Thessalonica fell into the hands of the Romans, became the chief city on the Via Egnatia, and disseminated Christianity among many of the Slavs, Bulgarians, and other peoples who came down from the north and the east.
It became a free city and then a part of the Byzantine Empire, and was finally sold by a Greek emperor to the Venetians, from whom it was captured in 1430 by the Turks.
High up in the Turkish quarter of Salonica—which rises in a long slope and then in steps from the sea—is a queer little Greek monastery dating back unknown centuries. It was there when the Turks came; for history records that the monks within its walls were treacherous to their fellow-Christians and sold the city to the Mohamedans. Under the courtyard of the monastery runs the aqueduct which supplies Salonica with water from the mountains, and supplied Thessalonica five hundred years ago. It was access to this, a certain means of reducing the city, that the monks of Chaoush (such is the name of the monastery) bartered when the Mohamedans besieged Thessalonica, for certain privileges to be granted after the conquest. The Turks have kept their bargain to this day, but Chaoush has not flourished. Time has moved the Christian quarter down to the sea, and the monastery is surrounded to-day by houses with latticed windows.
Once, when searching for this monastery with a fellow-countryman who conducted the mission at Salonica, I happened to open by mistake the gate of a Turkish yard. There was a rapid covering of faces by an amazed assembly of females. Discovering our error, we closed the gate and moved off; but veiled women, stones, and innuendoes were soon upon our heels, and our retreat in order shortly became an utter rout. Happily the unfortunate error occurred at an hour of the day when there were no husbands at home, and the women themselves were not in attire to follow us far.
I loved to ramble up through the Turkish quarter of Salonica where the native ‘infidel’ fears to tread. There is a charm about using the liberty one’s country commands. I generally stopped at a Turkish café on the route, and sat out in the narrow street on a stool with a cup of coffee on another before me, the subject of curious regard by mollahs and hojas in their long cloaks, and other Mohamedans of little work. Once at one of these cafés, with an English boy whom I picked up at Salonica for interpreter, I got into conversation with a harmless-looking Turk on the subject of wars and the Powers; and I learned from him that the Moslems are going to rise again, and will not stop in their conquests until they have subdued the world.
‘Abdul Hamid is a great prophet, infallible and invincible,’ said the Turk.
He pointed to three old warships in the harbour (whose machinery had been sold to a second-hand junk dealer years ago) as specimens of the means with which the work was to be accomplished; and it was useless to tell him that even the British navy was superior to that of his Sultan. He pitied me for my exceeding ignorance of history, because I thought the Turks had been defeated in the field several times; they had never been defeated!
His culminating remark had a touch of pathos in it. He was a hungry-looking individual himself, and was glad to get the two piastres we gave him for showing us the way to the wall. ‘The hosts of the Padisha,’ he said, quoting, I judge, some mollah, ‘are the most powerful force in the world; but unfortunately they have not enough to eat.’
This ignorance is due to the teachings of the mollahs, from whom the young Turks derive, directly or indirectly, all of their knowledge. While I was in Salonica an order came from Constantinople to purge the library in the military school, and as a result all reading books, including modern histories which dealt with the decline of the Turkish Empire, were destroyed.
