THE BRISTOL Hotel in Skopje that I wrote about in High Times at the Hotel Bristol is not the only one to have survived disaster. Half a century earlier and 200km to the south, fires roared through Thessaloniki and spared little of this extraordinary, historic city. The handsome, neoclassical building that is today the Capsis Bristol Hotel was, however, one of the few buildings to have been spared.
I was in Thessaloniki at Easter, the Greek Orthodox one, which this year fell more than a month after the West’s. All the ancient Byzantine churches had opened their doors and were decorated with yellow flags bearing the double-headed eagle, symbol of Byzantium, while boiled eggs painted blood red were unappetisingly served by the bowlful at my hotel’s breakfast. I had of course wanted to stay at the five-star Bristol but Easter was a busy time, and the dates I had tapped into its website were unavailable.
I still wished to have a look at the Bristol, however, though for some reason I had difficulty in locating it in the old Ladaki area near the port, and must have walked past it a couple of times before I realised where it was. Perhaps it was because the ground floor was largely taken up by a restaurant that was closed, although it was hard to know why: it was Saturday night, the tables were laid and ready to be waited upon, and the bar looked open for business. Outside, the umbrellas of its pavement tables were furled like three trussed Dominicans. The restaurant was in fact part of the hotel, and its street door was on the corner of the Bristol, which, in the manner of the best boutique hotels, announces itself discretely. Its main entrance was some twenty-five yards from this corner, on the north side. I tried the doors, but found them locked, though the interior lighting suggested that at any moment somebody would come sashaying down the marble staircase that rose behind the lobby, their brass rods gleaming against the red carpet. Realising now that the restaurant was actually in the hotel, I went back to see if I could find a way in, but its doors, too, were firmly shut. Returning to the main hotel entrance, I gave the door handle a good shaking, then tried to access the intercom, but it was taped up.
At this point a policeman appeared at my side. With a hand on his pistol belt, he was an inch or two shorter than me, and he looked ready to take on the world. He chucked his head back and raised his dark eyebrows, the Greek gesture for “What’s going on here, then?” It was then that I saw, over his shoulder, something else I had not noticed - a manned blue police kiosk on the opposite pavement where another officer was watching us. I explained that I was merely attempting to enter the building.
“Why is it closed?” I asked.
“This is a hotel,” he said. “It never closes.”
He stepped forward to demonstrate, and when my experience was confirmed, he overcame a brief moment of surprise, gave a shrug and said, “It is closed.”
Then he strolled back to join his colleague at their look-out point across the street. They had not noticed that the hotel had become a Mary Celeste. The only thing suspicious they had seen was me, and their eyes were still on me as I entered the square opposite the hotel restaurant to find a cafe table.
It was early evening and at Coffee World I ordered an ouzo, still curious about what might have happened to the hotel. Had there been a tragedy? An infestation? Or had it suddenly just gone out of business? Perhaps everyone was be tied up inside and about to be held for ransom. But the police were uncurious and I wasn’t about to raise any alarms. The ouzo arrived with a gratifying quantity of nuts, and I asked the waitress, a middle-aged woman with the air of a proprietress, why the hotel was closed. She looked across at the empty building, where a group of potential diners were milling on the pavement outside the restaurant, peering in, trying the door, putting their faces to the windows.
“It is not closed,” she said. “The lights are on.”
“Not in the upstairs rooms,” I pointed out.
She shrugged. “It is a hotel. It is open twenty-four hours.”
There was no point in arguing. In a city of ever-open hotels, the man who insists that one of them is closed must be insane. I sat back and reflected on the elegant two-storey building before me. As I did so, a figure appeared for a moment between the curtains of one of the unlit upstairs rooms. He was elderly but maintained a patrician bearing; clean shaven, his hair was thin and combed flat, his glasses were dark-rimmed and sensible. In a suit with a striped, dark blue tie, he looked like neither guest nor staff, and as I stared at him, hoping to find some clue as to why he should be in this unlit room, he smiled and raised his right hand in a wave that seemed more like a blessing before dissolving into the darkness, into the fabric of the building.
The figure left me transfixed. Had he really been looking at me? I turned around. None of the other half dozen people at the cafe tables was paying any attention to the building; the waitress was nowhere to be seen. The figure had been so friendly, I wanted others to see him and receive his benedictory wave. Staring back at the window, hoping for the old man's return, and perhaps an explanation, I began to think about the Hotel Bristol's past.
The facade has not altered much since it was built in 1870 as the Ottoman Post Office. The postal system has an illustrious history in this part of the world. Philipp II of Macedonia, whose astonishing tomb lies nearby at Vergina, had set up what was probably the world's first mail delivery network when he united the Greek nations in the 4th century BC. His well-trained son, Alexander the Great, who conquered more of the world than anyone ever had before, always sent letters home to his mother, Olympias. But after the Greeks and Romans (St Paul’s letter was safely delivered to the Thessalonians), there was something of a gap.
The Post Office in Thessaloniki was one of the first to be established in the Ottoman Empire, and it was built at the same time as the nearby Ottoman Bank. A telegraph service had recently started, and postage stamps introduced, though it was two decades before the first international train reached the city, from Paris. Both Post Office and Bank participated in land buying, and, as their flagship buildings were going up, so the old walls of the city were coming down. Most dramatically, the mighty city wall that ran along the length of the waterfront entirely blocking the citizens’ view of the sea was being demolished and its stones used to make a seaside road. (An EU-backed project to sink a tunnel beneath this road was the indirect reason that I was Thessaloniki, but that is another story). European-style accommodation had been virtually non-existent up until this point. Ancient caravansaris and hans had long provided virtually free accommodation for the traveller, who would bring his own food, blankets and other needs. When western Europeans began arriving on trains from Paris seeking the glamour and romance of the Orient, they demanded their accustomed creature comforts, and hotels sprung up competing for trade: the Angleterre, Colombo, Floca, Grand, Olympos, Roma and the waterfront Splendid Palace, from whose balcony the Revolutionary Young Turks would make their impassioned pleas. Most of these buildings – hans and hotels alike – would be be devoured in the 1917 fire.
The Bristol Hotel looks majestic and calming today, but as a post office around the turn of the 20th century, it must have been privy to an infinity of news and gossip, plots and plans, some of it alarmingly violent. Among letters and telegrams that were collected and dispatched, many would have been encripted, or have meanings other than an innocent reader might suppose, for the Ottomans were notorious intelligence gatherers and not for nothing has Byzantium given its name to intrigue. The Young Turks, who started their campaign to overthrow the old order and modernise the Ottoman empire from here, would not want their activities detected by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the last Sultan, who would eventually (1909) be driven into exile to spend his last days here in Villa Allatini, which contains the Prefecture today. Other messages would have been passed to the Young Turks’ Committee of Union and Progress who met in secret in the city and plotted the elimination of Armenians. Radical national Bulgarians, Macedonians, and sundry revolutionaries and dynamiters made up an active core of society and they cannot have made guests in the city’s hotels feel safe.
Most notorious were The Boatmen, a breakaway faction from the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO). In 48 hours of terror in April 1903, they blew up the French ship Guadalquivir in the harbour, and the Ottoman Bank, having rented the grocer’s store opposite and tunnelled beneath the street to lay charges. Suspicions had been roused when the drains of the Hotel Colombo, which stood next to the bank, became blocked. Attempts were also made to set fire to the Bosniak Han, which stood near the bank, and dynamite was hurled into the Grand Hotel, mercifully with no loss of life. “Wish I wasn't here,” guests must have written on postcards home
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1912 during the First Balkan War, and the subsequent reunification of Thesaloniki and the rest of northern Greece with Athens and the south, the Post Office went out of business. The First World War swiftly followed, leaving no time for idle travellers in search of adventure and the picturesque, and though the former Post Office became the Bristol Hotel, its clientel would have been officers, administrators and aid workers from the vast multinational allied Army of the Orient, made up of British, French, Russian, Italian and colonial troops who set up camps around the city in 1916 following the failure of Gallipoli.
“To an already multi-lingual town, the newcomers added numerous new shades and tongues,” writes Mark Mazower in Salonica: City of Ghosts. “Off-duty they crowded together in the narrow streets by the waterfront. Weaving their way amid the street sellers, they shopped for trinkets, or muscled their way to a table at Floca’s, Roma or the Bristol.”
In this city of rumours, Greeks, Jews, everyone was blamed when the great fire broke out on a sunny day in August 1917, but it was later generally agreed that it was inadvertently started by French soldiers encamped on the northeast side of the city. A north wind coming down from the mountains enraged the flames that devoured the largely wood-built city, spreading down to the sea and even burning a few boats. As it licked the Bristol Hotel, officers billeted in the building fought off the flames and saved it from destruction. Twenty-four hours after the fire had begun, three quarters of the city, including 9,000 houses, were destroyed and 70,000 made homeless.
Thessaloniki’s troubles were not over. Following the exchange of populations in 1922-3, when Turks were expelled from Greece and around a million Greeks living in Turkey arrived in Thessaloniki, it became “the city of refugees”. The population mix was further reduced in the Second World War, when the German army of occupation was billeted in comfortable buildings such as the Bristol. The large Jewish population, many of them who had been here since their expulsion from Spain in 1492, was expunged.
In that respite between wars, Thanos Capsis was growing up in the world of hotel keeping. Born in Egypt, his family was already in the trade, having established up the Capsis House Hotel in Cairo. After the war Thanos set out on his own with his wife, Marika, who came from Crete and had a family business running cinemas. In Athens the couple built the city’s first entirely en-suite hotel, and they made hospitality history by starting the first hotel chain in the country. In 1970 they arrived in Thessaloniki, where their older daughter Dia had married into the Varga construction family, and together they built the Capsis Thessaloniki, with 470-rooms the largest hotel in northern Greece, over which, following her divorce, Dia took full control. The company was subsequently divided between Dia and the younger daughter, Lena – who takes care of the Capsis Crete and Rhodes resorts.
By the time Dia bought the old Bristol Hotel in 2000 it had become a run-down, one-star hotel, and only one of its 38 rooms was en suite, the others having to share a single facility on each of the two floors. With ambition and flair, she set about making it the city’s first boutique hotel. Bit by bit he old Post Office building was fully restored, getting back to the wood-panelled corridors and tiled floors and bringing up the elegance and lustre that it once possessed. Antiques, Murano glass, hand-made carpets and other handsome furnishings helped turn the Bristol into a classy five-star hotel. Free wi-fi internet access was installed so that guests could send emails; there was no need for a post office any more.
I know this now because I went back to the hotel the morning after my strange encounter. There were no policemen on duty. People were dressed for church, and the streets were quiet. The Bristol’s windows were lit, but there were no figures in the upper windows. The main doors were open wide and welcoming, and I wondered if I hadn’t dreamed the whole episode.
“You were closed yesterday.” I said to the woman on the desk.
She had a commanding, no-nonsense presence, and she said simply, "Yes. It was a holiday.”
I was so taken by the one explanation for the closure that I had failed to think about, that I forgot to ask about the man in the window. Instead, I blurted out my interest in hotels called Bristol, and heard about the family who had founded the Greek hotel empire. It was only later, when I was trying to find out a little more about the hotel, that I came across photograph of Thanos Capsis. This was the man, the founder of the famous dynasty, who had smiled and waved to me from the darkened room. He had been around to advise Dia when she bought the hotel in 2000. But he had died two years later, a full six years before that night when the lights went out on the Thessaloniki Capsis Bristol. I am sure he was acknowledging my appreciation of his daughter's hotel – and my interest in all hotels called Bristol.
© Roger Williams, 2008
