SALONIKI 



221 



PATR0X OE THE HUSBANDMEN 



A place like Saloniki might have sug- 

 gested to Heine his fancy of gods in ex- 

 ile. St. Demetrius is not merely the suc- 

 cessor of Aphrodite and the Cabiri in the 

 prayers of the Thessalonians. He is, by 

 some strange turn of fortune, the true 

 heir of Pelasgian Demeter. As such, he 

 is the patron of husbandmen throughout 

 the Greek world, and his name day, No- 

 vember 8 (or October 26, old style), 

 marks, for Greeks and Turks alike the 

 beginning of winter — as the day of his 

 associate St. George, upon whom has 

 fallen the mantle of Apollo, marks the 

 beginning of summer. 



Whether the Greek St. Demetrius and 

 the Turkish Kassim be one and the same, 

 this is not the place to inquire. But their 

 fete day is the same, and the Cathedral 

 of St. Demetrius was called by the Turks 

 the Kassimieh. In any case, the good 

 people of Saloniki, whether Christian or 

 Mohammedan, must have found it highly 

 significant that the Greek army of 1912 

 entered their city on the name day of 

 their patron saint. 



UNREALIZED OPPORTUXITIES 



Many cities that can boast so much in 

 the way of interesting antiquities have 

 survived themselves. They live only in 

 the memory of what they have been. 

 But not so Saloniki. She is too much in- 

 terested in what she is and in what she 

 is going to be to think very much about 

 her past. So little indeed has she yet 

 taken in, as the remainder of Europe has 

 so profitably done, the possibilities of a 

 past, that I was unable to find there a 

 map of the city. 



And as I went from shop to shop in 

 search of photographs of the churches I 

 was followed by an officer looking vainly 

 for a Baedeker. Imagine — in a town 

 where one may live quite as comfortably 

 as in Siena or Verona, and where there 

 is quite as much to see ! 



Somebody had told me that Saloniki 

 was rather "like Genoa. My first impres- 

 sion, therefore, was of a disappointing 

 flatness, not in the least comparable to the 

 lofty air — the piled, bastioned, heaven- 

 scaling air — of the Italian city. Yet Sa- 



loniki scales heaven, too, in her more 

 discreet manner. 



And there is even something faintly 

 Italian. about her. This is most palpable 

 on the broad quay of the water front, 

 especially when a veritable row of fish- 

 ermen from the Adriatic are drying nets 

 or sails under the sea wall, just as they 

 do in Venice. The crescent of white 

 buildings facing the blue bay would not 

 look foreign in any Rimini or Spezzia. 



The White Tower, which is the most 

 conspicuous of them, might perfectly 

 have been the work of an Italian prince. 

 Indeed, a Doge of Venice is said to have 

 built the first edition of it, and Suleiman 

 the Magnificent employed Venetian ma- 

 sons for his own. 



A GREEK "MOVIE" THEATER 



A "splendid palace" opens florid gates 

 of hospitality there. A skating rink and 

 a cinematograph offer their own more 

 exotic attractions to the passer-by. Cafes 

 abound, overflowing onto the awninged 

 sidewalk. Electric trams clang back and 

 forth in proud consciousness of the fact 

 that they existed when imperial Constan- 

 tinople was yet innocent of such mod- 

 ernities. 



They take you around the eastern horn 

 of the bay to the trim white suburb of 

 Kalamaria, where consuls and other nota- 

 bles of Saloniki live, and where Sultan 

 Abd-iil-Hamid II spent nearly four bitter 

 years in the Italian Villa Allattini, look- 

 ing out at the provincial capital which he 

 and Nero both embellished in their day. 

 On the opposite horn of the crescent is 

 the Latin-enough park of Besh Chinar — 

 Five Plane Trees — where it is good to 

 sip coffee and listen to music in the cool 

 of the day. 



And if you did not know that greater 

 prize and ornament of Saloniki for 

 Olympus, the true Thessalian Olympus 

 of Greek legend, you might easily imag- 

 ine it to be some white Alp or Apennine 

 looming magnificently across the bay. 



Look a little closer, however, and this 

 Italian appearing town has unfamiliar 

 details. The white campanili that every- 

 where prick up above the roofs of weath- 

 ered red are too slender and too pointed 



