From Public Sphere to Public Arena: Boycotts and Narratives of Urban Space in Late Ottoman Salonica

Like other port-cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, Salonica was by the late nineteenth century a thriving commercial hub with an ascending multi-ethnic middle stratum, which fashioned its identity, ascertained its position, and established its control over the city’s modernizing urban space in class, gender and ethnic terms. The integrationist discourses of Ottomanism, civic pride, and ‘western’ progress; shared leisure and consumer practices; and the common forms of mobility in and beyond the city shaped the lived urban environment and facilitated the creation of new narratives of urban space. These ‘spatial stories’ circulated widely in the local multi-lingual press and were performed through a dense associational activity and regular citywide celebrations. Personalized in individual mental maps, they produced a sense of a shared multi-ethnic space while drawing invisible class- and gender boundaries into the ever-changing urban landscape. Thus, ‘Salonica’ was narrated as modern, bourgeois, and progressive, prospering under the leadership of an enlightened civic elite-in-the-making.

This paper will explore how the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and the subsequent advent of mass politics--particularly in the loose form of anti-Austrian, anti-Greek, and anti-Italian boycotts-- challenged the newly minted triumphant narrative of Salonica as the spectacular cradle of a people’s revolution. Drawing from a wide array of Greek, French, and Ladino sources, it investigates the increase in radical state-sanctioned, pro-boycott Muslim port workers, as well as their attempts to impede the circulation of foreign goods by turning Salonica’s spaces of modernity (e.g., the port, department stores, public gardens, and boulevards) into arenas of class, gender and ethnic confrontation. As a result, a perplexed middle-class public generated new spatial stories of danger, fear and confrontation, which were to persist even after the city’s annexation to the Greek state in 1912.