ABSTRACT
In 1864, the French palaeographer Emmanuel Miller removed some fine marble sculptures from Salonika, part of a colonnade erected in the second century AD, and took them to the Louvre in Paris, where they are currently displayed. This, however, is not just another story about antiquities taken from Greece, which ended up in a foreign museum during Ottoman times, but one interwoven with the different ethnic and religious groups then living in the city: the Muslim Turkish population, who called the statues ‘Angel Figures’; the Greek Orthodox citizens, who referred to them as the ‘Idols’; and the Ladino‐speaking Jews, who thought of them as petrified figures and called them the ‘Enchanted Ones’ (Incantadas).
Today, the sculptures have re‐emerged in public discourses reshaping the city’s cultural memory and identity. For some Salonicans, the Incantadas represent the ‘Elgin Marbles of Macedonia’ or the ‘Caryatides of Northern Greece’, which must be returned. Yet, for others, they express the very special past of multicultural Ottoman Salonica: a Roman monument related to Greek Dionysus, once incorporated into a Jewish house, in the middle of a typically Balkan urban centre; and for the few remaining Jews of the city, the sculptures symbolise Salonica as the ‘Jerusalem of the Mediterranean’, as the city was often referred to until at least 1912, i.e. before the destruction of its Jewish quarters by a great fire and the later implementation of the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’. This chapter explores the competing imaginings of the statues by different groups living in the city and how, in the context of the current Greek economic and social crisis, Salonica seems to look for re‐enchantment in its polysemous heritage.
