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| Mark Mazower |
The British researcher of the Ottoman Empire, Mark Mazower, author of numerous publications about the Balkans, has brought for the public a not-known episode for Thessaloniki Albanians.
The author of "Thessaloniki, a city of ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews 1430-1950", has revealed shocking facts that have never been touched by Albanian historiography.
Mazower, as he describes the Albanian uprisings in More against the authority of the High Gate, says that admiral Osman Hasan Pasha, in 1779, with a force of more than 30,000 undertook a fierce offensive against Albanians."Hasan Pasha also gave the green light to Turks and Greeks to take any action they liked against every Albanian they found: to kill them was not a crime. Continuing his march, he executed all Albanians who came forward, burned a monastery where they were hiding the escaped, and offered five sequins for each Albanian head that was brought before him," Mazower writes.
The same measures, according to the author, were also taken by the Thessaloniki governor who expelled more than 4,000 Albanians within five days.
But all these wild actions didn't bring the peace of Albanians nor their reconciliation with Ottoman rule.
Mazower notes that 'most of them were Muslims, but their common religion could not vanish the contempt they felt for the Turks'.
"Albanians do not already recognize the authority of the Great Lord," a foreign observer would write a few years later, "they saw as an odious enemy even the Thessaloniki Pasha."
After the dynasty Bushati of Shkodra defeated the Ottoman army in 1793, the Thessaloniki Albanians began to cause new unrest. When the city's pasha tried to arrest a riotous stirrer, known as Alizot, more than 150 men with weapons and food were found in his home.
"The Pafter called on all "true Muslims" to help him, he also used falconets to fire the house of Alizot, but his adversary withdrew from the city by taking a hostage to his security, and threatening that he will return back with 2,000 men if will be not released a ferman to his forgiveness," notes Matzower.
A decade later, an imperial warrant would be issued that obliged local officials to clear the city 'from an unknown number of Albanians and others from the same category who did not perform the service ...'