On
the way from my temporarily abode in Salonica to the lower town I descend Agia
Sophia street. I notice the name of an alleyway I pass: Urania
street. Urania, the Muse of Astronomy. It makes me think of Charles
Dickens who founded a home for 'fallen girls,' named Urania Cottage,
together with the fabulously rich miss Coutts. The aim was to
rehabilitate these girls by teaching them the necessary domestic
skills after which they were to be shipped off to Australia or Canada
to get married and live long and happily ever after.
Dickens
never visited Greece, never mind Salonica, in the nineteenth century
the competitor of Smyrna and Alexandria for the position of second city in the
Ottoman Empire. There probably aren't any 'fallen girls' to be found
on Urania street, though you will in the seedy
side of town, between the port and the
railway station. By the way, there aren't many stars to be seen
either at night between the towering flats of narrow Urania street.
My
temporary abode is in the former Turkish quarter. Just above the
street where the great fire of 1917 began. It burned for thirty-six
hours during which three quarters of the city was destroyed. It's a
picturesque neighbourhood with quite some remains from the days that
mobile telephones and the internet were still eccentric dreams of a
whacko Gyro Gearloose. A girl obsessively staring at her smartphone
nearly bumps into me. She gives me an angry look, as I am to blame of
course.
The
fire drastically changed the features of the city. History drove out
the Turks in 1923 and twenty years later almost all the Jews, who
constituted the largest community in Salonica by the end of the
nineteenth century, the reason why it was sometimes named the
Jerusalem of the West. It's impossible to predict what the internet
will finally bring about, but at least the word γουγλάρω
found a place in the Greek language.
Photo:
Kees Klok
