Invisible Revisited

I wrote a short post in September about the destruction of the Jewish cemetery in Thessalonki that generated interest from people (and a heated comment thread). The article Bodies Visible and Invisible was sent to me by a friend and I posted the whole piece that day. Then I was in some confusion as to whether I was allowed to do that or not, so I decided to pull the article and contact the authors. I have heard nothing from them as yet.
A few days ago I read in Kathimerini that a book has been published in Greek called “Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950″. It is written by British historian Mark Mazower who will present his book at the old Athens stock market, 10 Sophocleous, Jan 11, 12.30 p.m. An interview with Mazower can be found here. The book

revisits mutilated Ottoman minarets and flattened Jewish graves, as well as modern monuments and institutions, renamed streets and history books to expose the false continuities and convenient silences that were used to airbrush away half a millennium of tricultural history

The Jewish communities of Salonica, who at one time were the majority there, have been almost entirely wiped out of history here in Greece. There is no mention in school text books and precious little outside the realms of academia. So, in the spirit of redressing the balance a little, I have decided to publish the original article, in extracts, all this week. So, you get two fascinating posts a day!
Part One of Twelve

Bodies Visible and Invisible: The Erasure of the Jewish Cemetery in the Life of Modern Thessaloniki

LAQUEUR and HESSE

The western edge of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is dominated by the elegant Old Philosophy Building, built in the late nineteenth century to the plans of Vitaliano Poselli, a local Italian architect, as a training school for Ottoman bureaucrats. It became the heart of a new, Greek university in 1927 when the fifteen professors and sixty five students who for a few months had held classes in temporary quarters– the villa Allatini, belonging to the prominent Jewish founder of the city’s biggest mills and bakeries— moved in. Almost a kilometer to the east, at the opposite end of the vast, rectangular shaped, campus is the Student Union. It, like many of the buildings in between, is in the institutional, international style of the late 1960’s and after —functional, concrete and glass, non-descript. Fifteen thousand students eat lunch there every day; some sixty thousand students are enrolled in the University’s various faculties. Walkways and plazas are abuzz with the polyglot talk and energy of the young; the professoriate is cosmopolitan and in many cases distinguished. This is a world of the living.

Not so far beneath the surface there is another world: a world of the dead. Of course this can be said of many places in an ancient land but these dead are more intimately bound up with modern Greek history and the history of the Aristotle University than most. Before December 6, 1942 the land that is now the campus was quiet, visited only for burials and rituals of memory, the shadow world of the old city’s once large, prosperous and culturally inventive Jewish community; a place where great rabbis and ordinary mortals had been laid to rest for centuries.

How might it have looked on that Sabbath morning in the hours before its destruction? We probably should not imagine it as beautiful and well kept by contemporary northern European standards. The Thessaloniki Jewish community “showed very little care for the maintenance or presentability of this large area,” complains its legal representative in the memoir he managed to write before being murdered at Auschwitz: “no order, no master plan, no tree or flower.” It did not have the grandly melancholic qualities of some of the great nineteenth-century Jewish cemeteries of western and central Europe with their carefully laid out avenues and magnificent classical or art nouveau mausoleums. The grave markers we would have looked out upon were more modest, rather like the wood furnaces in a Greek village thought the novelist Giorgos Ioannu. The Jewish Cemetery of Thessaloniki, although just as old and archaeologically far richer than the famed old cemetery of Prague, would have had none of its old world coziness — the intimate connection to nearby buildings, the comfortably ancient gray stones and the mounding earth that is evidence that, contrary to Jewish law, bodies were buried here in layers over the centuries. Our vista would have been far more expansive, far more open, and far brighter: over thirty-five hectares of graves white marble under a Mediterranean sky. (The Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague was, and is, about one hectare in area.)

On that December, 1942, Sabbath morning looking westward from where the Student Union now stands we would have seen, in the distance, the Old Philosophy Building and between us at it tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of tombs interspersed with slabs flat on the ground and the occasional smaller gravestone or stellae. The United States Consul in Istanbul estimated that there were more than three hundred thousand markers of various sorts in a cemetery that he thought “was of the greatest historical value, dating from the first centuries of the Christian era.” Standing higher up on the hill, where the medical and veterinary faculties are now situated, we would have had a clear view of uninterrupted sepulchral monuments stretching for hundreds of meters toward the sea. Half a million dead bodies would have been under foot.

Today there is no hint of this lost nether world anywhere on the Aristotle University campus. The bodies are mostly still there, hidden as before. But the tombs that marked their location are gone. A tiny fraction made their way to other memorial venues: some fragments are in the Museum of the Jewish Presence in Thessaloniki that opened in 1997; a few, whose owners managed to remove them before the destruction, are to be seen in the new, much smaller, Jewish cemetery in the suburb of Iliopolis; some migrated to the American Farm School. We have been told by colleagues that some gravestones remain visible, incorporated in walks or walls. We could find none.

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