Turkey and Greece: A History of Colliding
From Cyprus: A Place of Arms (London: Praeger, 1966), chapter 6.
The conflict in Cyprus did not rise from a vacuum. Greece and Turkey have been at odds for hundreds of years despite many commonalities. While the notion of Aancient hatred@ is a convenient myth, there is nonetheless a history of occasional conflict that stretches back to the entry of Turkish nomads into the Byzantine empire in the 11th century, the gradual collapse of the Byzantine empire, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the long dominance of the dynasty of Osman, or Ottomans, over Greece and the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. Understanding the Cyprus problem today requires knowledge of the longstanding disputes in the Greek-Turkish relationship. In this excerpt, AOttoman Imperialism and Hellenism: Death Throes and Disaster,@ British journalist and historian Robert Stephens describes the modern period of this confrontation.
THE YOUNG TURK revolution began the destruction of the old Ottoman political order, but it was only one, albeit important, stage in the long effort of the Turks to come to terms with Western culture and power: an effort which began two centuries ago and on which, psycho- logically at least, the Cyprus dispute still has some effect today.
One of the tragedies of this Turkish struggle to adapt and reform is that, as has occurred in other countries, the advent of the reformers often coincided with dangerous pressures from precisely those quarters at home and abroad to which the reformers looked for cooperation and help. The results generally either discredited the reformers at home or provoked them to bitterness and disillusion. For example, the revolt of the Balkan Slavs and Turkey's disastrous defeat by Russia in 1876-78 helped to wreck the first Ottoman constitutional experiment.
When the Young Turk revolution revived the constitutional regime thirty years later, it again immediately faced a crisis in its relations with the Balkan Christians and with Europe. The revolutionary movement was strong enough to survive but only at the cost of becoming more nationalistic and authoritarian. Even before it came to power, the Young Turk movement had been split. One section believed in a decentralisation which would give local autonomy to the subject peoples of the empire. It advocated inviting help from the European powers in carrying out reforms. The other section, which had most support among the army officers, wanted a unified centralised Ottoman state in which everyone would have equal rights and duties, irrespective of race, language or religion. It rejected any foreign intervention.
Before the revolution, a compromise had been reached between the two sections. When Abdul Hamid's despotism was ended and the Constitution restored, there was a genuine feeling of freedom and reconciliation between the different races and religions of the empire. But it did not last long for, while Greeks and Bulgars were waiting to take their seats next to Turks in the new Ottoman Parliament, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria was proclaiming his country independent and free of the last trace of Ottoman suzerainty, the Greeks of Crete were announcing their union with Greece, and the Austro-Hungarian empire was annexing the former Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Within the next four years, Italy attacked Turkish-controlled Tripolitania and seized the Dodecanese Islands, while Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia united in the Balkan League to attack Turkey and wrest from her almost all her remaining territory in Europe.
The difficulty was that neither the decentralisation plans of the Ottoman liberals nor the ideas of the more nationalist Young Turks could achieve the aim of saving the empire from further disintegration. Nationalism among the Ottoman Christians, backed by the existence of the new Christian states in the Balkans, had already gone too far for them to be satisfied for long with local autonomy. They would inevitably have regarded autonomy as the first step towards separation from the empire and reunion with those of similar race and religion beyond the Ottoman frontiers. Even less were the Christians disposed to accept a new minority status which robbed them of old privileges and protections while offering new freedoms whose application, in practice, was open to doubt. For the nationalists who dominated the Committee of Union and Progress increasingly came to interpret >ottomanisation= as meaning centralised rule by the Turkish majority and the >turkification= of the rest of the population. They no doubt considered themselves as genuinely progressive in offering to all Ottoman subjects the privileges of full citizenship, with its duties as well as its rights, which had hitherto been reserved for Turkish Moslems. But at the same time their main purpose was to defend and preserve the Ottoman empire more effectively than the Hamidian despotism had done. In trying to achieve an aim which was no longer possible, they were driven back to a military despotism of their own. Their failure, and the feeling that they had been betrayed by those to whom they had looked for understanding and friendship, gave a new bitterness to their relations with the Christian minorities and those countries outside the empire which supported them. The Armenians were to bear the brunt of this bitterness at the cost of a million dead, but it also affected the Greeks who were still the biggest and most influential Christian minority within the empire. In the eighty years after the Greek war of independence, there had been no great increase in animosity between Greeks and Turks in Asia Minor, despite recurrent crises between Greece and the Ottoman empire over Crete or Thessaly. Apart from the Thirty Days' War in 1897, there had, indeed, been no war between Greece and the Ottoman empire. But a new bitterness and savagery was to show on both sides in the great Greco-Turkish conflict which, opening in 1908 with the proclamation of Cretan union, closed in 1922-23 with the Greek withdrawal from Anatolia.
The first round of the conflict, however, ended not in tragedy but in farce, largely because of the intervention of the European powers. In Crete, the powers had begun, in the summer of 1908, to withdraw their troops, since Zaimis, the Greek high commissioner, appeared to have the island well under control. But when the Young Turk revolution broke out, the Cretans took advantage of the absence of Zaimis from the island to form a provisional government under Venizelos and five associates. In October 1908, this government proclaimed union with Greece. The Greek constitution was declared to replace that of Crete. The European powers now favoured the union of Crete with Greece, provided the Moslem minority were protected, but the Athens government hesitated to take the final step of accepting the union for fear of Turkish and international reaction to such a fait accompli.
In the meantime, the Young Turks had reacted strongly to external pressures and to an attempted coup by reactionaries in Istanbul. On April 12, 1909 they had deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid, putting the harmless Mehmed V in his place. In response to European pressures to recognise the union of Greece, they had demanded the end of Cretan autonomy and a return to the situation in the island before 1898 when it was still under Turkish sovereignty. Despite the continued deadlock over the international status of the island, the powers completed the withdrawal of their forces from Crete in June 1909 and the Cretans hoisted the Greek flag. When the Turks demanded a repudiation of the Cretan action by Greece, backing up their demand with a boycott of Greek goods and a threat of war, the powers intervened and, as a conciliatory gesture, sent marines to cut down the flagstaff bearing the Greek flag. At the same time they warned both Greece and Turkey not to intervene. They declared both Crete and Macedonia to be matters of European and not merely Greco-Turkish concern.
This humiliation, which the Greek government was forced to swallow, brought to a head the revolt of the Military League in Greece. The League, bearing some resemblance to the Young Turks, was composed of young army officers who disapproved of the conduct of national affairs by the professional politicians and, especially, of their neglect of the armed forces. In August 1909, a group of 500 officers, members of the League, and 1,500 troops, led by Colonel Zorbas, marched out of Athens and encamped on Goudi Hill. They demanded the reorganisation of the armed forces under service ministries headed by professional soldiers and sailors, and the exclusion of the royal family from army commands. The latter demand largely resulted from the fact that Crown Prince Constantine had been held responsible for the main defeats of the Greek army in the 1897 war with Turkey. As a result of the intervention of King George, the reforms were accepted by Parliament. The League then demanded political changes and called on Venizelos to come to Athens from Crete to deal with the political situation.
The energy and intelligence with which Venizelos disentangled the crisis in Athens was the foundation of his political fame. He persuaded the king to accept the calling of a National Assembly to revise the Constitution and obtained the agreement of the Military League, in return, to dissolve itself voluntarily once the Assembly had been called. After the National Assembly, including Venizelos himself, had been elected, Venizelos resigned from the post he still held as head of the Cretan provisional government and was appointed prime minister of Greece on October 18, 1910. When the Assembly refused to accept his view that its task was only to revise the Constitution and not to make a new one, he resigned, advised the king to dissolve the Assembly, and, in new elections was swept back to power with huge public support. The revised Constitution was adopted in June 1911. Among the reforms was the introduction of compulsory primary education and the establishment of a permanent, non-political civil service. In 1912, the National Assembly gave way to an ordinary Chamber of Deputies of whom the great majority were supporters of Venizelos.
At the opening of the Chamber, Venizelos created a sensation by refusing to allow the deputies elected from Crete to take their seats. He did so because he was not yet ready to face the crisis with Turkey which recognition of the Cretan delegates might precipitate. The retraining of the Greek army and navy by French and British missions was still in progress, but, more important, Venizelos was waiting for the completion of the Balkan alliance which he had set in motion in a secret approach to Bulgaria a year earlier. The basic idea of the alliance was to end the divisions among the Balkan states which had been exploited by Turkey against each of them in turn. Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, who all had claims on Macedonia, were to unite with Montenegro in stripping Turkey of her European provinces in which Greek and Slav Christians were a majority. They were then to divide the spoils of victory among themselves.
Thus, on March 13, 1912, Bulgaria signed a treaty with Serbia and, seventeen days later, an alliance with Greece. The Greco-Bulgarian agreement contained a clause which released Bulgaria from her obligation to Greece if war with Turkey were caused by the admission of Cretans to the Greek Parliament. The treaties were the prelude to the first Balkan war which international opinion nowadays would probably classify as a carefully prepared war of aggression, despite its aspect of national liberation. Hostilities began in 1912 with a declaration of war on Turkey by Montenegro, as a result of a dispute over the international status of Albania. Ultimatums were promptly presented by Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia and, equally promptly, rejected by Turkey. On October 14, 1912, the same day that he sent the ultimatum to Turkey, Venizelos officially recognised the union of Crete with Greece and allowed the Cretan deputies to take their seats in the Greek Parliament.
The Balkan allies quickly routed the Turkish armies and over-ran almost the whole of Turkey's remaining territory in Europe. The Greeks captured southern Macedonia, including the major prize of Salonika which they occupied before the Bulgarians, their potential rivals in the area. They took part of Epirus, nine Aegean Islands and Mount Athos. Despite the Bulgarian-Serbian armistice with Turkey and the opening of the London Conference on the Balkans in December 1912, Greece maintained hostilities in order to keep control of the Aegean and prevent any Turkish troop movements by sea. After the London Conference broke down, full scale hostilities were resumed in February 1913, and Greek forces took the offensive and captured Yannina, northern Epirus and the island of Samos which, throughout most of the nineteenth century, had been an autonomous principality paying a fixed tribute to Turkey. Albania was proclaimed independent under Italian protection. The Greek victories were marred by the assassination in Salonika on March 18, 1913, of King George. He was shot in the street by a Greek with a personal grievance. His son, Constantine, succeeded him in an aura of popularity won by his command of the troops which captured Salonika and Yannina.
The first Balkan war was brought to an end by the Treaty of London on May 30, 1913. Turkey formally surrendered to the Balkan alliance the island of Crete and all her European territories except Thrace. The future of Albania and its frontiers, and of the Aegean Islands was left to be settled by the great powers. However, the Balkan allies quarrelled over the division of the spoils. Bulgaria, in particular, was dissatisfied with the share of Macedonia which was offered to her, and on June 30, 1913, began the second Balkan war with a sudden attack on the Greeks and Serbs. But she was defeated by her three former allies with the help of intervention by Rumania, while the Turks took advantage of the conflict to recover the city of Adrianople from the Bulgarians. The Treaty of Bucharest, signed on August 10, 1913, confirmed Greek possession of southern Macedonia and part of the coast of Thrace, including the tobacco port of Kavalla. Greece also kept Crete. She remained in occupation of most of Epirus and all the Aegean Islands, except Tenedos and Imbros which guard the approaches to the Dardanelles and the Dodecanese. The latter had been taken by the Italians in their war with Turkey in 1912 and remained under their control. The Greek occupation of the other islands and Epirus was, however, subject to approval by the European powers.
Greece had almost doubled her territory and population within one year. But her success brought new problems in its train, and Venizelos hoped for a generation of peace in which to absorb these gains. Greece's new frontiers in the north were greatly extended, and her two million increase of population included 600,000 Moslems with some Slavs and other minorities. Moreover, the Treaty of Bucharest had created a legacy of bitterness and revenge in Turkey where there were still over two million Christians, the majority of whom were Greek. The treaty also established a new pattern of power in the Balkans which led to the outbreak of the first world war. Despite their warning that they would uphold the integrity of the Ottoman empire, the great powers had been unable to deter the Balkan alliance. It was the continued determination of Austria to curb the influence of Serbia, strengthened by the Balkan wars, that eventually brought the great powers themselves into conflict.
Turkish resentment was strongest at Greece's formal annexation of Crete and occupation of the Aegean Islands, especially Chios and Mitylene. These two large islands lie only a few miles off the coast of western Anatolia and cover the approaches to the port of Smyrna. The Turks feared they might be used as a base to attack Asia MinorCas indeed happened six years later. Turkey's refusal to accept the loss of her Aegean Islands was, in fact, the main cause of the breakdown of the London Conference and the resumption of the first Balkan war. After the Treaty of Bucharest, when the future of the islands was being considered by the powers, Turkey began a campaign to force Greece to withdraw from Chios and Mitylene by a combination of economic and naval pressure and by the persecution of the Greek minority in Asia Minor. (These tactics were to be repeated fifty years later when Turkey began to take reprisals against the Greeks in Istanbul and the islands in order to put pressure on Greece over the Cyprus question.) A boycott of the Greeks in Turkey began in November 1913, and, at the same time, some 30,000 Greeks were deported or driven from their homes on the coasts of Thrace and Anatolia. [Venizelos claimed at the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1923 that a total of 430,000 Greeks had been expelled from these areas and had taken refuge in Greece in the months just before and after Turkey's entry into the first world.] The Turkish authorities claimed that their jobs and homes were needed for the Moslem refugees who were pouring in from Macedonia. Turkey began to expand her navy and bought two dreadnoughts which were being built in British yards. In July 1914, Greece countered this show of force by acquiring two secondhand American battleships.
Relations between Greece and Turkey became increasingly strained and on June 12, 1914, Venizelos gave a warning in a parliamentary speech that Greece might be forced to fight to protect the Greeks in Turkey from further persecution. A month later he left Athens in order to meet the Turkish grand vizir in Brussels to discuss a possible settlement of the dispute. But, before they could meet, the Greco-Turkish quarrel was swallowed up in the outbreak of the first world war.
Turkey's decision to side with Germany in the first world war destroyed the traditional British policy of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman empire. Instead, Britain found herself for the first time at war with Turkey and, moreover, in alliance with Russia, her former chief rival at Constantinople. Her aim now became the dismemberment rather than the preservation of the Ottoman dominions. But the old British policy had always been to a certain extent conditioned by her other role as one of the protecting powers of Greece and by her own ambitions as a Middle Eastern power in her own right. The outcome of the Balkan Wars had already dealt a heavy blow at Britain's attempts to keep a balance between her Greek and Turkish interests. Now Turkey's action gave Britain the opportunity of expanding her own Middle East empire, the foundations of which had already been laid - - though still in a hesitant provisional fashion - - for some time past. For at the outbreak of the first world war, Britain had already been established in Cyprus for thirty-six years, in Egypt for thirty-two, and in the Sudan for sixteen, following the reconquest of 1898. She controlled the Suez Canal and her fleet dominated the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. On the day, November 5, 1914, that Britain declared war on Turkey, she also announced the annexation of Cyprus and the establishment of a protectorate over Egypt. Both territories had, until then, remained formally under Ottoman sovereignty though occupied and controlled by Britain.
In August 1914, both Turkey and Greece at first maintained a position of neutrality in the world conflict. But it was clear from the start that the military oligarchy led by Enver Pasha which had come to rule in Turkey favoured Germany, while the policy of the Greek prime minister, Venizelos, was to side with the Entente powers - - Britain, France and Russia.
Turkey entered the war on October 28 when her fleet bombarded Russian ports on the Black Sea. Resentment at Britain's refusal to deliver two battleships ordered for the Turkish fleet has been cited as an excuse for the Turkish government's decision to abandon its neutrality. But Turkey had already become heavily dependent on Germany for financial help and military supplies, and she now saw Germany as her chief ally against her traditional enemy, Russia. Her military leaders, themselves German-trained, believed Germany would win. But, even so, a more cautious man than the impulsive, ambitious Enver, who had emerged as the decisive figure among the Young Turks, would probably have hesitated longer before committing himself.
Greece's entry into the war on the Entente side was to be brought about only after a bitter and confused struggle inside Greece lasting for nearly three years in which Venizelos and the Allied powers were pitted against King Constantine. At first, Constantine and Venizelos agreed that Greece should remain neutral and that she must, above all, avoid a clash with the Allies, who controlled the seas round the long Greek coastline. But Constantine did not share Venizelos's belief that the Allies would win and that Greek neutrality should therefore be benevolent towards them. Both Venizelos and the Allies saw Greek neutrality as useful so long as it was a factor in keeping Bulgaria out of the war, but they believed that if Bulgaria attacked Serbia, Greece should go to the help of the Serbs in fulfilment of her treaty with them. Constantine, however, considered that Greece should remain neutral even if Serbia were attacked - - though he was also accused of waiting to bring Greece in on the German side at a favourable opportunity. The king's attitude was blamed on his personal germanophil preferences and the influence of his German wife; but a convincing case can also be made that, if he erred, it was not as a result of such personal reasons but from a mistaken view of the Greek national interest.
As long as there seemed to be any chance of keeping Bulgaria out of the German camp, by either threats or promises, Allied pressure on Greece to abandon her neutrality was not heavy and differences between King Constantine and Venizelos were not acute. But, as hope of influencing Bulgaria diminished, the Allies began a more serious effort to bring Greece into the war on their side, so as to provide support for Serbia. In January 1915, the British foreign secretary. Sir Edward Grey, offered Greece >important concessions on the coasts of Asia Minor= if she would join in a concerted Allied action in the Balkans. This was the first indication for the Greeks that the possibility of their acquiring territory in Asia Minor could be taken seriously. Venizelos pressed the king to accept this unexpected offer >in order to save the Greeks in Turkey and create a Great Greece which would include nearly all the provinces where Hellenism flourished through the long periods of its history=. He suggested ceding the port of Kavalla to Bulgaria in order to get the latter's co-operation. The king agreed to this, but the Bulgarians were not to be tempted.
The Allied offer, though not immediately accepted, was the beginning of the great Greek adventure which was to end, seven years later, in disaster in Anatolia. Even at this time, the Greek general staff under Colonel Metaxas warned that the conquest and control of western Asia Minor, which Venizelos envisaged claiming, would be an enterprise far beyond Greece's own resources. To accomplish his aims, Venizelos was counting on help from the Allies, and in a memorandum to the king on January 17, 1915, he wrote:
The proposal that very wide territorial concessions would be made to us in Asia Minor proves to me without the sligh-*test*-('") doubt that the activities displayed by the New Hellas have attracted the confidence of certain Powers who consider her an important factor in the settlement of the Near East at the moment of collapse of the Turkish state. The support of these Powers provides us with the financial and diplomatic means to cope with the inherent difficulties of such a sudden increase of territory. Confident in this support, Greece can follow boldly the new and wonderful paths opening out for her.
On March 1,1915, Venizelos proposed that a Greek army corps be sent to support a renewed Allied naval attack on the Dardanelles. (The first attack, begun by warships on February 18,1915, had been inconclusive.) But the very next day, Russia vetoed the proposal, making it clear that in no circumstances would she allow Greece to take part in an Allied attack on Constantinople. The Russians now saw the Greeks as potential rivals in their own newly formulated claims to Constantinople and the Straits. The Greeks assured the British that their interest in Constantinople was merely sentimental: they only wanted to march into the city and be the first of the victorious troops to take Holy Communion in Saint Sophia. But they did not wish to stay there, and indeed would not accept the city if it were offered them. Such was the argument of the Venizelists, but the Russian veto was reinforced by the objections of the Greek general staff.
On March 6, King Constantine rejected the Venizelos proposal, whereupon the premier resigned. In new elections he was returned to power. When Bulgaria mobilised on September 12 - - a month after the Greek elections - -Venizelos asked for an Allied expeditionary force of 150,000 men to be sent to Greece. But the king objected that the landing of these forces would be a breach of Greek neutrality unless Bulgaria attacked Serbia to which Greece had treaty obligations. However, the Allied force was already at sea and, despite a formal pro-*test*-('") from Venizelos, British and French troops landed at Salonika on October 5, 1915. The same day Venizelos resigned once more after the king, ignoring a parliamentary vote of confidence in the prime minister, had told him he opposed his policy of fulfilling the Serbian treaty.
In a further attempt to gain Greek support for Serbia, Sir Edward Grey offered, on October 16, to transfer Cyprus to Greece. But eight days later the new Greek government of Alexander Zaimis, backed by the king, formally refused the offer. The British foreign secretary's initiative, agreed upon at an informal meeting of the 'War Committee', was criticised both in the cabinet and in the House of Commons for having been taken without proper cabinet consultation. But, in fact, as Roy Jenkins points out in his biography of Asquith, the Cyprus offer had been thoroughly discussed by the cabinet in January 1915. George V's secretary, Lord Stamfordham, had then written to Asquith:
The King desires me to express the earnest hope that the Government will, on further consideration, decide to support Sir E. Grey's proposal and offer Cyprus to Greece on condition of her joining the Allies. . .. Financially Cyprus is I suppose a loss to this country. Strategically, HM understands that it has proved a failure, the harbours impracticable and ships obliged to lie off six miles from the coast."
The defeat and occupation of Serbia by the Austro-German armies forced the thirteen Allied divisions (eight French and five British) in Greece to withdraw into a fortified camp at Salonika and to treat the Greek government and army as potentially hostile. The Allies instituted a partial economic blockade of Greece, and sent an ultimatum to Athens demanding demobilisation of the Greek army, new elections and a truly neutral government.
Following an Allied offensive in Macedonia and a counter-offensive by the Bulgarians, in which 8,000 Greek troops were taken prisoner and interned in Germany, part of the Greek garrison in Salonika went over to the Allies. Venizelos then raised the standard of rebellion in Crete and from there sailed to Salonika to set up a pro-Allies provisional government. For eight months Greece was split between the Athens government and the Venizelist nationalist movement. The country hovered on the brink of civil war until, on June 10, 1917, the Allies forced the abdication of King Constantine. He was succeeded by his second son. Prince Alexander, and ten days later Venizelos once more became prime minister. By then, 60,000 Greek troops of the Venizelist National Army were fighting beside the Allies in Macedonia. By September 1918, 250,000 Greek troops were engaged in the Allied offensive launched by General Franchet d'Esperey on the Macedonian front, which knocked Bulgaria out of the war. The Bulgarian armistice on September 30 was followed, a month later, by the armistice signed at Mudros between Turkey and the Allies. Greek warships were part of the Allied fleet which sailed up to the Golden Horn. Greek troops shared in the triumphal entry into Constantinople led by General Franchet d'Esperey >riding without reins on a white horse and thus aspiring to lay the spectre of Fatih, the Moslem conqueror of Byzantium, who had done the same=.
Although the victories in Macedonia helped to bring about the collapse of Turkish resistance, the main blows against the Ottoman empire were struck elsewhere. In the first months of the war, the Turks, under Enver Pasha, boldly took the offensive against both the Russians in the Caucasus and the British in Egypt, but were repulsed on both fronts with heavy losses. For the next two years Turkey held the Allies at bay, with notable victories at Gallipoli where Mustafa Kemal, the future Ataturk, first made his reputation in forcing a British and ANZAC withdrawal, and in Mesopotamia, where the British and Indian garrison at Kut was obliged to surrender. The Russian revolution in March 1917 relieved the pressure on Turkey's eastern front from Russian armies in the Caucasus, but the respite was short-lived, the Turks could not redeploy enough forces to meet the growing threat from the British in the south. The Turkish armies were exhausted, food was short and transport ill-organised; reinforcements which should have been available to resist the British were wasted by Enver Pasha's reckless decision to pursue the disintegrating Russian armies into the Caucasus, in the hope of fulfilling his dreams of a new pan-Turkish empire.
In 1917, the British under Maude and Allenby began their offensives northwards through Mesopotamia and Palestine, capturing Baghdad and Jerusalem. The army of the Arab revolt, led by Emir Feisal and Colonel T. E. Lawrence, took Mecca and moved up through the Syrian desert towards Damascus, operating as raiding forces on General Allenby's right wing. After a pause, Allenby resumed his offensive in September 1918 and drove the Turkish army out of Damascus and up to the hills north of Aleppo. The remnants of the Turkish forces under Mustafa Kemal had taken up positions covering what is now Turkey's southern frontier when news came of the fall of the Turkish government, of the flight of Enver and his two closest associates, Talat and Jemal, and of the signature, on a warship off Mudros in the island of Lemnos, of an armistice with the British. The armistice was purely military; it provided for the demobilisation of the Turkish army and for Allied control of all important strategic points, including the Dardanelles. But Constantinople was not to be occupied and the Allies promised not to interfere in Turkish internal affairs, unless the Turks themselves failed to maintain law and order.
The Mudros armistice roused bitter feelings among Turkish nationalists, and Mustafa Kemal at once began secret preparations to resist what he feared to be the impending complete subjugation of Turkey. Bitterness and fear were greatly increased when the Allies came to discuss peace terms for Turkey and, above all, when they authorised the landing of Greek troops at Smyrna in western Anatolia on May 15, 1919. In Constantinople, the sultan dismissed the last representative Ottoman government and dissolved parliament, relying on the Allies to save his throne. But elsewhere in the country, especially in the unoccupied interior of Anatolia where two Turkish armies were still in being, the nationalist resistance movement began to spread and the armistice terms were systematically evaded.
Apparently unaware of the extent of this resistance, or considering European affairs of far greater urgency, the Allies wasted a precious year before getting round to serious discussion of a Turkish peace. They then produced, in the Treaty of Sèvres signed on August 10, 1920, a drastic settlement which would have reduced the former Ottoman empire to a small state in central Anatolia under foreign economic and military control. At the San Remo Conference of April 1920, the Allies had already disposed of the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire. France had been given a mandate over Syria, and Britain mandates over Palestine and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). The Treaty of Sèvres confirmed these provisions and recognised the Arab kingdom of the Hejaz as an independent state.
The Turks had already resigned themselves to the loss of these Arab territories, but the other provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres exceeded their worst expectations. An independent Armenian republic and an autonomous Kurdistan, both intended to be under American mandate, were to be carved out of eastern and southern Anatolia. Almost all Turkey's remaining territory in Europe, apart from Constantinople and a small enclave round it, was to go to Greece, which was also to receive the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, commanding the entrance to the Dardanelles. Worst blow of all to the Turks, the Greeks were to occupy and administer Smyrna and a substantial hinterland in western Anatolia. While Turkey might retain a nominal sovereignty over it, the Smyrna area would be autonomous: it would have its own parliament and the right to decide, by plebiscite after five years, whether or not to unite with Greece. Cyprus was to remain British and the Dodecanese Italian. The latter islands were to be subject to a separate agreement between Greece and Italy about their future. The Straits were to be open to ships of all countries and controlled by an international commission. Turkey's army, reduced to a token force, was to be placed under Allied supervision. The economic carve-up of Turkey was equally drastic. France and Italy were to have large zones of influence; the hated Capitulations -- special concessions to foreign traders - - were to be extended; and the national finances of Turkey supervised by the Allies.
The Treaty of Sèvres was the sum of three factors: 1. The various claims of Britain, France and Italy arising from secret wartime agreements among themselves and with Russia for the partition of the Ottoman empire. 2. The claims of Greece for the fulfilment of promises made to her in return for her participation in the war. 3. President Wilson's concern for the principle of ethnic self-determination in accordance with his Fourteen Points.
For Greece the treaty appeared to be a spectacular victory, vindicating the Venizelos policy of supporting the Allies in the war. With Smyrna and its hinterland, Greece would acquire a large and valuable territory and another 1,720,000 inhabitants, making a total population of 6,540,000, compared with 4,820,000 in 1913 after the Balkan wars and 2,760,000 in 1911. But the great gain was to remain a paper triumph and a prelude to disaster. The treaty left out one other vital factor: how it was to be enforced. This omission was all important, since, in the period following the secret partition agreements, and especially in the twenty-one months following the Mudros armistice, significant changes had taken place in the military and political situation, not only in Turkey, but also among the Allies themselves.
The first unforeseen development was the Russian revolution which had led to Russia's withdrawal from the war and from the making and the enforcement of the peace. This not only removed a serious threat to Turkish national resistance but eventually provided it with positive help in the form of Russian arms and money. An independent Armenia or Kurdistan, without support from Russia - - which was not forthcoming - - had no chance of survival, unless one of the other great powers was prepared to make a heavy long-term military and financial commitment in eastern Anatolia. President Wilson asked Congress to consider an American mandate for the Armenians and the Kurds, despite advice that it would need at least five American divisions to enforce the mandate and to garrison Constantinople. But the president fell ill and his proposal was rejected by the Senate. Marshal Foch estimated that it would require a total of twenty-seven divisions to bring Turkey under complete control and enforce peace terms. Nor were the other Allied powers in any hurry to commit more troops to Turkey when they were all facing mounting pressure from their war-weary populations to bring their troops back home. Indeed, Italy and France, after having tried to establish their claims to zones of influence in southern and southwestern Turkey by force of arms, had come to realise the strength of Turkish nationalist resistance and had already begun to make separate peace arrangements with Mustafa Kemal. Italy was also incensed at the Greek occupation of Smyrna, which she considered should have gone to her under one of the wartime agreements.
The Greek landing at Smyrna, with the ensuing slaughter of civilians and humiliation of Turkish officers by the Greeks, had greatly accelerated the Turkish nationalist movement. Four days after the landings, Mustafa Kemal escaped from Constantinople to eastern Anatolia and assumed the political and military leadership of the nationalists. The British had been forced by growing unrest and the guerrilla activities of the nationalists to withdraw their control officers from their exposed positions in Anatolia. In defiance of both the Allied occupying powers and the sultan's government in Constantinople, the nationalists elected their own parliament in Ankara on April 23, 1920, under the presidency of Kemal. An earlier nationalist congress at Erzerum had already drafted the ANational Pact@ which was to be the basis of Kemal's diplomacy and his political aims. The National Pact called for the restoration of Turkey's frontiers to include all non-Arab Moslem subjects of the former Ottoman empire, and rejected any privileges for non-Turkish minorities.
When the terms of the draft Treaty of Sèvres leaked out in May 1920, the Kemalists gained much popular support in Turkey. Their troops broke through the forces still loyal to the sultan and advanced on Constantinople where the British two months earlier had seized key points and deported a number of leading nationalist parliamentary deputies. To relieve the threat to Constantinople and the Allied positions on the Straits, Venizelos offered to send two of the five Greek divisions in Smyrna to attack the Kemalists, and another division to eastern Thrace. Despite opposition from the British and French military staffs, Venizelos, with the active support of the British prime minister, Lloyd George, persuaded the Allied Supreme Council to authorise a Greek offensive. Lloyd George had consistently backed Greek claims in Asia Minor. He did so partly out of pro-Greek and anti-Turkish sentiment, partly as a means of limiting French and Italian influence in Turkey, and partly because he saw the Greek army as a useful and inexpensive means of enforcing British policy. There was also the consideration that a refusal of Smyrna to Greece might have brought down the Venizelos government in Athens, since Smyrna had been the prize offered to win Greek support for the war. But both Venizelos and Lloyd George greatly underestimated Turkey's power of resistance. They ignored warnings from their military advisers about the difficulty which would be experienced by the Greeks in holding their gains on the Asia Minor coast, let alone subduing, virtually single-handed, the vast Anatolian interior. Admittedly, the civilian optimism at first seemed to be justified. In the summer of 1920, the Greeks occupied Thrace and advanced all along the line in Anatolia, and the Turkish nationalists withdrew on to the Anatolian plateau. On August 10, the sultan's government signed the Treaty of Sèvres, and Venizelos returned to Athens in triumph. But within a few months be was out of office. Within two years his dream of a greater Greece on both sides of the Aegean was utterly shattered.
The death of King Alexander of Greece, from a pet monkey's bite, brought up the question of royal succession. It revived old accusations that Venizelos had been imposed on Greece by foreign bayonets when the former king, Constantine, had been forced by the Allies to abdicate. The Greek prime minister had also lost touch with the home political scene in his preoccupation with international diplomacy. In an election fought on November 14, 1920, on the issue, 'Constantine versus Venizelos', he was heavily defeated. Venizelos resigned and left Greece. Within three weeks of the election, the Greeks voted in plebiscite by a large majority to recall Constantine to the throne.
The Greek army in Asia Minor had meanwhile resumed the offensive and continued its advance towards the railway line running from north to south between Eskishehir and Afyon Karahissar. But, as a result of pressure from the French and Italians, the Allied Supreme Council stopped the Greek advance, leaving the Greeks holding a dangerously extended and vulnerable line. The fall of Venizelos and the return of Constantine gave France and Italy an opportunity to wash their hands of what now began to look like a rash Greek adventure in Anatolia. But Lloyd George still believed that the Treaty of Sèvres was enforceable and encouraged the Greeks to carry out the enforcement. Greece faced a difficult choice. To hold her position in Asia Minor against the Kemalist challenge she needed a large army of her own and substantial Allied support. A withdrawal of Greek forces would mean exposing the now heavily compromised Greek population of Asia Minor to possible massacre by the Turks. In the winter of 1920, during their campaign in eastern Anatolia to crush the attempt to create a separate Armenian state, the Kemalists had massacred Armenians wholesale, thus proving - - though the details were not known in Europe until more than a year later - - that they were quite as ruthless as previous Turkish governments. Possibly overestimating the amount of military support they could expect from Britain in a crisis, the Greeks decided to try to improve their position by a new spring offensive.
But before the offensive began, the Allies made a new attempt at a peace settlement at the London Conference in February 1921. The conference was attended by Turkish delegations from both the Ottoman and the Kemalist governments. The Allies proposed a revision of the Treaty of Sèvres which would have made concessions to Turkey on the questions of the Straits, Constantinople, Armenia and Kurdistan. They also proposed an international enquiry into the ethnic statistics of eastern Thrace and the Smyrna region: a proposal accepted conditionally by the Turks but rejected by the Greeks. (Greece claimed that there were Greek or non-Turkish majorities in these areas. Arnold Toynbee, then in the Smyrna region, formed the impression that there was a clear Turkish majority there.) The Allies then suggested >an equitable compromise= for the Smyrna region, based on Greek autonomy. This was rejected by the Turks. The conference ended without agreement. On March 23, 1921, the Greeks began their offensive. They aimed at capturing Eskishehir, Afyon Karahissar and other key points on the railway, their ultimate objective being an advance on Ankara. But they were repulsed with heavy losses before Eskishehir, at Inönü, where the Turkish commander, Ismet Pasha, earned his present name. The Allies, including Britain, declared their neutrality in this conflict outside their zones of occupation in the Straits. This confirmed the character of the struggle as an isolated war between Greeks and Turks: a war of extermination, fought with the bitterness of those who feel their national existence is at stake. The Greek general staff and army command, diluted by political appointments of loyal royalists, were inexperienced and absurdly over-confident. Although the Greek forces were about equal in strength to Kemal's regular forces, they were badly equipped and short of munitions. Greece had 300,000 men under arms but no money in her treasury. In June 1921, the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, offered to try again to negotiate a peace settlement but the Greeks rejected the offer.
On June 11, King Constantine and his prime minister, Gounaris, left Athens for Smyrna, and four days later there began >the grea-*test*-('") campaign undertaken by Greece since classic times=. The new Greek offensive was at first successful. Afyon and Eskishehir were captured and the Kemalists forced to carry out a strategic withdrawal to the line of the Sakarya river, a hundred miles to the east and only fifty miles west of Ankara. The Greek commander-in-chief, General Papoulas, wanted to halt the advance at Eskishehir, but Theotokis, prime minister and minister of war, with the acquiescence of the king, insisted on pursuing the Turks in the hope of driving Kemal out of his political base in Ankara. The Greek army resumed its advance on August 13, 1921. After ten days' march across the hot, dusty Anatolian plateau, with little food or water, the exhausted Greeks launched an attack on the strong defensive positions held by the Kemalists in the loop of the Sakarya river. The battle was fought with immense courage and heavy casualties on both sides. It lasted for twenty-two days and nightsCthe longest pitched battle in history, according to Mustafa Kemal. Having gained only ten miles in ten days of fighting, the Greeks were finally forced to retreat back across the plateau to the line of Afyon and Eskishehir.
The Greek government now sought Allied help to save it from the dangerous situation into which its political ambitions and military recklessness had drawn Greece. But by this time there was no 'common policy discernible among the Allies. One of the first fruits of the Kemalist victory was the signature of what was to all intents and purposes a separate peace treaty between France and the Ankara government. Under the Franklin Bouillon Agreement of October 20, 1921, France withdrew its forces from Cilicia in southern Turkey, though keeping the port of Alexandretta and the surrounding province of the Hatay within her Syrian mandate, and gave the Kemalists large quantities of arms and ammunition. Kemal was also able to buy arms from Italy with money from Russia and from the contributions of Moslems in India. France at first refused to take part in a meeting of the Allied foreign ministers to discuss new terms for a peace treaty with Turkey; but eventually, on the insistence of Lord Curzon, a conference met in Paris on March 22, 1922. Curzon, Conservative foreign secretary in Lloyd George's coalition government, proposed an armistice to be followed by peace talks which would provide for the Greek evacuation of Anatolia. The conference broke down when the Turks declared that the Greek evacuation must come before the armistice. In the meantime, the Greeks continued to hold on to a front three hundred miles long, and a new government in Athens, instead of preparing for a withdrawal, appointed a new commander-in-chief. General Hadjanestis and, in July, proclaimed the independence of the Smyrna vilayet.
The catastrophe in this Greek tragedy was approaching. In a surprise attack at sunrise on August 26, 1922, the Kemalists broke through the southern flank of the Greek front, surrounded and destroyed half the Greek army and drove the rest headlong back to Smyrna and the coast. In Smyrna harbour lay the yacht from which the Greek commander-in- chief. General Hadjanestis, incompetent and almost insane, had directed the fatal battle. In their retreat the Greeks left a trail of burned towns and villages and massacred Turkish civilians; 40,000 Greek troops escaped from Smyrna in Greek warships, leaving another 50,000 as Turkish prisoners. When the Turks entered Smyrna on September 9, 1922, the city was packed with refugees. The Turks began to deport all able-bodied Christian men to the interior, killing Greeks and Armenians and looting and setting fire to their houses. The flames from the burning houses spread into a great fire, destroying most of the city and driving thousands of people into the sea.
After Smyrna, the next Turkish objective was to recover control of Constantinople and of the area of eastern Thrace, including Adrianople, which was still in Greek hands. But when the Kemalists advanced towards the Allied neutral zone round Constantinople, they were stopped by the British at Chanak on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles. A minor international crisis ensued with a threat of renewed war between Britain and Turkey. France and Italy advocated a peace conference with Kemal and withdrew their support from Britain when the British government sent a division of troops to reinforce the Chanak garrison. A compromise was reached by which, pending the organisation of a peace conference, the Turks would occupy eastern Thrace together with an Allied detachment. The Greek population of eastern Thrace began to move out to Greece and preparations were put in hand for a peace conference at Lausanne.
In Constantinople, the Kemalists gradually took over power, leaving the sultan isolated. Kemal then proposed, and the Ankara Assembly accepted, the abolition of the sultanate but leaving the caliphate still in being. On November 4, 1922, the Kemalists formally took over from the Ottoman government in Constantinople. The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI Vahdettin, was smuggled out of the city on a British warship into a comfortable exile on the Italian Riviera.
The sultan's government was not the only victim of the Anatolian debacle. In Greece, a military revolution under General Plastiras had overthrown the government, tried and shot General Hadjanestis, Gounaris and four other ministers and sent King Constantine once more into exile. The revolutionists asked Venizelos to return to Athens, but he replied that he had finally retired from public life. He agreed, however, to represent Greece at the Lausanne Conference. Lloyd George's Near Eastern policy was in ruins and the Chanak crisis finally brought him down. He was replaced as prime minister by the Conservative, leader, Bonar Law, who had declared in a letter to The Times: >we cannot act alone as the policeman of the world=.
In the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 24, 1923, Greece renounced all claims to Asia Minor and to eastern Thrace beyond the Maritza river. Her only territorial gain was a small area of western Thrace. Turkey thus secured frontiers consistent with the principles of the National Pact: that is, frontiers embracing all - - or almost all - - non-Arab Moslem subjects of the former Ottoman empire. She kept possession of the Straits, but formally agreed to their being demilitarised, and to the establishment of an international commission to ensure freedom of passage for ships of all nations. Greece's sovereignty over the Aegean Islands, save for Tenedos and Imbros, was confirmed, but she had to agree not to put naval bases or fortifications on the islands of Mitylene, Chios, Samos and Nikaria. Turkey recognised British sovereignty over Cyprus, and the Dodecanese remained under Italy.
Greece and Turkey also agreed at Lausanne to a gigantic and unprecedented barter of populations'. Before the Anatolian war there had been over 2,000,000 Greeks and about 600,000 Armenians left in Asia Minor. Several hundred thousand had subsequently lost their lives and another million or more Greeks had fled as refugees to Greece. Most of the refugees were old men, women and children, since many of the younger men had either fought in the war or had been deported, into the interior of Anatolia by the Turks. Greece asked that these refugees be returned to their former homes but the Turks refused to have them back; so Greece demanded the compulsory emigration of 1,400,000 Moslems from Greece, chiefly from Macedonia, to make room for the Greek refugees returning to Greece. The Turks, who needed people, accepted the deal although they claimed that 1,500,000 Moslems had disappeared from the Greek-occupied areas of Asia Minor as a result of massacre or deportations. The only Greek and Turkish minorities on either side who were not compelled to move were approximately 100,000 Greeks who had stayed in Constantinople and in the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, and some 124,000 Moslem Turks of Western Thrace. These minorities were guaranteed equality as citizens and the right to use their own language and their own educational and religious institutions. But otherwise all special communal arrangements such as had existed under the Ottoman empire were abolished together with the Capitulations. Under pressure from European and American opinion, Turkey dropped a proposal to remove the Orthodox patriarchate from Istanbul, but it was agreed that the patriarchate should be a purely spiritual and ecclesiastical institution, with no political or administrative role.
The departure of the Greeks from Asia Minor ended a long historic association for both the Greeks and Turks. Anatolia was the main reservoir of power for both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. >It was the birthplace of the Modern Greek people and the backbone of the medieval Greek State.= After the Ottoman conquest most of the unconverted Christians in Anatolia adopted Turkish as their language, which they wrote in Greek script. Similarly, many of the Moslems in Greece spoke only Greek and wrote it in the Turco-Arabic script. So what took place was not an exchange of Greeks and Turks, but rather an exchange of Greek Orthodox Christians and Ottoman Muslims. A Western observer, accustomed to a different system of social and national classifications, might conclude that this was no repatriation at all but two deportations into exile - - of Christian Turks to Greece, and of Muslim Greeks to Turkey,
Six weeks after the signature of the Lausanne Treaty, the Allies withdrew from Constantinople. Mustafa Kemal, recognising that Anatolia had now become the backbone of the modem Turkish republic, decided to make his capital at Ankara. So ended what a Greek writer has described as the second part of the struggle for the Ottoman succession. The first part was the Balkan war of liberation to free the homeland of the Greeks, the Serbs and the Bulgars. The second part was the struggle for territories with mixed populations, such as Macedonia, Thrace and finally Asia Minor. This struggle began in 1912 with the Balkan League against Turkey, and ended with the Greek disaster in Anatolia in 1922.
Or so it seemed. But in the Near East, history has a habit of lingering on. Scarcely noticed in the turmoil of war and the making of the peace was another territory with mixed population where the struggle between Greek and Turk had not been settled: Cyprus.
It was that paragraph towards the end re the ethnicity and language of the refugees that I’m very iffy about. I just don’t think it was an accurate summation to assume that all the Greek/Christian refugees spoke Turkish, and all the Turkish/Muslim refugees spoke Greek.
ASFAIK the only Greek-speaking Muslims in Greece 1923 were the Vallahades in Macedonia, whom only numbered 20,000, and I think most the 36,000 Cretan Muslims (I need someone to confirm this btw). And this was from a total of 400,000 Turks/Muslims.
I do know that some Greeks in Anatolia did convert to Islam to prevent being deported. What numbers there were I’m honestly not sure about. It might have only been in the thousands rather than the tens of thousands. But admittingly I’m just guessing here.
Also, keep in mind most of the Turks/Muslims in Greek Macedonia at the time resided in the central and eastern part of the province, where right up to the end of Ottoman rule was a heavily mixed region of the Empire. So it just can’t be assumed most of them were once or spoke Greek.
And I’ve never come across any reference to the Greek language being written in the Arab script. If there was it will be interesting to learn more about.
True, I know very little about the Arabic script. An Arab once explained to me that spoken and written Arabic differ. That’s because the latter’s language is a common standardized form used across the Arab-speaking world, rather than ever evolving to reflect the various Arabic dialects spoken in the different countries. So unlike the Greek and Roman alphabets, which are phonetic, and thus easily adoptable, Arabic script is read along similar lines to Chinese characters. At least that's how I understand it.
Therefore, it would have been unpractical for Greek Muslims to invent their own version you'd think. Apart from his westernization policies, I read that Ataturk adopting the Roman alphabet also helped improve literacy in Turkey. So it further confirms this for me. But you just have to look at the Bosnian and Albanian Muslims, from what I know neither ever adopted the Arabic script for their languages.
Re the Turkish-speaking Christians, the vast majority spoke Greek ASFAIK. The only community that stands out as being was unique to writing Turkish using the Greek alphabet, were the Karamanlides of Cappadocia. They numbered around 60,000. But at the same time there were also other Greek-speaking communities there as well.
There probably would have been other Turcophone Greeks, but those from Ionia, Bithynia and Pontus, the main clusters of Hellenes in Anatolia,would have been Greek-speaking for the larger part.
Of course religion did determine ethnicity in 1923, but most likely would extended to personal national conscience anyway.
What I think the author tried to do with his conclusion was highlight a sense of tragic romanticism re the movement of so many people from lands they would have been living on for centuries, victims caught up between war, modern nationalism and shifting borders, and so on. So he avoided some obvious facts to that affect, and thus what he wrote on that subject was not very accurate IMGO.
But taking that part of article in hindsight the question is are we the same people? It’s a grey area, isn’t it? If you read it carefully it’s one that will suit the Greeks more than the Turks.
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Well, we know that the population exchange was done based on religion and not ethnicity, so the question to look into is, to what extent religious boundaries coincided with “kinship”. I guess this is the point you say you feel iffy about.
I must admit that my knowledge about this is even more anecdotal. Through my interest in rebetika, I know that many Christian musicians from Smyrna couldn’t speak Greek, & they kept recording in Turkish after they left Anatolia, both in Greece & in the USA. I would think of “Turkish” naturally as a linguistic category than one based on ethnicity (I would consider “Greek” to be similar, but I’m not going to push any opinion on this, you make up your own mind about that), so I keep wondering whether these singers should be called Turkish or Greek. Only thing I can think of at the end, is that they are “how they defined themselves”, and that’s it.
I’d also consider “race” more of a social issue rather than one of true kinship, thus anything could be possible, so there’s no data I could see that would really surprise me on this matter. I personally thought Turks would share more “kinship” with Armenians than Greeks, but again, I don’t know. It’s an interesting point to look into both linguistically and genetically.
One question for you: I often wonder about the –oglou (son of) suffix in Greek surnames. Is this just etymological exchange, or could they be a partial link to the kinship we are talking about [post-population exchange]? What do you think?
About Arabic: I started learning but couldn’t follow through with it. It’s an incredibly interesting and rich language. You can make the meaning of the word stronger (derive “adore” from “love” for example, although this example might not be on the mark) just by emphasizing the dominant letter in the word further. It seems to transfer the organic relationships among “concepts” to the words that symbolize them, which I find really interesting. I guess Hebrew must be similar in this sense.
Anyway, re the script, in fact, you can write almost any language in the Arabic script, and it’s pretty practical. Especially for personal writing and taking notes, Arabic script (1) helps you write faster ‘cause you don’t write most of the vowels [though this comes with its own problems, of course], and (2) it’s perfectly fit for handwriting. I know people who used to take their class notes (Turkish) in the Arabic script most of the time, and some journalists who did the same. I would easily dismiss claims that changing the alphabet alone helped improve the literacy rate, though this idea is thrown out often to give more credence to the alphabet revolution.
I always thought that there is a sense of “tragic romanticism” in the population exchange, so it’s fine by me really. I’ve heard of towns in Western Anatolia, whose only doctor, only vet, and pretty much all such craftspeople were Greek, so the remaining Turkish folk, who did mostly agriculture, didn’t know what to do with themselves after the Greeks were gone. Anyway, the personal side of this event strikes me more than anything else about it, I should say.
Finally, about your last sentence, I don’t know why it would suit the Greeks more than Turks. It is possible to pick any related information and twist it to fit Turks as well. These things mostly depend on the intent of the interpreter, really.