Xanthi, a beautiful town in Western Thrace

Continuing eastwards from Kavala, I reached Xanthi, in western Thrace. Xanthi has a well preserved, beautiful old town. Many of its old buildings have been sensitively renovated. Ottoman-style houses, with their first floors built out over the narrow streets, as if reaching out to touch each other, are interspersed with grand mansions more in a European style, built by rich 19th century merchants. Streets lead into little tree-shaded squares with stylish cafés. Xanthi has a bohemian atmosphere. Sculptures, fashioned out of metal, are dotted around the old town.

The region of Xanthi was known for the quality of its tobacco, and the city’s mansions were built by the mainly Greek merchants who prospered from it. Especially impressive is the house of Vasilios Kougioumtzoglou, built in 1877, with its colourful, decorated exterior. The Kougioumtzoglou family also owned another large house on the same street, which today houses Xanthi’s folklore museum. Inside, the visitor can walk through rooms depicting the life of a period Greek home of the 19th century. The family also owned a house in Plovdiv (Philippopolis in Greek), in present-day Bulgaria, indicating the one-time interconnectedness of the region.

Kougioumtzoglou mansion, Xanthi

Xanthi was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912, when it was taken by Bulgaria during the first Balkan War. Together with the rest of western Thrace, it became part of Greece after the First World War, and, apart from a period back under Bulgarian rule during World War II, it has remained with Greece since then. More than anywhere else I have been, in Xanthi I could see vestiges of the prosperity and accomplishment of the Ottoman Greeks. The once great cosmopolitan cities of the eastern Mediterranean, Smyrna, Salonika, Alexandria, have been devastated by the tragic events of the 20th century, destructive fires and war, which have left only traces of their past glory. But, on a smaller scale, Xanthi has been preserved, and some flavour of that past era can be sensed today, walking among the mansions of this once flourishing town.

The Ottoman Greeks enjoyed levels of prosperity and development far beyond those of the independent Greek state in the 19th century. Greek Levantine merchants and financiers spread their wealth and power around Europe. Their educational establishments and cultural achievements were widely admired. In the fine little town of Xanthi this has left an echo which has largely been lost in most of the rest of the region.

The Muslim quarter, Xanthi

Xanthi also offers a reminder of the cosmopolitanism of so many eastern-Mediterranean towns before the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of the narrow nation state. When Greece and the newly established Turkish republic agreed, by the Treaty of Lausanne, on the population exchange which in 1923 ended centuries of co-existence between Greeks and Turks, two exceptions were made. Muslims (Bulgarian speaking Pomak and Romany Muslims as well as Turks) would be allowed to remain in Greek western Thrace, and Greeks could remain in Istanbul. Most of the Istanbul Greeks were driven out in the 1950s, leaving only a tiny remnant today. But the Turks of western Thrace are still there.

Life has not always been easy for them. At the beginning of the 20th century, Muslims formed a significant majority in Xanthi, but, following the settlement of Greek migrants from Turkish eastern Thrace and Anatolia, and outward migration by local Turks, they are now very much a minority. Events outside Greece have sometimes had negative repercussions for them. Following the 1955 pogroms against Istanbul Greeks, Greece retaliated by introducing a law depriving Muslims who left Greece of their citizenship. And in response to the declaration of independence by Turkish north Cyprus in 1983, the Greek government adopted a policy of referring to ‘Greek Muslims’, no longer recognising a Turkish minority. Greek courts outlawed the term ‘Turkish’ in reference to the community in western Thrace.

Achrian Mosque, Xanthi

Such treatment no doubt made Turks in western Thrace feel less than welcome, and there were protests. But they clung on. And now, as far as can be seen, they rub along with their Greek neighbours, much as they have for centuries. Walking around Xanthi, women in headscarves go about their business. At one end of the old town, climbing up the hill, the old Muslim quarter remains just that. At the top of the hill, the Achrian Mosque, built after 1850, has notices outside in Greek, English and Turkish. People greet each with ‘as-salaam alaikum’, and chat away in Turkish. Children kicking a ball around shout to one another in Turkish.

I liked Xanthi, a town that has preserved its heritage, architectural and communal. Here, unlike almost anywhere else in either Greece or Turkey, the history of co-existence between Greeks and Turks has been preserved, and it seems to work.

Kavala and Mohammed Ali Pasha

To the east of Thessaloniki, on the Macedonian coast, Kavala is an attractive little town. The old town climbs up a hill above the bay, its narrow streets lined with Ottoman-era buildings, with their enclosed balconies reaching out across the road. The roads lead up to the Byzantine fortress, which was extended by the Ottomans. Beyond the hill is an aqueduct, built during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, in the 16th century. I enjoyed an evening meal at a restaurant owned by Greek migrants from Georgia, some of the many Black Sea Greeks who have moved to Greece since the end of the Soviet Union, the final extinction of a community going back nearly three millennia. Looking through the menu, I spotted khinkali, a kind of big Georgian ravioli, filled with seasoned minced meat, and a delicious broth that has to be slurped out. It is a Georgian dish, explained the waiter, who then told me that he and his family came from Tbilisi. The khinkali were not bad either. Not the best to be had, but not bad, so far away from Georgia.

Kavala was part of the Ottoman Empire from the late 14th century until 1912. One of its main claims to fame is that it was the birthplace of Mohammed Ali Pasha, father of modern Egypt, which he ruled for the first half of the 19th century. He founded a dynasty that reined until Nasser’s revolution in the 1950s. In 1801, Mohammed Ali had gone to Egypt as second-in-command of an Albanian contingent of an Ottoman force sent to restore authority after Napoleon’s brief occupation. By a mixture of military campaigning, cunning and ruthlessness, he managed to seize control of the whole country. At its height, his power eclipsed that of the Sultan, and for a time his rule extended over much of the Near East, almost reaching Istanbul itself.

The Imaret, Kavala

But Mohammed Ali did not lose contact with his roots in Kavala. He commissioned the building of the Imaret, a Muslim theological college. Nowadays it has been renovated as a luxury hotel. From the outside, stretched along a hillside overlooking the sea, it is an impressive sight. It has been described as the best preserved Ottoman-era building in Greece. Unfortunately, it was closed for renovation when I visited, so I was unable to see the interior.

Mohammed Ali Pasha’s home, Kavala

Close by the Imaret is Mohammed Ali’s family home, preserved as a museum. Upstairs, a large living room has been restored in the style of a traditional Ottoman haremluk, surrounded by low divans, covered with cushions, a low round table in the middle, and a conical fireplace on the back wall. I had seen such recreations before, in Albania, but what I had not seen before was a restored privy and washroom. I confess I was fascinated. In concept, it was not much different from the outdoor hole in the ground toilets I have encountered in rural areas in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

In a square next to the house is a statue of Mohammed Ali on a horse, in the act of either drawing or sheathing his sword, a rare example of a Greek town honouring one of its sons who was a Muslim, and who was not Greek. But what was Mohammed Ali? I had understood he was Albanian, like the troops who were the backbone of the army he led to Egypt. When, in 2011, I visited the Alabaster Mosque in Cairo, which was commissioned by Mohammed Ali and which contains his mausoleum, my Egyptian guide too described him as Albanian (see post of 5 January 2012). But the young Greek guide at Mohammed Ali’s house in Kavala told me this was disputed, and that in Turkey he was claimed as a Turk. It was claimed, so he told me, that the notion that Mohammed Ali was Albanian was a misunderstanding caused by the fact that the troops that he led to Egypt were Albanian. The issue could apparently inflame passions. The young man told me of an occasion when parties of Turks and Albanians visiting the house at the same time had a fierce row over the matter.

Mohammed Ali Pasha, Kavala

In the Ottoman period, the question of Mohammed Ali’s nationality would have been of secondary importance. He was an Ottoman Muslim, and that was what counted. Although he ruled over Egypt, he never learned Arabic, and the language of his court was Turkish. Some contemporary diplomatic visitors claimed his native language was Albanian. But indeed, he might in any case have known the language of his soldiers. The young Greek at Mohammed Ali’s house in Kavala told me that at the time of his birth, in 1769, the population of Kavala was almost entirely Turkish, with just a very small Christian population. He thought there would have been very few Albanians there, apart from the soldiers of the garrison. Yet there were Albanians almost everywhere in Greece during the Ottoman period, including nearby Salonika. With the information I had, I could not conclude either way. I had liked the idea that an Albanian, a chancer from one of Europe’s smaller nations, had become ruler of an Empire in Egypt, Sudan, western Arabia and the Levant, and one of the most notable historical figures of his day.

The Yeni Tzami, Salonika's Esoteric Mosque

The last mosque built in Salonika, in 1902, the Yeni Tzami, or ‘New Mosque’, is also one of the city’s few Ottoman-era mosques to survive to the present. And it is one of the most unusual mosques in the world. It was built by an Italian architect to serve the city’s Dönmeh, or ‘convert’ community. The Dönmeh were descendants of Jews who had converted to Islam in the 17th century.

They were follows of Sabbatai Zevi, a Jewish mystic from Smyrna, who proclaimed himself the Messiah. He attracted a huge following among the Jews of Europe and the Levant, antagonising the Jewish establishment in the process, and, with his claims of earthly kingship, attracting the wrath of the Sultan. Finally, he was brought before the Sultan in Edirne in 1666. Offered a choice between conversion to Islam and impalement, he chose the former. Many of his followers reverted to Jewish Orthodoxy, while some continued to believe in their Messiah. Still others, the Dönmeh, followed Zevi’s example and converted to Islam.

The Yeni Tzami, Salonika

Salonika became the main centre of the Dönmeh, where some of them were prominent merchants. While outwardly Muslim, they retained many Jewish practices and continued to speak Ladino, the dialect of the Spanish Jews. Disapproved of by both Jews, for whom they were apostates, and strict Muslims who rejected their crypto-Judaism, until the late-19th century they practiced endogamy, marrying only within their own community. They were politically active, and were prominent in the Young Turk revolution of 1908, which originated in Salonika. As Muslims, they were included in the population exchange in 1923. In the early years of the Turkish Republic, they continued to play an important role, as merchants and as supporters of Ataturk’s secular, modernising reforms. However, during the 20th century many of them have gradually assimilated into the broader Turkish society.

Their remarkable, eclectic mosque in Salonika reflects the complex, ambiguous identity of the Dönmeh. A hybrid of European and Islamic styles, fusing Baroque, neoclassical, and Byzantine, it also contains Jewish features. Walking up the road towards it, the initial impression is one of extraordinary oddness. As well as a Mihrab, pointing towards Mecca and the direction of Muslim prayer, the six-pointed Star of David is repeated around the exterior and interior of the mosque. The mosque did not function as such for long. Scarcely 20 years after it was built, its faithful departed for Turkey under the Lausanne Agreement. Some tried to claim they were not in fact Muslims, hoping to be excluded.

The Dönmeh never really fitted. Only in the diverse, cosmopolitan atmosphere that was Salonika before the Balkan Wars did they find their place. Perhaps that was why they supported Ataturk, hoping that they could find a new home in a modern, secular state. They were to be disappointed. Ataturk’s vaunted secularism was in reality a sham. The very core of the new Turkish identity was in fact based on religion. At the start of the new republic, Turks were defined as Muslims, and a Turk could be a Muslim from anywhere in the Balkans, no matter whether he had spoken Turkish or not, so long as he identified with the Turkish nation. A Christian from Turkey, by contrast, even if he spoke only Turkish, could not be accepted as part of the new Turkish nation, and had to be expelled to Greece. The aim of Ataturk’s secularism was to keep religion in its place, out of the sphere of government, so that he could set about building his modern republic unfettered by competition from institutions that had held immense power and importance under the Ottoman order. But within the state, one religious community, Sunni Islam, was given a privileged position, under firm state control, but favoured over any rivals, be they non-Muslim or other branches of Islam. In this world, the Dönmeh, with their esoteric brand of Islam, their fusion of different faiths, were decidedly suspect.