, and was re‑experienced within the enclosed space of Alcazar. These melodramas screened in an ex‑mosque-cinema in post-war Thessaloniki, possessed the subversive force towards “normal constraints” in viewing the Other, themselves offspring of Turkish modernity.92

  • 93 Μακεδονία, 2 February 1951.
  • 94 Stokes 1997, p. 679.
  • 95 Marc Augé in Stokes 1997, p. 680.
  • 96 Stokes 1997, p. 680; Stokes 2010, pp. 149–151.
  • 97 Boym 2001, p. 131.

36Many films did indeed focus on music and dance and often involved the presence of Munir Nurettin Selçuk, “the most famous Turkish singer of the first half of the century, one of the first big recording stars”―“the famous worldwide tenor who breaks havoc in Turkey”, according to the blurb of Hasret (Longing), 1945, dir. Faruk Kenç.93 One of Nurettin Selçuk’s most celebrated songs, recorded in the 1940s, was called, simply, Aziz Istanbul, “Beloved Istanbul”.94 As anthropologist Martin Stokes notes on Nurettin: “Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of [his] songs is the opening ‘call to prayer’ from the minarets of the mosques he sees below him [in Istanbul].” Stokes interprets this as a “distinctly modern scenario”, in which the “‘bass line’ of ancient places and rhythms”, just like in Baudelaire, Proust and Joyce, “evidenc[es] ‘a modernity which does not obliterate them but pushes them into the background […] like gauges indicating the passage and continuation of time.’95 Munir Nurettin’s call to prayer thus might be seen […] as an evocation of the old rhythms in order to signify their transcendence by the new”.96 The parallel paths to modernity taken by Greece and Turkey are somehow evoked and embodied by Nurettin and all that he symbolized. This observation is particularly pertinent here, as the oldest mosque in the city was indeed entangled with the very modern activity of cinematography, while its former function, architectural standing and overall cultural semiotics were relegated to the background. Nostalgia was omnipresent but, according to Svetlana Boym, it could be both restorative and reflective.97

  • 98 Huyssen 1995.
  • 99 Astrinidou 2010, p. 212. For the battle over the Ottoman monuments, with voices urging for their u (...)
  • 100 Quoted in Anastasiadis 2000, p. 154. Our emphasis.

37Not all visitors to Alcazar were nostalgic for the Ottoman past, nor did everyone entertain orientalist fantasies, so their gaze on the former mosque differed greatly. According to memory specialist Andreas Huyssen: “Objects of the past have always been pulled into the present via the gaze that hit them, and the invitation, the seduction, the secret they may hold is never only on the side of the object in some state of purity, as it were: it is always and intensely located on the side of the viewer and the present as well. It is the live gaze that endows the object with its aura, but this aura also depends on the object’s materiality and opaqueness.”98 As Astrinidou mentions, in the post-war period and even up until the late 1970s “for some residents of Thessaloniki, lingering enmity toward anything ‘Turkish’ came out”, reconnecting in a sense with the immediate post-1922 era of open enmity to Ottoman residues as ugly and uncultivated.99 Some people stress the fact that they did not like the couleur locale of Alcazar and rejected the owner’s decision to preserve its original features, in fact playing up its “oriental” outlook. For instance, film critic Giorgos Lazaridis wrote with surprise in the newspaper Kinimatografikos Astir, in January 1951: “Even though the owners of Alcazar took particular care of the entrance of the cinema, they left, however, the same… oriental appearance of the theatre intact.”100

38However, spectatorship did not remain static and unchanged. Unlike the early days of screenings which mostly attracted male viewers, melodramas drew a predominantly female audience. Eleni Ampatzi employs a melodramatic description of viewers’ reactions to match the film’s own plot. The use of the word “Mecca” in her note on the social function of Alcazar is also noteworthy:

  • 101 Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 46.

The Salonicean Mecca of Indian movies was Alcazar, the old Hamza Bey mosque on a central spot on Egnatia Street. That cinema had a central role in terms of screening “social dramas.” It would switch from Indian, to Turkish (directly imported by its owner), to Russian, to Greek melodramas. This is where female workers and saleswomen would go after work in the neighbourhoods, this is where servants from good households would go on their day off (sometimes taking with them the kids of the families they worked for) […] Some people would go too who wanted to poke fun on the tragic scenes on the screen. In the morning sessions people would come from the nearby market with their groceries and the cinema would get stuffed with grocery bags with cabbage and onions, while tears were flowing in the corridors like rivers.101

  • 102 Quoted in Anastasiadis 2000.

39Notice the affective inversion and subversion of the genre and its seriousness by people who wanted to poke fun, also mentioned in other testimonies. Historian Giorgos Anastasiadis, for instance, remembered that, as youngster, he liked to disrupt Turkish or Indian melodramas, inducing the fury of the people who were solemnly watching the films. In contrast, journalist, and later politician, Giorgos Lianis recalled the cinema as “an erotic pole. Alcazar with Nargis and the Turkish films”.102

  • 103 Chouzouri 2012.
  • 104 Ioannou 1980.

40The rapid change in the gender hierarchies of audiences triggered new practices within the cinema such as the proliferation of the infamous “frotteurs” (κολλητηρτζήδες) who obtained sexual gratification due to the close proximity of the spectators' bodies in the cinema hall. Ioannou, himself a homosexual, also refers to the issue of “closeness” within Alcazar, indirectly pointing at popular cinemas as homoerotic milieus par excellence.103 He offers one of the most emotional testimonies, underscoring the particular sense/affect that this space produced in the viewers: “In Alcazar, when the film is good and not some terrible ‘porn,’ you can feel an ecclesiastical relief and the person sitting next to you, very close.”104 But the allusions to a “church-like” feeling and the sense of elevation as well as the notion of “togetherness” and “closeness”, give compelling pointers to the sense of religiosity in the building’s afterlife that apparently lingered on. Ioannou captures the “moving” nature of the films themselves. The ecclesiastical comparison in his narrative (just like with the “solemnity” mentioned by Anastasiadis, or “Mecca” used by Ampatzi) place the cinematic space of Alcazar firmly, albeit indirectly, within its longue durée history of a former sacred space.

  • 105 Gauntlett 2003, p. 258; Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 15.

41Things were bound to change over time, especially after tensions caused by the outbreak of intercommunal violence in Cyprus in the mid-1950s provoked the Turkish government-led violent riots against the Greek community of Istanbul in September 1955. Indian melodramas took over from that moment on. According to Ampatzi and Tasoulas, but also Gauntlett, the most plausible political explanation is that Turkish films became politically unacceptable in Greece after these incidents, in the same way that post-1974 there was a gradual banning of branding Arabic coffee as Turkish in Greece. “India was a ready alternative source of comparable films for the entertainment of the residual post-Second World War devotees of the Asiatic Muse.”105 It is noteworthy that, as late as 1959, yet another cinema, Akropol, advertised the melodrama Alachtan Boul (Allah’tan bul, 1952, dir. Vedat Örfi Bengü) by making a reference to Alcazar’s glory days, writing a fitting elegy for the Turkish films in the city’s cinemas:

  • 106 Μακεδονία, 13 September 1959.

During its screening in 1952 in “Alcazar” cinema 50,000 hearts beat fast and 100,000 eyes were full of tears by the deep emotion. A film whose every scene is a tear. Belly dances. Amanes. Nostalgic songs.106

42Henceforth the cinema switched its schedule from Turkish (and Indian) melodramas to strictly Greek ones in the 1960s and 1970s, before switching later on its repertoire to karate and porn, reconnecting in an intriguing way with Alcazar’s original sexual connotations in terms of the city’s historical nomenclature:

  • 107 Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 46.

Alcazar’s fate depicts the evolution of the viewer’s needs. When people stopped being moved by social dramas, the cinema switched to violent action movies and porn. In 1997 that supposedly “diatiriteo” [preservable] space was deserted and in bad shape.107

43The changes in the building’s function, but especially its transition from a space of social interaction and collective remembering, orientalist or not, to a space of consumption of porn is particularly striking. This connects with anthropologist Navaro-Yashin’s theory of ruination and abjection of buildings formerly belonging to the “other”―in her fieldwork on Greek Cypriot properties in Northern Cyprus. Abjection and “ruination” for Navaro-Yashin refer to the material remains or artefacts of destruction and violation, but also to the subjectivities and residual affects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of war. Many reminiscences, in fact, focus on the deplorable state of the space after the 1990s, or even before.

Fig. 4. View of Hamza Bey Mosque’s dome with restoration scaffoldings from Egnatia Street.

Fig. 4. View of Hamza Bey Mosque’s dome with restoration scaffoldings from Egnatia Street.

Photograph by Kostis Kornetis.

Epilogue: Hamza Bey/Alcazar as emotive archive

  • 108 The main bearers of the dispute were the construction company Attiko Metro, contracted by the Gree (...)
  • 109 This was conducted, in accordance with state law on antiquities, prior to the construction of the (...)
  • 110 Raptıs, Xanthos 2015, pp. 147–148.

44The once glorious Hamza Bey Mosque, situated at the junction between Egnatia Avenue and Venizelos Street, is right at the heart of the Thessaloniki’s city centre. This junction and its historical layers have been the epicentre of an on‑going public dispute on the imminent construction of the subway of Thessaloniki.108 The main issue of discord concerns the fate of the remains of the Byzantine Mesi Odos of Decumanus Maximus that were revealed in 2013, following a rescuing excavation by the 9th Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities of Thessaloniki.109 While the neighbouring Ottoman-built mosque is deliberately not included in the aforementioned agenda, it stands in the shadow of this dispute as a historical monument of Thessaloniki that is equally threatened by the metro’s construction works.110 Following the archaeologists’ core argument against the wiping out of a significant layer of the city’s rich historical past from public space, the fate of Hamza Bey Mosque is directly interwoven with the preservation (or not) in public memory of yet another, highly contested historical layer of the city: the Ottoman era and its heritage.

  • 111 Earlier planning by the Municipality of Thessaloniki considered the connection of Hamza Bey Mosque (...)
  • 112 Turnbridge, Ashworth 1996.

45Hamza Bey Mosque and what it stands for are underrepresented in this debate over Thessaloniki’s historical and material heritage.111 Since its official pronouncement by the Greek state in 1926 as a “historical and archaeological monument”, this former mosque alongside other Ottoman buildings in the city constitutes a dissonant heritage112 or rather a continuously contested one. Its ambivalent status is inscribed both on the building’s physical transformations, entangled with the interchanging functions it served since 1926, and more importantly on a public discourse based on lived experiences and personal memories constituting strong affective subjectivities ever since it turned into a cinema in 1932.

  • 113 Zeitlin 1998, p. 180.

46For classicist Froma I. Zeitlin, “each vestige always drags behind it the shadow of a story, perhaps not complete, doubtless incomplete, full of lacunae, ghostly, hieroglyphic, cadaverous or fragmentary, like bits of gravestone or like ruined pediments with fractured inscriptions, and sometimes it’s not even possible to know how a story really ended”.113 This article tried to demonstrate how the life history of Hamza Bey Mosque/Alcazar in the 20th century, carries with it precisely the vestiges and flows of its uses, as well the senses and incomplete stories of its inhabitants and their bodies, that changed radically over time.

  • 114 Gell 2013, p. 257.
  • 115 Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 150.

47What aligns the collective affective projections of the Thessalonican intelligentsia to their ahistorical narratives of the building, with the subjective experiences of each individual constituting the “population” that co‑existed in Hamza Bey Mosque and post-humanist materialism is the attachment to the nowness of the building. Like in the case of the celebrated Maori houses described by Alfred Gell, Hamza Bey Mosque’s affective domain operates as an extended temporal field that brings together the past and the present: in other words, Hamza Bey Mosque “carries with it the whole thickness of durée and belongs not just to the ‘now’ […] but to an extended temporal field which reaches back into the past and which is drawn back into the present again”.114 It is in this particular temporality, seen in the attachment between humans and the very abjected materiality of the building, that lies its ability to enact the constitution of “the subjective self, the social class order, or the public sphere”115 of Thessaloniki in the twentieth century. In its current state, Hamza Bey Mosque still retains the capacity to be the city’s affective archive.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Filmography

Allah’tan bul, Vedat Örfi Bengü, 1952.

Cici Berber (Little Barber), Muhsin Ertuğrul, 1933.

Gizli Yara (Secret Wound), Sami Ayanoğlu, 1953.

Harmankaya (Harmankaya), Sami Ayanoğlu and Kadri Öğleman, 1948.

Hasret (Longing), Faruk Kenç, 1945.

Kerem ile Aslı (Kerem and Asli), Adolf Körner, 1942.

Kılıbıklar (Henpecked Husbands), Seyfi Havaeri, 1947.

Monogramma. Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis (Monogram. Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis), S. Lampropoulos, 1984.

Zehirli süphe (Poisonous Doubt), Suavi Tedü, 1951.

Archival sources

BOA, ŞD, 180/40, 12/R /1325 = T.C. Cumhurbaşkanlığı Devlet Arşivleri Başkanlığı [Turkish Presidency State Archives of the Republic of Turkey], Istanbul, Turkey.

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Ayşe Nükhet Adıyeke, Nuri Adıyeke, “1912-24 Yılları arasında Selânik’te el konulan Müslüman vakfı emlâkı ve eşyası”, in Ünal Şenel (ed.), Uluslararası Balkanlarda Türk Varlığı Sempozyumu‑II, Bildrileri, I, Manisa, Celal Bayar Üniversitesi, Süleyman Demirel Merkezi, 2010, pp. 18–32.

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Eleni Ampatzi, Manouil Tasoulas, Ινδοπρεπών αποκάλυψη: από την Ινδία του εξωτισμού στη λαϊκή μούσα των Ελλήνων, Athens, Atrapos, 1998.

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Giorgos Anastasiadis, Σινεμά ο Παράδεισος, οι κινηματογράφοι της Θεσσαλονίκης που άφησαν εποχή, Thessaloniki, Ianos, 2000.

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Meropi Anastasiadou, Θεσσαλονίκη 1830-1912: μια μητρόπολη την εποχή των οθωμανικών μεταρρυθμίσεων, Athens, Estia, 2008.

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Savaş Arslan, Cinema in Turkey: A New Critical History, New York, Oxford, UP, 2010.

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Astrinidou, “Material Memory and Politics: An Approach to the ‘Destruction’ of the Architectural Past of Thessaloniki in the Twentieth Century”, in Anna Stroulia, Susan Back Sutton (eds.), Archaeology in Situ: Sites, Archaeology, and Communities in Greece, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2010, pp. 201–220.

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Notes

1 Boyer 2001, p. 65.

2 This publishing outcome includes both academic and works that address wider readership. For a recently published example see Keridis, Kiesling (eds.) 2020.

3 Heath Lowry provides a historical documentation of the mosque based on past major studies and new archival material. He further argues towards the connection of the foundation of the mosque to the 14th century dynasty of Hâcı Gazi Evrenos (Lowry 2010). For a recent overview of the history of the building with bibliographical additions, see Raptıs forthcoming 2022.

4 For an overview of the material turn in anthropology see Yalouri 2012, pp. 11–74.

5 For a key publication in this genealogy of studies see Birtek, Dragonas (eds.) 2005.

6 On ruination, see Stoler 2013, pp. 1–35.

7 Raptıs forthcoming 2022.

8 Pentzıkıs 2008, p. 69. Here we are using the translation by Astrinidou 2010, p. 215. Also see Stavrakopoulou 2011.

9 Lowry 2010, p. 4.

10 Lowry 2010, pp. 5–11.

11 In late 16th century Hamza Bey Mosque is mentioned in Menâzırü’l‑Avâlim by Âşık Mehmed’s (Âşik Mehmed 2007, p. 989). For the 17th century see Kâtip Çelebi (in Lowry 2010, p. 12) and Evliyâ Çelebi 2003, p. 66.

12 Hekimoglou 1995. For the different professions situated around Hamza Bey Mosque see also Anastasiadou 2008, pp. 449, 457.

13 Dimitriadis 2008, p. 412.

14 Dimitriadis 2008, p. 136.

15 Selânik Vilâyeti Salnâmesi 1902, 1905–1907.

16 Selânik Vilâyeti Salnâmesi 1902, 1905–1907, pp. 315–316.

17 BOA, ŞD, 180/40, 12/R /1325.

18 Ginio 2006, p. 287.

19 On a registry (no. 1456) dated in 1924 recording the confiscated properties of the Muslim community of Thessaloniki by the Greek state between 1912–1924, there is a note on the mosque of Hamza Bey neighbourhood about a temporary halt of its religious function by the Greek state (Adıyeke, Adıyeke 2010, p. 30).

20 ΦΕΚ 191/Α/11‑6‑26. For correspondence between the Greek state and the owner with regard to various disputed alterations of the building’s structure prior to its function as cinema, see Raptıs forthcoming 2022.

21 Mazower 2005, p. 426.

22 For a genealogy of the term see Mazower 2005. Also note that “Alcazar di Salonicco” was an infamous brothel of the 19th century. See Tomanas 1995, and Tragaki 2007, p. 51. “Alambra” was also a fashionable name of nightclubs in the Greek context and of a cinema too which adds to the exotic effect of Arab names in the city.

23 Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 152. Cf. Kristeva 1982.

24 Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 150.

25 Monogramma. Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis (Monogram. Nikos Gavriil Pentzikis), S. Lampropoulos, 1984.

26 Bergson 2010.

27 Bergson 2010, pp. 76–77.

28 Hamilakis 2013, pp. 126–127.

29 The emerging interest of the Archaeological Section of the Armée in the Islamic art and architecture of the city is stated by Gustave Mendel, who was the second of the section between 1916 and 1918, in one of his report (Mendel 1918).

30 Navaro-Yashin 2012, pp. 167–168.

31 For a full overview of the state of Muslims in Greece throughout the 19th and first quarter of the 20th century see Katsikas 2013.

32 Rigney 2017, pp. 475–476. See also Gell 2013. For an interesting approach, along the same lines, to the constitution of middle class in post-War Thessaloniki see Zerboulis 2019.

33 Raptıs forthcoming 2022.

34 Raptis, Vasılıadou 2013, p. 65.

35 Dimitriadis 2008, pp. 27–28.

36 Dimitriadis 2008, pp. 295–300.

37 Eldem 2020, pp. 117–118.

38 Eldem 2020, pp. 116–117.

39 On the concept of “cultural afterlife” see Rigney 2012, pp. 1–16.

40 Hekimoglou 1995, pp. 377–385.

41 On Ali Sami Bey and his political credentials see Tsitselikis 2020, p. 249.

42 For the Muslims of Thessaloniki who managed to be exempted from the exchange of population see Tsitselikis 2012, p. 86; Tsitselikis 2020, pp. 250–251.

43 Tsitselikis 2020, pp. 380–381.

44 Adıyeke, Adıyeke 2010.

45 Adıyeke, Adıyeke 2010, p. 26.

46 Gell 2013, p. 222.

47 Ergin 2008, p. 208.

48 Hamilakis 2013, pp. 126–127.

49 Hamilakis 2013, p. 127.

50 Mazower 2005, p. 348. See also Tsitselikis 2012, pp. 378–379.

51 Ginio 2006, p. 273.

52 Hastaoglou 1997, p. 317; Astrinidou 2010, p. 207.

53 Kallimopoulou, Poulos 2015.

54 For an overview of the city in the local literary production see Bastéa, Hastaoglou-Martinidis 2020, pp. 275–284, and Mackridge 1997.

55 Kallimopoulou, Kornetis, Poulos 2020.

56 Astrinidou 2010, p. 212.

57 Mazower 2005, p. 370.

58 We are grateful to Aliki Arouh, Archive director of the Historical Archive of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, for her valuable feedback on the family history of Benico Segoura.

59 Mazower 2005, p. 426. Also see Dordanas 2002, p. 202.

60 Kornetis 2018, pp. 236–237.

61 Tomanas 1993, p. 13

62 Ioannou 1964, p. 196.

63 On Indian films in Greece, see Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998 and Eleftheriotis 2010. On Turkish melodramas see Erdoğan 2006, and Arslan 2010. On Greek melodramas see Kassaveti 2017.

64 Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 46.

65 Gell 2013, pp. 256–257.

66 Greek vocal improvised genre based on the modal system of makams. The term is used here to refer collectively to music of oriental origin and style.

67 Μακεδονία, 5 October 1948. The dancer can be possibly identified with Mediha Gürsü.

68 In Greek the words “hanoumisa” and “hanoum” (after the Turkish hanım) has orientalist connotations, identified with the notions of odalisque.

69 Μακεδονία, 25 March 1949.

70 Μακεδονία, 2 April 1949.

71 Μακεδονία, 28 January 1951.

72 Kokkalidou-Nachmia 1996.

73 For a concise historical timeline of Turkish cinema see Özgüç 1988 and for a recent periodization see Arslan 2010.

74 For the linguistic controversies involved in the Exchange of Population, see Glavinas 2013.

75 Μακεδονία, 12 February 1949.

76 We are thankful to Edhem Eldem for bringing this point to our attention. Similar case is the advert of the film “Woman in the Desert”, Μακεδονία, 5 October 1948.

77 Vogiatzoglou 2011, p. 32.

78 Hirschon 1998, p. 28.

79 Atakav 2012.

80 Μακεδονία, 31 January 1947.

81 Μακεδονία, 11 May 1952.

82 For details on this Greek-Turkish co‑produciton and the screening of the movie in Greece, see Tsiapos 2018, pp. 320–321.

83 Μακεδονία, 28 January 1951. Emphasis and capitalisation in the original.

84 For a parallel “transferring of homeland” in the case of the Zionist Jews of Thessaloniki in the 1930s via public socialty see Papamichos Chronakis 2018.

85 Μακεδονία, 11 May 1952.

86 Μακεδονία, 10 April 1952.

87 Μακεδονία, 26 February 1955.

88 Harvey 1989, p. 308.

89 Zelepos 2010, pp. 80–81. For Asia Minor nostalgia in Greek fiction see Mackridge 2003.

90 Gürata 2006, pp. 250–251.

91 Harvey 1989, pp. 308, 322.

92 Harvey 1989, p. 308.

93 Μακεδονία, 2 February 1951.

94 Stokes 1997, p. 679.

95 Marc Augé in Stokes 1997, p. 680.

96 Stokes 1997, p. 680; Stokes 2010, pp. 149–151.

97 Boym 2001, p. 131.

98 Huyssen 1995.

99 Astrinidou 2010, p. 212. For the battle over the Ottoman monuments, with voices urging for their ultimate destruction extended up to 1939, see Astrinidou 2010, pp. 209–210.

100 Quoted in Anastasiadis 2000, p. 154. Our emphasis.

101 Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 46.

102 Quoted in Anastasiadis 2000.

103 Chouzouri 2012.

104 Ioannou 1980.

105 Gauntlett 2003, p. 258; Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 15.

106 Μακεδονία, 13 September 1959.

107 Ampatzı, Tasoulas 1998, p. 46.

108 The main bearers of the dispute were the construction company Attiko Metro, contracted by the Greek state, on the one hand, and a broad alliance of local, national and international professional associations and collectives of archaeologists backed by distinguished archaeologists and cultural heritage specialists, on the other.

109 This was conducted, in accordance with state law on antiquities, prior to the construction of the “Venizelou” metro station, with archaeologists arguing passionately against the state’s plan to remove the antiquities from the site. The open dispute between the KAS (Central Archaeological Council) and the Municipality of Thessaloniki on this particular matter goes back to 2014, see Bastéa, Hastaoglou-Martinidis 2020, p. 275.

110 Raptıs, Xanthos 2015, pp. 147–148.

111 Earlier planning by the Municipality of Thessaloniki considered the connection of Hamza Bey Mosque with the “Venizelou” subway station, and proposes its function as shopping centre and museum, Raptıs forthcoming 2022.

112 Turnbridge, Ashworth 1996.

113 Zeitlin 1998, p. 180.

114 Gell 2013, p. 257.

115 Navaro-Yashin 2012, p. 150.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Alcazar’s advertisement, 1936.
Légende The caption reads: “Why are they running like mad? Simply, they run to watch ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ in Alkazar!”.
Crédits Reproduced from Anastasiadis 2000.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/820/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 667k
Titre Fig. 2. View of the atrium of the Hamza Bey Mosque.
Crédits Section photographique de l’Armée, D. Loupis Visual Archive of Islamic Architecture, Athens, Greece.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/820/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 656k
Titre Fig. 3. Adverts with the indication of “Türkçe” and the title of the movies in Arabic script.
Crédits Μακεδονία, 1951 and 1949.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/820/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 561k
Titre Fig. 4. View of Hamza Bey Mosque’s dome with restoration scaffoldings from Egnatia Street.
Crédits Photograph by Kostis Kornetis.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/docannexe/image/820/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 612k
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Référence électronique

Kostis Kornetis et Panagiotis C. Poulos, « Moving Objects, Images, and Memories: Hamza Bey Mosque/Alcazar Cinema as an Affective Archive of Thessaloniki »Bulletin de correspondance hellénique moderne et contemporain [En ligne], 4 | 2021, mis en ligne le 22 mars 2022, consulté le 16 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bchmc/820 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/bchmc.820

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Auteurs

Kostis Kornetis

Profesor Ayudante Doctor at the Department of Contemporary History, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Panagiotis C. Poulos

Assistant Professor at the Department of Music Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Articles du même auteur

  • Introduction [Texte intégral]
    Paru dans Bulletin de correspondance hellénique moderne et contemporain, 4 | 2021
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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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