Farewell To Salonica

Leon Sciaky

Editions

Review

The author of this fascinating, nostalgic memoir was born in  Salonica in 1893 when the city was still a sleepy provincial town of the Ottoman Empire.  His family, Sephardic Jews, were grain merchants, settled in the city for 400 years and still speaking Ladino at home.  Sciaky describes a childhood of Oriental pace and comforts, surrounded by Muslims and Christians; Turks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks etc: a multicultural society living in the relative harmony of the Ottoman state.  Among many beautiful descriptions of how life once was in the region, there is one of a visit to outlying villages with his grandfather, and the hospitalities they receive.  Whether it is from the Middle Ages or Eden, it is evocative and moving, and the world it describes is vanished.

Rumours of the West and the ‘Franks’’ inventions were slow to percolate into this society, but Sciaky’s grandfather had traveled not only to Europe but also to the USA.  Care was taken to ensure that the boy should be educated along Western lines.  With hindsight, he knew that his childhood was not quite the idyll it seemed: he gradually became aware of tensions around him as the adults started to speak of bombs in the outlying villages and fighters in the hills.  In due course he met one of these in a ravine as he returned to the city, and was startled to see that the man was the son of the kind babu who looked after them in the village.  Attacks, massacres and reprisals built as the Balkan states started to assert their national identities, populations and territories against one another and the crippled Turkish state – not helped, as ever, by the West.  The author’s immediate family went to the US for a year, but their return was brief for Salonica was already sinking into the chaos that engulfed it during the First World War and continued until its emergence as a wholly Greek city, purged of all the other cultures and peoples that once defined it.  Sciaky’s family returned to America, where they stayed, and in 1946 he wrote this account of what it felt like to grow up in his lost Salonica.  Although certainly nostalgic, it is beautifully done.  His book may be compared with Irfan Orga's Portrait of a Turkish Family pbk £9.99 and André Aciman's Out Of Egypt pbk £6.99: between them, they form a valuable testimony to some of the benefits of Ottoman rule and shed valuable light onto complex (and unresolved) historical and cultural conflicts. - review by Johnny de Falbe