Before the 19th century reforms, Skopje had many features in common with other cities of the Empire. I will review here the reasons why Skopje may, at first sight, be seen as a ‘typical’ Ottoman and fragmented city, before suggesting an alternative perspective on Ottoman urban life.
Like many Ottoman cities, pre-1689 Üsküb was separated into two different and separated zones: on the one hand, the administrative and economic areas, and, on the other hand, the residential neighbourhoods. The first area was developed on the space of the downtown city and organised around the Čaršija with the bezisten (covered market) at its core. It was above all a functional place. The Čaršija was concentrated important public buildings, such as the clock tower and the city’s medresas, with the han, the hammam and the mosque symbolizing the Islamic troika (Stamenov and Čoloviќ, 2003). What might have appeared to be a maze-like plan actually functioned as rational zoning, based on a well-structured 17th century network of streets which connected the residential areas to the Čaršija as the city’s centre, towards which all streets led (Dojchinovski, 1997). The second area was constituted by the different mahallas,
developed around the Čaršija and used only as a place of living. The mahalla’s location, far from the city’s commercial centre, ensured that their inhabitants were preserved from the Čaršija’s noises. The architecture of the mahalla was similar to that of most Ottoman cities: division into smaller areas, narrow streets bordered by high walls, houses enclosed from the outside and centred on interior gardens. We are far here from the definition of contemporary urban sociology, which views the street as the major component of urban space that ensures communications between the city’s different zones and its inhabitants. Skopje’s streets and impasses were not a place to go for a walk. They discouraged the entry of foreigners to the mahalla and permitted its control by the community.
Skopje bore, at first sight, the marks of the Empire’s official approach to the management of cultural diversity. The Muslim / Christian division appeared in the division of labour: Skopje’s guilds were divided by religion, with Muslim and Christian guilds dominating business, and only a small number of mixed guilds with double administration and press (Kačeva et al., 2006). The different communities seemed to have precise activities and little room for manoeuvre: cobblers, bakers and butchers were Christian, while blacksmiths, barbers and tanners were Muslim (Arsovski, 1971). Heavy physical work was usually the lot of Gypsies (Kačeva et al., 2006).
The most visible separation was the communities’ repartition into different areas of the city, with successive waves of migration leaving major traces on the urban fabric. Migrants usually concentrated in one area in order to preserve their cultural specificities. These areas were called after their community or their place of provenance. One of Skopje’s oldest colonies, the Jewish community, lived in Evrejsko
maalo, i.e. the Jewish mahalla, on the left side and centred on the Kaal Hadash
synagogue. Skopje’s religious communities lived in separate neighbourhoods with their own facilities, except for the Čaršija. Most Muslims lived in Karadag or Krnjevo maalo, on the northern side, where the clock tower and important mosques were located. They had their own cemeteries, separated from the Christian, the Jewish and the Gypsy cemeteries (called imoiria). Until the late 19th century, Muslim houses differed from Christian ones: the former were larger and remained ground, with, in rich families, a gender separation into two different buildings, while the latter had often two floors and a veranda (Kačeva et al. 2006). Skopje was home to different Muslim (Turk, Albanian, Roma, Cherkess and Tatar) and Christian (Macedonian, Serb, Vlach, Greek and minority Roma) communities. This group distinction was roughly reflected in urban
space. Most Vlachs lived in Vlashko maalo, on the right side of the river. The Roma community lived in Gazi Mentash, also called Cigansko maalo (‘Gypsy maalo’) and Xhadzhi Seledinovo until the 1876 Turkish-Serbian war and the arrival of waves of refugees. They then settled in Topaana, at the city’s periphery, which became a major Roma area (a feature it has preserved today), especially after their ousting from Gazi Mentash during the interwar period.
It seems hard to identify any kind of cosmopolitanism here. Most individuals could live their whole life secluded in their respective neighbourhood, speaking only their community’s language and interacting with ‘foreigners’ only at the Čaršija – outside of which women were even more isolated than men. At first sight, it is true that Ottoman Skopje might have appeared as a divided city or a sum of strongly identified territories rather than a unified city, lacking social bonds outside the community, with partitioning of the urban physical structure, and the exclusionary appropriation of space by different groups. However, I will now suggest that the lived reality was quite different. Two factors question the image of a strictly partitioned city: first, the permeability of communities and, second, the evolutions Skopje experienced during this long imperial rule. As a crossroads in the Balkans, the city was not only an area through which migrations passed, but also a place where groups gathered, changing the structure of the city and themselves in the process.
First, we should be cautious of anachronistic ideas on religious and/or ethnic divisions which do not correspond to the reality of the lived environment at a certain period. While Muslim and Christian communities in Ottoman Skopje are often seen as having very different cultural habits and lifestyles, a poor Christian had actually more in common with a poor Muslim than with a rich Christian. For many centuries, the workers’ lifestyle extended the belonging to a specific community and did not change much. This is explained by the relative social and cultural permeability between groups and their constant interaction in mixed areas. The Čaršija was a major meeting place: before 1689 and during the 19th century, Skopje was an important economic centre, where traders from various cultures and places interacted on a regular basis.12
12 At the end of the 19th century, Skopje’s Čaršija had 1,150 shops and its merchants were Arab, Jewish, Armenian, Greek, Venetian or Serbian – to cite only a few (Stamenov and Čoloviќ, 2003)
Second, a close observation of archived documents suggests that the city’s mahallas were not as strictly divided as they seemed. Skopje had many mixed neighbourhoods. Even if Jews were concentrated in the Jewish mahalla, they were also present in other mahallas. The historic area of settlement, Čair, was home to Orthodox and Muslim populations. Even the so-called ‘Vlach maalo’ was also populated by Turkish officials. Finally, most Roma neighbourhoods were populated by both Muslim and Christian Roma groups (Kačeva and al., 2006). This permeability is assessed by the presence of Orthodox churches in non-Christian neighbourhoods, such as the church of St Dimitrius, built in 1690 in the Jewish mahalla. Soon after the Ottoman conquest, the construction of Christian buildings was again allowed and, in 1543, the church of the Holy Saviour was built in the Čaršija. These elements suggest that the Empire’s tolerance towards non-Muslim communities was greater than usually thought. There was no absolute segregation in Ottoman Skopje.
Skopje was also not a static entity. It experienced many changes, especially in the last century of Ottoman rule. The successive migrations altered both the spatial distribution of its populations and their interactions. While the most important waves of migration occurred in the second half of the 19th century, there had already been some movements of population which influenced the development of the city before. The Muslim community’s internal heterogeneity increased in the late 18th century, with the establishment of new Muslim populations. It is in this period that the Albanians – or ‘Arnauts’ as they were called by the Ottoman ruler – settled in Skopje. All of them were Ghegs, but not all of them were Muslim – not to mention also the Orthodox and Catholic Albanians. Many Catholic Ghegs opted for Islam when they settled in Skopje: religious conversion (especially to Islam) was a common practice in Ottoman lands, with the complexity it added to the already convoluted cultural make-up of the Empire. Such migrations brought about some processes of fusion, inter-crossing and blurring of intergroup barriers which defy any attempt at categorisation.
These aspects of life in Skopje during the Ottoman Empire suggest that the image of a divided city is inaccurate. Skopje may have been home to different communities, but its mahallas were not exclusively monoethnic. Similarly, communities were more porous and intercommunity sociabilities more developed than usually depicted by Macedonian historiography. This indicates that Skopje’s processes of divisions should not be attributed to the Ottoman period, but that they most likely emerged after the 19th century. I will now analyse the changes occurred during the
Tanzimat, a series of reforms which altered the organisation of the city, in particular its spatial development and intercommunity relations.