Read Online Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence by David Brewer - Free Book Online Page B

sixteenth-century prominence. Nevertheless the Jews remained a flourishing element of Thessalonika life until the atrocious events of 1943, when some 45,000 Jews, virtually all of those in the town, were deported by the Germans, most to their deaths in the gas chambers.
    One might ask why the Greeks had not taken the opportunity to prosper, especially through the cloth trade that the Jews had so quickly exploited. There were perhaps two main reasons. The Greeks were traders rather than manufacturers; and the Jews brought with them from their original homelands skills and techniques that the Greeks had had no opportunity to learn.
    Whereas Thessalonika was important as a commercial centre, Athens was of interest for its antiquities. It was hardly ever visited in the sixteenth century, so travellers’ accounts of it appeared regularly only inthe seventeenth. In the 1670s there was a sudden burgeoning of accounts of contemporary Athens: from the Jesuit priest Jacques-Paul Babin, from the Marquis de Nointel, ambassador to Constantinople, from Jean Giraud, the long-serving French consul in Athens who played host to many visitors, and from both Jacob Spon (French) and George Wheler (English), who travelled together to study antiquities.
    There was another curious work of that time, Athénes ancienne et nouvelle by André Georges Guillet, published in 1675. It was very popular, both in French and in English translation and until challenged, especially by Spon, was accepted as genuine. It purported to be based on a firsthand account by Guillet’s brother, the Seigneur de la Guilletière, who had visited Greece after being captured by the Turks, sold to a Tunisian pirate and eventually released – a suitably dramatic provenance for the book. But almost certainly this brother did not exist, and Guillet got some of his information from Capuchin monks in Navplion and invented the rest. Some of his observations were scurrilous, for example about the French consul Giraud, and he frequently mocked the Greeks. In the end we cannot trust a word he said, and he is worth quoting only to show how the Greeks were presented in one of the most widely disseminated accounts of them.
    The population of Athens in the 1530s had been less than half that of Thessalonika, about 12,500 against 30,000, and its composition was very different. Whereas at that time Thessalonika’s inhabitants were roughly half Jews and a quarter each Greeks and Muslims, the Athenians were almost exclusively Greek, with only some dozens of Muslim residents apart from the transient Turkish garrison of a few hundred soldiers. The total population barely changed in the following centuries, though by the 1670s the proportion of Muslims had increased to about a quarter, and some Albanians, generally considered troublemakers, had settled in the town and the surrounding villages.
    Apart from the Akropolis there was nothing remarkable about the town of Athens. The Jesuit priest Jacques-Paul Babin, visiting in 1672, was surprised to find that the town had no defensive walls. The streets were narrow and unpaved, like those of a village. The houses, he said, lacked magnificence, and were haphazardly built from ancient ruins, ornamented only with bits of marble column or stones marked with a cross from ruined churches. But at least the houses were built of stone, unlike the wooden houses that Babin had seen in Constantinople. The most attractive part of Athens was the surrounding plain, planted with vines, corn and the olive trees that, standing ‘so thick to the west of the city that they seem to be a wood’, provided the main export fromAthens. The vines, however, produced wine that de la Guilletière typically described as disgusting – ‘blackish and not fine’. 9
    The Turkish government in Athens was represented, as elsewhere, by the voyvoda or governor living in the Akropolis, the kadi or judge, and the Akropolis garrison commander and his few hundred troops with their