by Kemal Bölge
Warships and landing craft at the port of Izmir
On the morning of 15 May 1919, dark clouds gathered over the sky of the port city of Izmir. Under the escort of warships from Great Britain, France, the USA and Italy, 12,000 soldiers of the Greek occupation army landed at the port of the western Turkish commercial metropolis. The landing craft contained not only Greek soldiers, but also British, French and American units.
The Greek inhabitants of Izmir in particular had come out to welcome the Greek force. The former Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Izmir, Chrysostomos Kalafatis, who was known for his hostility towards Turks, addressed a flag-waving crowd in front of the Greek soldiers. He said, “Be welcome! O conquerors of Anatolia! When you set foot on Smyrna with your sacred combat boots, the three-thousand-year longing of the Greek people came to an end.” [1]
What the enterprising Chrysostomos uttered with this sentence had traumatic consequences for the Turkish Muslim population that continue to this day. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War and the Mudros Armistice Agreement on October 30, 1918,[2] the occupation of Izmir was a signal for the invasion of Western Anatolia, in which the Greek army burned down entire regions, towns and villages and carried out ethnic cleansing through widespread massacres of the Turkish Muslim civilian population.
As early as November 13, 1918, warships of the victors of the First World War had occupied the former capital Istanbul. In the written testimonies of Turkish Muslim civilians who had survived massacres by Greek irregulars and regular troops in the 19th and 20th centuries, the term “Yunan or Rum Mezalimi” (“Greek atrocities”) is often found. In Turkish and Azerbaijani historiography, the term mezalim has become established as a technical term for mass violent crimes against the Muslim civilian population.
Inconsistencies in the population figures of Greeks in Izmir
In February 1919, the British Prime Minister and philhellene David Lloyd George[3] had proposed to the Allies that Izmir be occupied by the Greeks, which was initially rejected by US President Woodrow Wilson.[4 ] It was the British prime minister in particular who put pressure on the American president to give his consent to the occupation. In order to legitimize the occupation of Izmir, the Greek prime minister Venizelos presented the Allies at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 with exaggerated figures on the demographic development of the population of Greek origin in Izmir. The Greek delegation relied on figures provided by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul[5].
The inconsistencies in the population figures of Izmir were also noticed by an Italian journalist, Ernesto Vassalo, who had been staying there since April 1919 and published his impressions in the Italian daily newspaper “Il Tempo”. The historian Mevlüt Çelebi points out the inconsistency of the Greek statistics in his essay“The Occupation of Izmir from the Pen of an Italian Journalist” (title of the Turkish source text: “Bir İtalyan Gazetecinin Kaleminden İzmir’in İşgali”) in the Journal of Modern Turkish History Studies.
According to Greek data, Izmir had a total population of 416,494, of which 243,879 were Greeks, 96,250 Turks and the remaining 76,365 were Jews, Armenians and other ethnic groups. Because of his doubts about the accuracy of the Greek statistics, Vassalo contrasted them with the Turkish statistics.
According to a Turkish census of 1917, Izmir had a total population of 238,179. Of these, 111,486 were Muslims, 87,497 Greeks, 24,403 Jews, 12,857 Armenians and the remaining 1,936 Catholics and Protestants. Vassalo also doubted the accuracy of the Turkish statistics. In his opinion, Turkish inhabitants were in the majority in Izmir. According to Vassalo’s information, in the then province of Aydın, Turks formed the majority of the population compared to the Greeks, which Greek statistics would also confirm. The Italian journalist calculated a population of 586,000 Greeks and 827,000 Turks in the province of Aydın.[6]
Turkish statistics show 1,293,000 Turkish and 234,000 Greek inhabitants for the entire province. The economist and statistician Servet Mutlu gives the population figures of the Izmir sandshak (including the city of Izmir) in 1914 as follows: 378,883 Muslims, 214,686 Greeks, 14,273 Armenians and others 32,915. The Greek historian George Soteriadis, in his book “An Ethnological Map Illustrating Hellenism in the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor” published in 1918, identified 219,494 Muslims, 449,044 Greeks, 11,395 Armenians and 74,113 others in the Izmir Sandjak.
According to Erkan Serçe, the Ottoman population statistics of 1914 showed a population of 639,657 for the Izmir Sandjak, while the French-language company Annuaire Oriental Limited assumes a population of 500,000. Serçe also points to the differences in the various population groups, where there are discrepancies. Official Ottoman population statistics give the Muslim Turkish population of the Izmir sandshak as 378,894 and the number of Greek residents as 217,686. Annuire Oriental counted 120,000 Turkish Muslim civilians and 320,000 Greek residents. The US consulate in Izmir estimated the total population of Izmir at 400,000, of which 165,000 were Turks and 155,000 Greeks. According to Erkan Serçe, 40,000 of the 155,000 Greeks in Izmir had Greek citizenship (Serçe, p. 163).
Behind Ernesto Vassalo’s scepticism about Greek statistics lay Italian political and economic interests in Anatolia. The journalist was in Izmir on behalf of the Italian government, because Italy itself intended to occupy Izmir and the surrounding region. When Italy went to war alongside Britain and France during the First World War, two secret treaties that Rome signed with the Allies on 26 April, 1915 (London) and on 8 August, 1917 (San Giovanni di Moriana) agreed to occupy the present-day Croatian city of Rijeka and the Turkish city of Izmir after the end of the war.
This was at least promised by London and Paris (Çelebi p. 132), but after the American-British-French agreement on the Greek occupation of Izmir, Italy could not implement its plans and left the Versailles Conference in protest. The Allies hoped that this move would limit to some extent Italy’s territorial gains in the occupation of Anatolia. The Greek-born population of Anatolia lived mainly in the coastal areas, especially in Izmir. During the First World War, Greeks living in the coastal areas and in Izmir were relocated inland by the authorities as a precautionary measure. After the signing of the Mudros Agreement, the native Greeks returned to their settlement areas on the coast.
Greek irredentism and the plan for the settlement of Western Anatolia
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the ideology of Greek nationalism propagated the “Megali Idea” (The Great Idea), which envisaged the unification of all territories settled by Greeks; this is referred to as “Greek irredentism”. This plan envisaged the occupation of parts of Anatolia at the expense of the former Ottoman Empire. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the Greek government under Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who was considered the“greatest advocate” of the irredentist plan at the beginning of the 20th century, saw the opportunity to realize the Megali Idea. With the realization of the Megali Idea, the old “Byzantium” was to be resurrected, Asia Minor was to be Hellenised and Turkish rule over the Balkans and in Anatolia was to be ended.
Regardless of the statements of the Italian journalist Ernesto Vassalo about contradictory Greek data on the population of Greek inhabitants in Izmir, the Greek side had reasons to present the figures on the Greek population in Izmir as disproportionately high during the negotiations in Versailles in order to have an argument in hand for the forcible seizure of Anatolia. The Megali Idea was part of Greek foreign policy, which envisaged a union of all Greek inhabitants in the Balkans and Anatolia.
One of Athens’ first measures in the occupation of Western Anatolia was to change the demographic structures in favor of the Greek population. The objective of settling Greeks in Asia Minor began even before the occupation of Western Anatolia. Greeks who left Izmir and the region during the Balkan Wars and World War I and settled in other regions returned after the signing of the Mudros Armistice Agreement. The Greek government promoted the resettlement of Greeks to Anatolia by adopting a program that provided financial incentives for return.
Through a branch of the Greek Central Bank in Izmir, a loan of 20 million Greek drachmas per person was announced for a term of three years with an annual interest rate of 6 per cent. Furthermore, land and estates were promised for Greek settlement. With the Greek government’s subsidy program, a total of 126,000 Greek re-settlers returned to Western Anatolia between 20 October 1919 and 31 December 1920. The Ottoman government under Prime Minister Damat Ferit Pasha attempted to prevent the exodus of the Turkish population in Western Anatolia through appeals, parliamentary resolutions and instructions to the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of War, but since the sovereignty of the occupied territory was under Allied control, these steps were of little value.
Massacres and war crimes against Turkish civilians
After the Greek army occupied Izmir and the surrounding area, Manisa, Turgutlu, Aydın, Nazilli, Ayvalık and other cities in Western Anatolia were also taken in the following weeks. The Greek army acted with cruel harshness against the Turkish Muslim civilian population. Local militia units were recruited from among the Greeks living in Anatolia, and together with the Greek army they carried out bloody massacres of Muslims. The expulsions, tortures and mass crimes of violence committed by the Greek occupation army against the Muslim civilian population were systematic. The day after the occupation of Izmir, native Greeks began to form militia units in western Anatolia, especially in the Söke and Kuşadası regions.
Reports of the occupation of Izmir and the massacres of Turkish civilians committed by the Greek forces had frightened the surrounding population and caused them to flee. A few days before the invading forces arrived in Izmir, there was unrest among the Turkish population in the Izmir region because armed local and foreign Greek militiamen who had previously fled or been expelled by the Turkish authorities for various crimes were making the area unsafe. These Greek militias came from the islands of Lesbos (Midilli), Chios (Sakız) and Samos (Sisam) from January 1919 onwards.
According to a report by the Izmir Gendarmerie Regimental Command, the number of Turkish civilians killed by the Greek army in Izmir and in the villages of the Urla Peninsula on 15 May 1919 was over 2,000. The Izmir Regimental Command sent a situation report to the General Command in Istanbul on the mass violent crimes committed by Greek troops against the Turkish Muslim civilian population. The following is an excerpt from the gendarmerie report:
“During the occupation of the city of Izmir by Greek soldiers on 15 May, unprecedented murders were committed against the Turkish-Islamic [Muslim] population. Hundreds of residents, officers, policemen, women and children were killed and the property of most looted and destroyed. Government buildings and barracks were defeated and lay under rifle and machine gun fire for hours. After the firing ceased, all the government officials and gendarmerie delegations who had gathered in the presence of the governor were brought down with bayonets fixed and forced to shout ʻZito Venizelosʼ [ʻlong live Venizelosʼ] after insults, threats, blows and curses by the cruel Greek soldiers as well as the local Greek population, where even the children were armed. The Greek soldiers and armed militia forced the people to undress one by one, robbing them of their cash and even their dirty handkerchiefs. Many were stripped of their jackets and shoes […]. “[7]
Soldiers of the Greek army taunted muezzins in the town of Aydın who called for prayer from the minaret of the mosque, and some were arbitrarily killed. The muezzin of the Cuma neighborhood, Mehmet Efendi, was taken from a minaret at gunpoint by a Greek army patrol on 23 June 1919 during the call to prayer and stabbed to death with a bayonet. The same fate befell the muezzin of the Ramazan Pasha Mosque, who was shot during the call to prayer. Furthermore, the mosques and the minarets of the Muslim houses of prayer were shelled with artillery shells and machine gun fire. During the holy month of Ramadan, the Greek army used force against Muslims to prevent access to the mosque or traditional prayer. Those who attempted to enter the prayer house were threatened and beaten by soldiers.
On 29 June 1919, the Greek army attacked the Cuma neighborhood in the western Turkish city of Aydın. A resident of the neighborhood, Hafız Mustafa Ağa, described how Greek soldiers began setting fires in several places in the district. The helpless residents tried to flee from their burning houses and were shot by the soldiers of the occupying army posted at the entrances of streets and alleys. While the flaming inferno raged, the neighborhood was shelled with artillery fire from the Greek army. The testimony of Hafız Mustafa Ağa is dated August 1, 1919:
“In our neighborhood, at the Çavuş Bridge, the soap factory of Cretan İbrahim Badorakin, at the tea room and stable of Yalabukoğlu Ahmet, at the house of Canbazoğlu Ali Efendi, in front of the Dükkânönü Cami-i Şerifi mosque, at the house of Hacı Yahya Efendi and at the house of Hacı Ibrahim, they poured petrol and threw accelerants, causing fires to break out in five places in the district. Greek soldiers were waiting at the street entrances. The buildings were engulfed in flames, while the people fighting for their lives threw themselves into the streets. The Greek soldiers opened fire on entire families without any consideration. Some were killed, some were injured and some survived.
Other residents heard the gunfire in the streets and would not flee outside out of fear, so they burned in their houses. Our neighborhood consisted of 580 houses and 30 stores. Of these, only 35 houses (households) remained. We know of more than 50 victims, but there are hundreds more whom we do not know if they are dead or alive. As the residents of our neighborhood are scattered in the villages and other places of calamity, it is not possible to know the actual number of victims at present. While the inferno raged with full force, the Greeks fired artillery shells at our neighborhood. The Greek soldiers destroyed the houses and beat the helpless people in their houses, and abducted some young girls. We have no knowledge of their fate. Those who survived fled to the cities and towns such as Nazilli, Çine, Yenipazar and Denizli, and to localities and villages where they were in a miserable condition”[8].
The displaced fled to areas not yet occupied by the invaders. The total number of people who fled their ancestral homes because of the ruthless actions of the Greek army against the Turkish civilian population is estimated at around 1.5 million. According to the historian Erol Kaya, civilians who did not manage to escape were either killed or captured by the occupying forces and sent to internment camps. The prison camps were either in the occupied territories in western Anatolia or in Greece itself.
According to Kaya, there were several reasons for the capture and internment of Turkish Muslim civilians:
- To change the demographic structure in favor of the Greek population. Kaya supports his thesis with a census taken at the beginning of the First World War in 1914, according to which the province of Aydın had a total population of 1,608,742. Of these, 1,248,067 inhabitants were Muslims, 299,096 Greeks, 19,395 Armenians and 35,041 Jews.
- Another reason Kaya gives is the internment of Turkish intellectuals and people capable of organizing resistance against the Greek occupation; the purpose of the internment was to break the resistance.
- According to Kaya, there was another reason for the Greek occupiers to imprison Turkish Muslim civilians: after the Greek occupation on 15 May 1919, a Turkish independence movement had formed and gained further support.[9]
Further violent crimes by the Greek army in Western Anatolia
During the occupation of the western Turkish city of Manisa, Greek units committed massacres, rapes and looting against the Muslim civilian population in the villages and small towns. In the villages of Hacı Rahmanlı and Kapaklı, as well as other communities located along the Manisa-Akhisar railway line, Greek soldiers committed acts of violence against the Muslim inhabitants, killing all of the inhabitants and looting their property.
Hundreds of civilians were arrested in their orchards by Greek units and taken to Athens via Izmir. About 160 Muslim prisoners of war, previously released by the British in Egypt, were recaptured and forced to perform forced labor under severe conditions. According to a report by the local police, most of the prisoners did not survive the internment conditions: they died mostly due to lack of food or from torture. The report stated that the Greek army had confiscated horses and pack animals from the rural population and that if the atrocities (mezalim) did not stop, all Muslims would be exterminated if no precautions were taken.
Greek army relied on scorched earth policy in its retreat
In the Battle of Sakarya (22 August – 13 September, 1922), the Turkish army under Commander-in-Chief General Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later known as Atatürk) succeeded in halting the advance of the Greek army and defeating it in a war of attrition. In their forced retreat, the Greek army used scorched earth tactics. Entire towns, villages, communities, buildings, houses, camps, agricultural land and infrastructure were burned down and the inhabitants killed.
The western Anatolian town of Afyonkarahisar was also affected, being reduced to rubble. During the evacuation of the city of Eskişehir, soldiers from the Greek invasion army set fires. According to a report by a reconnaissance plane, three fires were lit in Eskişehir at the railway station, one in the market and another in the south of the city. At the beginning, looting took place and then the city was set on fire at the Porsuk River. Those who tried to escape the fire were shot. The number of civilians killed was around 250.
Most of the city quarters, including buildings, department stores, stores, schools, hamams, and mosques were a complete prey to the flames. During the Dumlupınar war of attrition, Greek army units destroyed the villages of Hamurköy and Çal. Another town that was completely destroyed is Uşak, which was also razed to the ground by fires. Before the Turkish army entered Uşak, Greek soldiers set fires in the town and the surrounding area, perpetrating atrocities on the population and killing 322 Muslim victims by fire.
Summary
In the course of the Paris Peace Conference, the victorious powers of the First World War determined that Greece should annex Izmir and the surrounding region. After the capture of Manisa on 25 May 1919, Greek forces occupied Aydın and subsequently other cities in western Anatolia on 27 May 1919, contrary to the Paris provisions. The Greek government under Prime Minister Venizelos, in the context of Greek nationalism, pursued an irredentist plan known as the Megali Idea, which envisaged the settlement of Western Anatolia by Greek emigrants, at the expense of the majority Turkish Muslim population.
In order to change the demographic structures of Western Anatolia, the Greek armed forces waged a ruthless campaign against the Muslim civilian population. In his book Death and Exile, US historian Justin McCarthy puts the number of Muslims killed by the Greek army during the occupation of Western Anatolia at 640,000 people, and the survivors included 860,000 refugees and 1.2 million Turkish Muslim displaced persons.[10] Behind the landing of Allied warships and the subsequent occupation of Izmir on 15 May 1919 as well as other cities and towns in Western Anatolia was a concrete plan by the victorious powers of the First World War to partition Anatolia. The Greek government under Prime Minister Venizelos pursued an expansionist goal to enlarge its own territory in order to implement the irredentist Megali Idea. The ethnic cleansing, forced expulsions, internment, sexual violence, looting, oppression and persecution against the Turkish-Muslim population during the Greek occupation of Western Anatolia (1919-1922) are deeply imprinted in the collective memory of Turkish society and are still present today.
[1] See Burhan, Sabahattin, Ege’nin Kurtuluş Destanı: Yörük Ali Efe, Yeni Asya Yayınları, Istanbul 1998, p. 276, translation by the author.
[2] From the perspective of the victorious powers of the First World War, the Mudros Agreement was a triumph because the Allies had dictated the surrender of the Ottoman Empire, but from the Turkish perspective, this treaty, along with the Sèvres Agreement, represented a severe humiliation and, as the Turkish historian Ilber Ortaylı states in his excellent biography of Atatürk, was perceived as a “death sentence against Turkey”. See Ortaylı, Ilber: Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Kronik Kitap, Istanbul 2018, p. 140.
[3] Thomas Woodrow Wilson belonged to the Democratic Party and was the 28th president of the United States during his term in office from 1913-1921.
[4 ] David Lloyd George was British prime minister from 1916-1922, and previously an MP, trade minister, chancellor of the exchequer and war minister.
[5 ] As historian Emine Pancar explains in her dissertation, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate’s manipulated statistics on the extent of the ethnic Greek population in Anatolia were crucial in the Allies’ approval of the occupation of Western Anatolia. According to the statistics of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the total Greek population in Anatolia was 1.7 million, whereas in Aydın and Bursa there were 1,080,000 Greeks. With the Greek population on the islands, the total population was therefore 1,450,000. In the census of the Muslim population in Anatolia, the Patriarchate calculated 943,000 people, see Pancar, Emine: Aydın ve Muğla Kuva-yi Milliyesi, Doktora Tezi, 9 Eylül Üniversitesi, Izmir 2010, p. 82.
[6] The former province of Aydın was composed of the Ottoman sandshaks of Izmir, Aydın, Saruhan and Denizli, with Izmir as its center.
[8] Cf. ibid., Belge No: 2375, pp. 48-49, translation by the author.
[9] Cf. Kaya, Erol: Milli Mücadele Döneminde Hilal-i Ahmer Cemiyetiˈnin Anadolu ve Yunanistan`daki Türk ve Yunan Esirlerine Yaptığı Yardımlar, Turkish Studies, Skopje/Ankara, Volume 3/2 Winter 2008, pp. 469-472.
[10] McCarthy, Justin: Death and Exile, The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims 1821-1922, Princeton 1995, p. 304.