Thessaloniki, Greece, November 2015 - Emerging from Denial?

I am writing this whilst flying back from Thessaloniki to Manchester – via Istanbul with flights of Turkish Airways.  When I mentioned this routing to someone a couple of weeks ago they were incredulous at the thought of direct flights between Turkey and Greece.  But times have changed – or perhaps I should say they are changing: there may be some way to go yet.

I have been to Thessaloniki many times over the last 15 years or so.  It is Greece’s second largest city – and perhaps the second largest city of Greeks in the world.  I was recently in the city that claims to have the third largest Greek population: Melbourne.

Thessaloniki is a fascinating place with an amazing history covering many epochs and empires.  Alexander the Great possibly knew the site (though I am not going to get drawn in to the Macedonian debate about who he was and who might claim him).  Aristotle was born nearby.  Cicero lived here.  St Paul wrote letters to the people of the city.  Methodius, the creator of the Cyrillic alphaber, was born here.  The founder of modern Turkey – Mustafa Kemal – was also born in Thessaloniki.  The Romans came and went as, later, did the Ottomans.  It was at one time possibly the city with the biggest Jewish population anywhere in the world.  The elimination of Thessaloniki’s Jews during the Holocaust, and reprisals against partisans, involved a young Austrian soldier who later became the General-Secretary of the United Nations, and who was then vilified when his wartime roles were exposed – Kurt Waldheim.

But some of the history and connections I have identified in that previous paragraph have been – deliberately or accidentally – omitted from the public personality of Thessaloniki over the years.  Instead Thessaloniki is today generally imagined, at least by Greeks, as a great and historic Greek city.  Yet when I first visited it there must still have been a number of residents who had been born there as subjects of the Ottoman Empire.  Thessaloniki only became Greek in 1912.  In many ways Thessaloniki has for many years denied those aspects of its history that are not Greek.

I have in front of me a leaflet for a bus tour and suggested walking routes in the city.  In total it identifies 61 places of interest.  Only three of them mention the Ottoman period, and one further site is Jewish (a museum).  The Rotonda, an amazing circular building, built in characteristic brick, larger in diameter than the Pantheon in Rome, is mentioned in relation to its Roman origins – yet one of its most distinguishing features is its minaret, and signs round the entrance demonstrate that at one time or another this has been a place of importance for all three of the monotheistic faiths: Christian, Jewish and Muslim.  The major Ottoman bath complex – the Bey Hamam - is shown on the map as ‘Ancient Baths’, suggesting a Hellenic or Roman origin: but it is not on either the bus tour or the walking routes.  Most remarkable of all is the fact that the house where Mustafa Kemal was born is not shown as a place of any interest at all on the map.  In the eastern suburbs beyond the line of the old city walls there are a remarkable series of villas built in the late nineteenth century by Ottoman landowners – these are not advertised to visitors at all.

The restitution of Thessaloniki to modern Greece was of vital importance to that state – yet arguably Thessaloniki only really became Greek during the 1920s when large numbers of Greeks expelled from the new Turkey settled here and in the rest of northern Greece.  Even before the Ottomans arrived in the middle of the fifteenth century the city had had a very diverse population drawn from all over the Balkan region – and beyond.  Perhaps it was the Greekness of the refugees of the 1920s that led to the imagined story of Thessaloniki as an eternally Greek settlement becoming embedded – more so after the loss of the Jewish population two decades later.  There is a wonderful book on the history of Thessaloniki – ‘Salonica: City of Ghosts’ by Mark Mazower.  Yet Mazower is something of a controversial figure in Thessaloniki because he sheds light on the multiple ethnic dimensions of the city’s evolution over the 500 years from 1450 onwards.  Just as the tourist maps supress many of the tangible manifestations of that evolution, so the city powers, the Orthodox church, and wider city society have in the past tended to do the same.  

Thessaloniki is, as it is, a beautiful, lively and exciting city.  Yet it could be a much greater tourist destination on the basis of a wider celebration of its diverse cultural history and the major forces and groups that have had connections with it over the centuries.  My taxi driver to the airport was of the opinion that many more Turks would visit as tourists if only they did not need a visa first.

But I have titled this blog ‘Emerging from denial.’  The very fact that I have left Thessaloniki aboard a Turkish plane represents something of a rapprochement with the city’s past.  Much of the credit for this must go to the city’s current far-sighted mayor, Yiannis Boutaris, who sought to open Thessaloniki up to the world via Istanbul and who persuaded Turkish Airlines to run a twice daily service into the city.  Given the major hub status of Atatürk Airport in Istanbul – Turkish Airlines flies to more countries around the world than any other airline – and certainly in comparison with Athens, the major international entry route to Thessaloniki now lies through Istanbul (or Constantinople as some still refer to it).  Thessaloniki could get by without Athens.  Boutaris has also put Thessaloniki on the map in many other ways, and in 2012 was given the accolade of the best city mayor in the world.  Whilst in Thessaloniki over the weekend I attended a lunch, following a graduation ceremony, attended by senior academics, politicians and business people from at least 7 countries around the Balkans. I personally spoke to attendees from Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia (or to the Greeks, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), Bulgaria and Romania  - as well as (of course) Greeks.  With the removal of the Iron Curtain and, later, the end of the Yugoslav conflict (temporary though that sometimes seems to be), Thessaloniki has regained its position as the major city of the whole southern Balkans, with a hinterland for trade and education that reaches far into the other countries of that region.  Bit by bit, Thessaloniki is once again becoming a multi-ethnic metropolis.

So perhaps Thessaloniki is starting to emerge from its period of denial of the diversity of its past, a denial that was more strongly felt when I first visited nearly 15 years ago.  But I suspect that it will take a very long time for the Ottoman past to be celebrated in any meaningful way.  A couple of years ago I was in Ronda in Spain, and visited the Moorish bath complex there.  I was very struck by something said at the end of the film commentary, that indicated that the Moorish past was now being validated as part of the city’s history – ‘We should remember that the Moors were here for 500 years: this was their city and we should remember that.’  I suspect it will be a long time before there is a similar sentiment towards the 450 or so years of Ottoman presence in Thessaloniki.

Paris, France, November 2015 - Why attack those districts?

All my entries in this blog to date have been occasioned by being in the place being written about at the time.  This one is different.

I was in the departure lounge at Melbourne Airport when I first heard about the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of Friday 13 November.  The Australian TV news channel was running with the story, and I have the app for Le Monde on my iPad so I was able to read the news reports coming through there as events unfolded.  Since then the world's media have been saturated with coverage.  A lot of it has been about the victims.

The question in my mind is different: 'Why attack those particular sites and those districts of Paris?'  You see, apart from the Stade de France (which I have seen from the train but never visited) I know the districts in which the other attacks occurred very well.  They were all within the 10th and 11th arrondissements (administrative areas) of the city.  I know the 11th particularly well, having carried out research there.  It features in one of my more referenced journal articles:

P. White and H.P.M. Winchester, 1991, 'The poor in the inner city: stability and change in two Parisian neighbourhoods', Urban Geography, Vol 12, No 1, pp. 35-54.

In this we looked at social evolution in the eastern part of the Folie-Méricourt quarter of the district.  One of the attacks was on a restaurant in rue de la Fontaine du Roi.  I used often to visit a nearby restaurant in that street - indeed I took students on field classes to eat there.  I have walked past the Bataclan on boulevard Richard-Lenoir many times.  The two sites attacked in the 10th district - the Carillon and the Petit Cambodge - lie in a tangle of streets near the Canal St Martin that is very familiar to me.  And the last time I went along the rue de Charonne, the site of the final attack, was on a bus.

I first got to know this inner eastern part of Paris in the mid 1980s - 30 years ago.  But I revisited it much more recently when I was at the Sorbonne to examine a PhD thesis on 'social mixing' in Parisian neighbourhoods and took the opportunity before the formal examination to reacquaint myself with both the 11th and the 20th arrondissements that provided much of the material for the thesis.

When Hilary Winchester and I published our article in 1991 we described the 11th as an area in transition.  It was traditionally a working-class Parisian district, largely self-contained in its operation - with printing and bookbinding important in the north, and furniture making in the south.  There were still a number of insanitary housing areas, and small enterprises and petty commerce dominated most streets.  To the west, near the grands boulevards, lay an entertainment area with the 'Cirque d'Hiver' (winter circus - a small indoor arena) and some theatres (including the doomed Bataclan).  One or two major arteries had been cut through by 'Baron' Hausmann in the 1850s. Georges Simenon had housed his great detective Jules Maigret in an apartment in boulevard Richard-Lenoir.

By the 1990s the 11th was becoming, in many parts, a blighted area of unimproved housing, declining employment, and increasing social problems.  It was rapidly changing to being an area housing poor immigrant populations, many of them of Islamic origins.  The diversity of food shops and restaurants was considerable - particularly along the rue Oberkampf and in the streets leading up to Belleville where a significant Vietnamese / Chinese presence had been established.    Why should terrorists today target sites in such an area, where ethnicity might be at its most diverse?

Well, today the 10th and 11th arrondissements have changed again.  Reading again our 1991 article I find that we were quite prescient in our predictions.  We did not foresee large scale gentrification and the creation of a completely new image. "Worn out housing will make way for the rehousing of the respectable lower middle class, involving also the displacement of the marginal poor, such as single foreign immigrants who do not qualify on the housing lists."  This has indeed happened.  Over the last 30 years the 10th and 11th arrondissements of Paris have arguably undergone a greater degree of transformation than many other areas of the city, with considerable investment in housing improvement and some new construction.  That hasn't meant that these areas have become the preserve of the wealthiest classes - they remain wedded to the western parts of the inner city.  But these districts have risen from being some of the poorest to being what could be called the most 'ordinary' in Parisian terms, with a wider cross-section of residents than might be found in other districts.

To strike at the political elite or the haute-bourgeoisie the terrorists could have chosen the 8th or 16th arrondissements, or parts of the 15th or 17th.  But these would be terra incognita to Islamic extremists.  In hitting at targets in the 10th and 11th they struck at what are today some of the most ordinary parts of the city - areas where most Parisians (probably except those haute-bourgeois) feel comfortable and at home.  But they are also, of course, areas with a history of immigrant and ethnic minority settlement providing perhaps some local knowledge and cover for the terrorists.  And maybe the fact that they are districts that are being 'lost' to immigrants as area upgrading continues played a further role in singling them out.

As I write there is a gun battle going on in St Denis to the north of Paris - an area where multiple minority groups have become increasingly predominant in recent years.  When there were riots in St Denis and other northern and eastern suburbs in 2005 I was in Hong Kong.  The Guardian newspaper, knowing that I had done research on such suburbs, contacted me for views and ran a think piece using some of my material and ideas.  Ten years later I find that my research interest over many years in Parisian neighbourhoods once again provides food for thought and some insight into current events.

Macau, Special Administrative Region of China, November 2015 - A surprising city

I’ve been studying cities for a long time now so that when I go to a new one (for me) I usually have a pretty good idea of what it is going to be like.  I’ve just been very wrong about a new place – Macau. 

I suppose I first learned something about Macau when I was a student and took an interest in the declining Portuguese colonial world, followed then by some knowledge of what happened in the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution and the return to democracy of the metropolitan country – associated with decolonisation of almost all of its overseas possessions.  But I also knew that Macau remained Portuguese until 1999, such that the Portuguese were still involved in part of the Pearl River basin even after the British handed Hong Kong over to the Chinese in 1997.  And finally I knew that Macau had in recent years become the gambling centre of Asia – and possibly of the whole world, outdoing Las Vegas.

So what did I get wrong when I visited Macau for the first time on a day visit by fast ferry from Hong Kong?

1.  I imagined that since the Portuguese had been the colonial power and they drive on the right in Lisbon they would also do so in Macau.  They don’t: they drive on the left.

2.  I imagined a much smaller and poorer city than Hong Kong.  But although the high rise buildings were less numerous, the press of people in the main streets  in the city centre was as great – and as varied.

3. I imagined that since it is only 16 years since the Portuguese left there would still be a lot of older people who would be able to speak Portuguese.  But I only encountered one – an attendant in a theatre who responded with the relevant pleasantry when I thanked him in Portuguese.

4. I imagined that because Portugal had been an impoverished colonial power they would not have produced much in the way of high quality buildings, monuments or other lasting legacies.  Yet throughout the city centre I encountered wonderful relics of the colonial past.  The Largo do Senado (Senate Square) in particular has the little granite block paving in black and white that  is so common in Portuguese cities, as well as palaces in Portuguese style.  And the Largo de Santo Agostinho contains a set of buildings that would grace any Portuguese city – the church itself, a theatre, a villa that is now a major library, and a seminary – all set on the top of a hill that could be in the Alentejo, or Tras-os-Montes or any other part of Portugal.

5.  I imagined that the new gambling industry would be confined to a zone of (possible) land reclamation.  Yet the brash gamblers’ hotels are sited on wide boulevards all around the old centre.  And they are tawdry in their commercialism in a way that went beyond anything I had envisaged.

Oh, and I was also surprised when, arriving on the ferry, one of the first sets of buildings I saw was a row of old and gabled merchant houses that would not have looked out of place in Amsterdam or Utrecht and which must have been the work of Dutch builders. 

So I got Macau quite wrong before I visited.  But it was certainly worth correcting my errors – a very interesting city.