Born in Crete, the
later premier of Greece Eleutherios
Venizelos, was to play a
prominent part in the Cretan insurrection of 1896-97.
The Greek population of
western Anatolia and the Black Sea littoral (the Pontus) however, numbered
around two million on the eve of the First World War. And while their
communities were very ancient; they continued to thrive in the modern world, as
any visitor to the busy waterfront of Smyrna could see.
Then in October 1915
the German military attache reported to Berlin that Enver wanted 'to solve the Greek problem during the war in
the same way that he believes he solved the Armenian problem'. The process
began in Thrace.
To the appalled
George Horton later, who desperately tried to buy a few Greeks and Armenians
safe passage with his own money, the destruction of Smyrna was 'but the closing
act in a consistent programme of exterminating
Christianity throughout the length and breadth of the old Byzantine Empire; the
expatriation of an ancient Christian civilization'. The idea persists that
religion was the principal motivation for what happened. Yet the emergent
Turkish republic was not an Islamic state; on the contrary, Kemal would later
introduce the separation of religion and state and abort moves towards
parliamentary democracy precisely in order to stop a nascent Islamist
opposition from reversing this. In reality, what happened between 1915 and 1922
was more ethnic cleansing than holy war. As Horton himself noted bitterly: 'The
problem of the minorities is here solved for all time.' The New York Times
detected the sexual dimension of Turkish policy, reporting that 'the Turks
frankly do not understand why they should not get rid of the Greeks and
Armenians from their country and take their women into their harems if they are
sufficiently good looking.' Kemal saw no need to massacre all the Greeks in
Smyrna, though a substantial number of able-bodied men were marched inland, suffering
assaults by Turkish villagers along the way. He merely gave the Greek
government until October I to evacuate them all. By the end of 1923 more than
1.2 million Greeks and 100,000 Armenians had been forced from their ancestral
homes. The Greeks responded in kind. In 1915 some 60 per cent of the population
of Western Thrace had been Muslims and 29 per cent of the population of
Macedonia. By 1924 the figures had plunged to 28 per cent and zero per cent,
their places taken by Greeks.
The Armenian genocide,
the massacres of the Pontic Greeks and the agreed 'exchanges' of Greek and
Turkish populations after the sack of Smyrna illustrated with a terrible
clarity the truth of the Archbishop of Aleppo's warning: when a multi-ethnic
empire mutated into a nation state, the result could only be carnage. It was as
if, for the sake of a spuriously modern uniformity, the basest instincts of
ordinary men were unleashed in a kind of tribal bloodletting. There was
certainly no meaningful economic rationale for what happened. Along the
Anatolian coast it is still possible to find ruined villages whose inhabitants
were forced to flee in 1922 but which were never subsequently reoccupied.
As British imperial
power faded after World War II, and Cyprus moved toward self-rule, the island
celebrated by visitors for its scenery, its lemons and oranges, and its
Mediterranean way of life became known for conflict between its Greek and
Turkish residents. This was the final and long-delayed struggle for power
between Greeks and Turks in a former Ottoman territory.
Already during the
1950’s the slogan of the day for Greek Cypriots was enosis, or union with the
Greek state.
In 1959 however,
negotiations between Greece and Turkey in Zurich, was neither enosis nor
partition, but an experiment in power-sharing between Greeks and Turks in an
independent state created in 1960. Greeks elected the president, Archbishop
Makarios, Turks the vice president, and the two communities divided up posts in
the cabinet, civil service, and military according to quotas.
After myriad
disputes, renewed fighting began on December 21, 1963, and intensified over the
following days. Greek Cypriot fighters, led by Nikos Sampson, attacked Turkish
Cypriots and expelled them from their homes in Omorphita,
a Nicosia suburb. Neither community was swept off the island, but in many
locales, civilians-most often Turks-fled their homes. On the other side of the
ethnic divide, Greek Cypriots did not emerge unscathed. Where Turks moved in,
they moved out, and the island became ever more clearly delineated into
distinct Greek and Turkish zones.
Some of the Greek
victims of the violence on Cyprus did not live on the island at all but far
away in Istanbul. Demonstrations in Turkey soon devolved into anti-Greek riots,
including a virtual pogrom on the night of September 6, 1955, with the massive
destruction of Greek houses and businesses. In 1964 Istanbul's dwindling
population of Greeks again suffered a backlash after violence on Cyprus: Turkey
revoked the right, based on a 1930 convention, for some ten thousand Greeks not
holding Turkish passports to remain in the country. By September 1965 more than
six thousand Greeks, their property seized, had been deported.
The chief symbol of
the new Cyprus was the so-called Green Line that divided the island's largest
city, Nicosia. Named for the color of the pen used to draw a line on the city's
map, the concept for the Green Line dated back to talks in late December 1963
at which British authorities tried to restore peace to Nicosia. Not a single
wall as in Berlin but a mixed barrier of sandbags, emptied streets, blocked off
houses, sides of buildings, barbed wire, and even oil drums, this neutral zone
running through Nicosia and neighboring suburbs became a permanent landmark where
United Nations peacekeepers separated Greek and Turkish Cypriot lines.
The end to the Cyprus
crisis in 1964 briefly stemmed terror, but in 1967 a military coup in Greece,
in which a group of colonels seized control of the Greek government, prompted a
new round of violence. The campaign for enosis was now firmly identified with
the Cypriot allies of the military junta in power in Greece. The colonels in
Athens provided Greek Cypriots with a new chance to attack until November 1967
when Turkey threatened military intervention.
In 1971 a new
breakaway wing of EOKA, dubbed EOKA-B was founded to targeted figures in the
Cypriot government led by Archbishop Makarios. Makarios had grown more cautious
and recognized that enosis might not be feasible, at least not under current
conditions. Certainly it was not worth another war, or, as one Greek Cypriot
government official said, "The idea of enosis is a feeling, it's nothing
more than that. Everybody believes it cannot be achieved." In an open
letter to the Greek president, Makarios accused Greece of seeking to abolish
the state of Cyprus and supporting EOKA-B. (New York Times, July 16, 1974.)
A coup of July 15,
1974, dislodged Makarios, replacing him with Nikos Sampson, a stunning choice
given Turkey's past record of threatening to intervene in Cyprus during times
of crisis. Few, if any, other presidents could have so dismayed and angered
Turkish Cypriots and Turkey. Sampson, a newspaper publisher, was best known for
his killing of British soldiers during the uprising of the late 1950s and of
Turkish Cypriots in 1963. Sampson was president for less than a week, just long
enough to hold a press conference and see Turkey invade Cyprus. On July 20
Turkish forces landed on the island's north coast and pushed south toward
Nicosia. Forced to concede that they could not defend Cyprus, the Greek
government of the colonels now generals-collapsed.
Outside the initial
Turkish zone of occupation, Greek Cypriot forces blockaded and carried out the
ethnic cleansing of Turkish Cypriots. One EOKA-B fighter from the village of Argaki in northwestern Cyprus, recounting an attack on a
neighboring Turkish village, told how he "just went berserk" after
one of his comrades was shot. "I burst into a house. There were six or
seven people inside and a child. I swung the machine-gun and mowed them down.
All seven. Afterwards I noticed the child." Turkish Cypriots decided they
could no longer live next to Greek Cypriots. Refugees crammed into towns and
villages still under Turkish Cypriot control.
In August the balance
of power on Cyprus shifted again, and so too did much of the island's
population. Almost as soon as negotiations in Geneva collapsed on August 13,
hundreds of Greeks, fearing a new Turkish attack, began to flee Nicosia. Sure
enough, Turkish forces launched a second offensive on August 14 during which
they quickly seized just under 40 percent of the island in a drive that
culminated with the capture of Famagusta. Turkish victory brought the ethnic
cleansing of many Greek Cypriots. When Turkish forces approached, Greeks fled.
As investigators for a U.S. Senate subcommittee discovered, "People moved
the instant they saw or thought the Turkish army was advancing towards their
town or village. And they moved instantly .... " Fear was the chief cause
of flight. "The stories of rough and sometimes brutal treatment of
civilians by Turkish forces in Kyrenia, after the
first phase of the invasion, had spread over the island like wildfire." In
this state of terror it took only a rumor for civilians to flee. That was the
case, for example, for the Greek Cypriots of Argaki.
As one refugee explained, "We'd heard what the Turks had done before
[during the July invasionn, how they'd dishonored
women, raped, murdered.""4 These stories reinforced old images of
Turks as enemies bent on Greek destruction. Then there was the bombing of the
village to send Argaki's Greeks on their way. Some
150,000 to 200,000 Greek Cypriots fled northern Cyprus. Within days, between
30,000 and 40,000 crammed into a small town on the territory of the British
Dhekelia base in southeastern Cyprus. Refugees lined the roads of southern
Cyprus. As the U.S. Senate subcommittee study mission observed, "To drive
along the roads of southern Cyprus, is to drive through an endless refugee
camp." (New York Times, August 19, 1974.)
The mass flight
triggered by the coup and the Turkish invasion of 1974 made Cyprus an island
divided. The Green Line now extended out from Nicosia until it stretched for
112 miles across the entire island. This new internal boundary made Cyprus a
Germany in the Mediterranean, long after the 1989 dismantling of the Berlin
Wall, though in April 2003 the Green Line was finally opened to travel in the
Turkish Cypriot north. To the south of the 112-milelong line lies the Cyprus of
the Greeks, or what remains of the Republic of Cyprus; to the north is the
Cyprus of the Turks, since 1983 a Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus that
lacks international recognition.
Already in the 18th
Century, there was a failed rebellion by the Greeks against their Turkish
masters, but the movement for independence only really came about in the 19th
Century. The traditional date for the start of the War of Independence is 25
March, 1821. On this day, Bishop Germanos of Patra
raised a Greek flag at the Monastery of Ayia Lavra in
the Peloponnese and called upon the Greeks to rise up against the Turks. This
marked the beginning of the war, and there was plenty of fighting. The rebel
peasants were ruthless, killing any Muslims they came across whether they were
armed or not. Within a few weeks they had slaughtered an estimated 20,000
Muslims. The Turkish response was to blame it all on Patriarch Gregorios V. He was not only the leader of the Greek Church
but also represented the nearest thing to a ruler of the Greeks. So they hanged
him.
This was not enough
to stop the fighting, though, and gradually, more and more of Greece came under
control of the rebels. They were aided in this by the allied support of the
British, French and Russians, who weren't officially at war with the Turks but
were not far off it; they applied political pressure to try and force the Turks
to give the Greeks their freedom.
In one bizarre
incident, on 20 October, 1827, virtually the entire Turkish navy was stationed
in Navarino Bay, a huge natural safe harbour on the
west coast of the Peloponnese. The allied navy sailed into the bay in an effort
to show the Turks what they would be up against should they go to war. There
was no intention of attacking. But the Turks opened fire, and in the ensuing
mayhem, the allies destroyed 58 of the 87 Turkish ships, with a loss of only a
few ships of their own.
Eventually on 3
February, 1830, the London Protocol was signed in which the allies recognised Greece as an independent state. This meant that
the Turks would have to fight the allies to pursue their claim to sovereignty
over Greece.
Things were not plain
sailing for the new country. The allies provided a Bavarian prince, Otto von
Wittelsbach, as the first king of Greece. He initially set up court in Nafplio, but a year later moved to Athens, at the time
reduced to a small farming village at the base of the Acropolis; with the
arrival of the king, Athens became the capital and has never looked back since.
Not everyone liked the
new king, and there were frequent risings against him. Otto resigned after
about 30 years and was replaced by a Danish prince, William of
Sonderburg-Gl¨¹cksburg, who became King George I. Relations with the 'allies'
wasn't all roses either, as Europe was in turmoil. In the 1850s, the British
and the French went to war with the Russians in the Crimea, and Greece
supported the Russian side, leading to blockades on Greek ports.
By the time of the
First World War, Greece had gained most of the territory it now possesses, with
the exception of the Dodecanese Islands which were held by Italy. Greece
supported the Austro-Hungarian / German alliance in the war and was occupied by
the Allied forces. After the war, the Greeks decided it was time to get back
some more land from the Turks. They went to war with them and lost.
The war ended with
the Treaty of Lausanne which allowed an 'exchange of population'. Basically,
the Turks rounded up everyone in Turkey who was of the Greek Orthodox religion
and said that they were Greek; they were kicked out of their homes and shipped
to Greece, arriving in Piraeus, the port of Athens. Here they lived in a giant
shanty town, bringing much of Turkish culture with them, including the Turkish
bouzouki, now the mainstay of Greek 'traditional' music. More than a million
people from Turkey arrived in Piraeus, some having fled of their own choice.
At the same time, the
Greeks decided that anybody of the Muslim religion couldn't possibly be Greek,
so they must be Turkish. About 400,000 such people were thrown out of their
homes and sent off to Turkey. Greece is littered with mosques which, without
any Muslims to use them, have been converted into museums.
From 1924 - 1935, the
Greeks also did without a king, declaring a republic, but they restored the
king in 1935. But clashes between ultra-right-wing and ulta-left-wing
groups led to much unrest. The king was hardly back on his throne when the
prime minister, General Metaxas, carried out a coup d'¨¦tat and seized control,
establishing a dictatorship.
Metaxas was in favour of siding with the British in World War II. On 28
October, 1940, when Italian dictator Mussolini demanded that Greece should
allow Axis powers to occupy strategic defense locations within Greece, he
refused; 28 October is still celebrated as a public holiday in Greece, known as
Okhi Day (literally 'No Day'). As a consequence of
the refusal, Italy invaded parts of Greece, and later Germany conquered the
whole of the country. The king fled to Egypt.
Metaxas died suddenly
during the war. After the war, the stage was set once again for clashes between
the forces of the conservative Greek government and the communists. This
degenerated into a bloody civil war which lasted until 1949. It is estimated that
100,000 people were killed and another 700,000 left homeless by this war. The
final victory in the war was to the government forces.
As for Cyprus, the
more recent situation for example on 13 June 2006, following the suggestion
that Turkey would “open up to
Cyprus” was that Cypriot
newspapers where upbeat about the deal reached in Luxembourg on Monday on
Turkey's EU bid, believing Cyprus' interests have been safeguarded. Whereby in contrast,
Turkish papers perceived the wrangle as the beginning of a long and difficult
journey that remains fraught with pitfalls for Ankara in its bid to join the
EU.
For updates
click homepage here