Once happy havens

Leon Sciaky was born in Salonica in 1893, when the city was still a provincial Ottoman town. His family were grain merchants, Sephardic Jews who had been settled there for 400 years and still spoke Ladino at home. In concise, elegant prose, he describes in this memoir a childhood of Oriental pace and comforts, surrounded by Muslims and Christians, in which Turks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks appeared to live in harmony. Among many beautiful passages about how life once was in the region, there is one of a visit with his grandfather to an outlying village which seems to belong to the Middle Ages, or Eden; at any rate, a world that has long since vanished.

Rumours of the West and the ‘Frankish’ inventions were slow to percolate into this society, although the author’s grandfather had travelled not only to Europe but also to America. Care was taken to ensure that the boy would be educated along Western lines, and with hindsight he understood that his childhood was not quite the idyll it seemed. Gradually, he became aware of the tensions around him as the adults started to speak of bombs in the villages and fighters in the hills. In due course, he met one of these in a ravine as he returned to the city one day, and was startled to recognise the man as the son of the kind babu who looked after his family in the village. Attacks, massacres and reprisals escalated as the nascent Balkan states started to assert their national identities, populations and territories against one another and the crippled Ottoman state — not helped, as ever, by the West.

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The author’s immediate family went to the US for a year, but their return was brief because Salonica was already sliding into the chaos that consumed it between the outbreak of the first world war and its re-emergence as a wholly Greek city, purged of all the other cultures and peoples that once defined it.