Ottoman Salonika
one said they would not be able to do it even for seven crowns. However,
I think I’ll be able to have it done for six crowns.
In conclusion İsmail notes that he is staying at Café Europa, which
“although not beautiful, is very cozy. I gave ten crowns for the night, but
I paid in two installments” (he wants Osman to know that he is a cagey
businessman). The Kapancı brothers worked closely together and with
their father, traveling from Salonika to Vienna and Berlin to further the
family business, always keeping one another informed of every decision
made along the way, particularly those that display an ability to get the
best deal.Salonika at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
In the late nineteenth century, Ottoman port cities were transformed
physically and culturally almost beyond recognition. Financial capitaliza-
tion by local, imperial, and international interests, connections to world
trade centered in northwestern Europe, and the accompanying new modes
of communication (the telegraph), international transportation (roads,
railways, steamships), and local transportation (tramways) propelled their
change.^3 In this context, Ottoman Salonika was converted from a sleepy
borderland Macedonian town into a major cosmopolitan port.^4 The face
of the city was dramatically altered: as in Istanbul at the same time, ancient
walls were knocked down, suburbs emerged beyond the city’s Byzantine
core, and straight, wide, tree-lined paved avenues were built.^5 The har-
bor and port were expanded to handle steamships, and the city’s port was
linked to a railway grid connecting western Europe and the Ottoman
Empire. After Istanbul ( 1 million), Izmir ( 350 , 000 ), and Beirut ( 170 , 000 ),
Salonika became the fourth leading port city in the Ottoman Mediterra-
nean, a terminus for steamships and railways, a significant manufacturing
and commercial center, and the most industrialized city in the empire.^6
Salonika possessed “a strategic position that made it a node for continental
transportation, a harbor that could be made to accommodate deep-sea
vessels, a productive hinterland that could be exploited for its cash crops
and markets, and a political and economic potential that attracted capital,
exploiters, and workers.”^7
As a result of economic dynamism, immigration, and improvements
in public health, Salonika experienced rapid population growth. The city
was one of the largest in the Ottoman Empire: its population tripled in