Mustafa of Thessalonica

Ariana Ferentinou

“It was a winter night in 1881. The storm was howling over Thessalonica. Everyone was trying to get warm in his ‘yatak’ and Kyra-Thodora, a well built Turkish-Rum midwife whom her fellow inhabitants in the city knew for her unique abilities (she had the reputation of a zero death rate in births that she took care of), is about to go to bed. Suddenly, loud knocks on the door are heard and she rushes to the door where she comes across the blushed face of a girl servant working at the house of the forty year old customs officer Ali Riza and his twenty year old wife Zubeide.

– Rush, mami (midwife), rush, says the servant. My lady has started getting the birth pains!

In the tall three-storey house in Islahane mahale where they arrive shortly afterwards, all the lights are on. Kyra-Thodora will do whatever she can to help the young woman with the birth. A little while later she holds in her hands a rosy-pink, blond-haired little boy. As the good hearted midwife tightens up the oda of the “lohusa” (woman who just gave birth), sprinkles fine salt on the baby for antiseptic purposes, wraps him tenderly with warm clothing and whispers magical spells for good fortune, she unknowingly becomes the godmother of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the “Father of Turks.”

When the white envelope containing the book of the veteran journalist Christos K. Christodoulou arrived at my home address in Istanbul, a few months ago, I did not know that it was going to be such a rich source of first hand information about the first years in the life of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, that uniquely powerful leader who has dominated the history of modern Turkey, and to some extent of contemporary Greece.

Yet the recent Turkish film “Mustafa” and the expected new Greek film “Zozo” about the documented love affair between Kemal Ataturk and the Greek operetta singer and actress Zozo Dalmas, makes the book by this Salonician journalist of the “Macedonia” newspaper and TV producer, all the more fascinating.

For example, I do not know how widely known it is to the Turkish audience that the Ataturk’s neighborhood, Islahane, in 1906 had “442 houses, 22 shops, 17 empty plots of land, six fountains, three bakeries, one storehouse and two coffee shops,” as the author states, quoting from Prof. Dimitriadis’s major work, “The topography of Thessalonica during the Turkish rule, 1430-1912”.
Or that Mustafa Kemal’s love for yogurt, tahini, salep, pekmez, omelets and cheese, comes from his days in Langada outside Thessalonica where in a farm belonging to his uncle, he and his sister were given the task “to scare away the crows who were attacking the broad bean fields, to supervise the herds of sheep, to milk cows and to plough.”

What is interesting in this book is that the author, who worked for twenty five years, from 1978-2003 as a producer for the public television channel in Thessalonica, had the opportunity to come across and sometimes interview some of the last living citizens of Thessalonica who gave a first hand account of this fascinating period at the turn of the last century. Quoting old chroniclers like Georgios Stamboulis who wrote about “Life of the Thessalonicans before and after 1912,” Christodoulou writes that “Kemal frequented the coffee shop ‘Proodos’ (Progress) belonging to Dimitris Sarayiotis, opposite the White Tower. Also, the coffee shop ‘Tumba’ in the Sindrivani area. He used to be a passionate billiard player in the ‘Parthenon’ belonging to Petros Nedos in Hamidie Avenue (Queen Olga Avenue today), and used to drink his raki at Nahmia’s place, on the seaside road, where he used to play billards-bacikoto.”

The story becomes even more interesting later on. “Among his co-players there was a Greek, a Kleomenis Hatzinicolaou, who was still alive, almost a centenarian during the 80s in Thessalonica, and remembered his friend Mustafa, “with whom they were playing ‘batska billards’ and then they used to dance and sing with a group of friends on the quayside.”

And later on, another interesting piece of information: “Thanks to the reform measures applied temporarily by Young Turks in favor of the minorities in the Ottoman Empire, Mr. Hatzinicolaou set up in 1908, a Greek cultural-dancing association, at the inauguration of which ‘friend Mustafa’ was also present.”

My beloved high school teacher and now professor of contemporary Greek History Vassilis Kremydas, speaking recently on a TV portrait about him, said that “history is useful because it makes us understand the present. But history is a science and has to use all available tools in order to compile a complete picture of the past.”

The recently heated up discussion prompted by the film on the life of the founder of modern Turkey, has fueled another confrontation conducted between the sworn friends and enemies of Kemal Ataturk. But maybe this may an opportunity for taking advantage of what modern scientific methods provide us with; a more objective light on that important period in Turkish history. And that period of history, whether we like it or not, is tightly connected with Greece. Should this not, then, be an opportunity for the historians and chroniclers of our countries to maintain a taboo-free and contemporary thinking cooperation in order to give more depth to our past and give more meaning to our present?

© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc.