Mazower and LeBor on divided cities of empire
To Columbia this morning for a panel discussion on cities of empire, moderated by Mark Mazower, with Robert Donia, author of "Sarajevo, A Biography"; our contributor, Adam LeBor, author of "Jaffa: City of Oranges"; and Robert Geraci,
author of
"Kazan, Window on the East".
Donia made a fine point that I took away: most of the talk about cities as melting-pots is romanticism, at least for cities that have two or three big deep-rooted communities, rather than lots of small and shallow-rooted ones.
Where you have big rival communities—Russians and Tatars in Kazan, Serbs and Muslims in Sarajevo, Jews and Christians and Muslims in Jaffa—the relationship tends to be one of avoidance in the public and social sphere. You live as neighbours, but you go your own way, and it works so long as nothing much intervenes to inflame feeling.
Geraci pointed out, wrily but accurately, that the Soviet Union did much to leave Kazan a relatively peaceful place by rooting out the religious observance that would otherwise have become a prime cause of communal friction.
In the absence of a religious divide, language is the next fault-line—a proposition painfully true for my other home-city, Riga, where a strategy of avoidance defines completely relations between the two main communities, Latvians and Russian-speakers (at least, until Russia intervenes to inflame feeling).
I enjoyed, too, Mazower's intervention on the question of what survived of empires in post-colonial cities. He recounted that he was doing research in the Ottoman archives in Thessaloniki for his book "Salonika", and was pleasantly struck by the throng of scholars around him. He mentioned this to the archivist, who explained to him gently that these were not fellow historians. They were lawyers, checking property titles. The legal system might have changed completely, but the Ottoman archives were still a primary record of who owned what.
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