Muslim refugees at the Mevlevi tekke

The Mevlevi dervish tekke, or Mevlevihane, outside the western walls was built in 1615 by Ekmeji Ahmed Pasha and included a mosque, a madrasa (an educational institution), dormitories, a water spring and a cemetery. Between 1916 and 1918, it housed Muslim refugees from other areas of northern Greece who had abandoned their homes due to the Balkan wars and the First World War.

According to Mazower, ‘An old, colour postcard depicts a large Muslim cemetery […] with cypress trees and a low exterior wall […] an unidentified long building. The message on the back of the postcard was written originally in French and reads: “Dear Dad. Here is one more unusual sight in Salonica: one of the few Turkish cemeteries in the city. In the background, you can see the mosque of the whirling dervishes, of whom there is only one left. In contrast, Muslim refugee families are now camped out there”. The message was probably written by a French soldier and the postcard is one of the last images that we have […] of the Thessaloniki Mevlevi dervish tekke’.

Henry Charles Luke, who visited Thessaloniki in 1915, writes: ‘Some of the city’s largest basilicas are housing hundreds of Greek families from Turkey who had to leave Thrace, Kallipoli and western Asia Minor persecuted by the Young Turks. Since mid-1914, they have found refuge in Thessaloniki’s churches […]. I walked up the hill to Agia Aikaterini […], then came out of a small gate and walked down the slope between the western wall and the Turkish cemetery, when on my right I noticed, in the middle of a garden, a building the likes of which would soon disappear in Europe. It was a rectangle Turkish structure, clearly 200-300 years old. A minaret towered above the yard and on the western end of the building, overlooking the gulf, there was a large pavilion with wide eaves and a richly carved and decorated roof with small wooden balconies and alcoves […]. A small enclosed cemetery with marble gravestones topped with the tall caps of the Mevlevi dervishes indicated that this was a tekke of that specific order. However, I was confounded by the crowds of women and children I encountered at the entrance. A couple of dervishes and a man in a Constantinople cassock, who introduced himself as the Sheikh’s son, […] explained to me the mystery of why the courtyard of their monastic institution had been overrun by men, women and children. They were Muslim refugees from New Serbia for whom life had become as unbearable in their own homelands as it had been for the Greek refugees in Turkey’.

According to Grigoriou and Hekimoglou, ‘Luke’s narrative is perhaps the only testimony about the temporary settlement of 37,000 Christian refugees, the first refugee wave (1914-1915) to arrive in Thessaloniki. Due to the immense tragedy of subsequent refugee waves, this first wave has not been the subject of historiographical research. In addition, we know very little about the Muslim refugees who escaped to Thessaloniki when their villages were occupied by Serbian or Bulgarian troops’. Whirling dervishes were persecuted by the Young Turks, with many suffering torture and imprisonment. The Mevlevi tekke or Mevlevihane was demolished in the period between 1925 and 1930 and in its place today stand the 59^th and 61^st Elementary Schools of Thessaloniki, opposite the church of Panagia Faneromeni.