> Then Came the Chance the Turks Have Been Waiting For: To Get Rid of Christians Once and for All In the late 1800s, Christians made up 20 percent of Turkey’s population. By the late 1920s, they were down to just 2 percent. New research reveals the scope of the genocide committed by three successive regimes
> Nov 4 2021, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi
> In May 1919, six months after the end of World War I, a Greek Navy fleet made its way to the city of Izmir in western Anatolia, escorted by British warships. The preceding October, the Ottoman rulers had signed an armistice agreement in Moudros harbor on the Aegean island of Lemnos, an accord that clearly reflected the Allied victory. By its terms, the Ottomans ceded control over large chunks of their empire to Britain, France and Italy, which in turn gave the Greeks the go-ahead to take control of the western coast of Anatolia, an area that prior to the war was populated mainly by Greek Christians. After landing in Izmir, the Greek forces made their way into the country’s interior. At the height of their expansion, in August 1921, they reached the outskirts of Ankara, the capital city of General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, leader of the Turkish national movement. From that point on, the forces under Atatürk’s command began to push the invaders back in the direction of the Aegean Sea, and on September 9, 1922, their victory was completed. The invading Greek army retreated to its ships and sailed back to Greece; Atatürk’s First Cavalry Division entered Izmir (Smyrna, to the Greeks) at a light canter, with swords drawn.
> What happened in Izmir in the early days of the Turkish occupation boggles the imagination. The first day was characterized by mass plunder and rape, which only intensified when another Turkish division entered the city. An American naval officer, Lt. Commander H.E. Knauss, whose ship was anchored in the port at that time, recounted: “En route we passed many dead on streets.… The smaller shops were being looted. Invariably, the owner was lying dead.” In another place, he saw four people murdered in cold blood. Another eyewitness told about seeing many Christian men being executed. Others died when their houses were set on fire. One of the people killed was the Greek Bishop Chrysostomos. When the bishop came to shake the hand of the commander of the First Army, Nureddin Pasha, the latter spit on his outstretched hand and handed the bishop over to the mob. They chopped off his beard, gouged his eyes out and cut off his ears, nose and hands before they killed him. Afterward, his body was dragged through the streets.
> But that was just the start of the nightmare for the two-thirds of Izmir residents who were Christians – a majority of them Greek and a minority Armenians. (Muslims made up the other third, with 30,000 Jews.) On September 10, Atatürk came to the city and evidently ordered Commander Nureddin to expel all the Christians from the city. The next day, Turkish soldiers surrounded the Armenian Quarter and launched a hunt for Christians. They pulled people out of their homes, looted their properties and raped the women. Many Armenian men were arrested, hauled away and shot.
> Two days later, the city was set ablaze in a massive fire. Initially, several buildings in the Armenian Quarter were observed to be on fire, and crowds of refugees, mostly women and children, fled in a panic toward the seashore. By evening, “The entire waterfront seemed one solid mass of humanity and baggage of every description,” wrote Arthur Japy Hepburn, the local U.S. Navy squadron’s chief of staff, who was on a ship near the port at the time. An estimated 150,000 people crowded onto the quay as the mass of flames moved directly toward the waterline. Escape routes out of the area were blocked by the Turks, and the fire was advancing rapidly. Within minutes, it had reached the piers and they began to burn. Sailors from Allied ships that were anchored in the port succeeded in rescuing thousands of people who leapt into the sea or fled the shore in small boats. But thousands more Greeks and Armenians were either slaughtered by the Turks or perished in the great fire.
> Ethno-religious massacres
> This was the beginning of the end of one of the worst and longest genocides in modern history. It is common to speak about the massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916, during World War I, as President Biden did in his statement on April 24, 2021, in which he announced U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide. But the story of what happened in Turkey is much broader and deeper.
> It goes deeper, because it covers not just what occurred during World War I, but a series of giant ethno-religious massacres that lasted from the 1890s through the 1920s and beyond. It is broader, because it was not only Armenians who were persecuted and killed. Along with hundreds of thousands of Armenians – the Armenians cite a figure of more than 1.5 million killed over the entire period – a similar number of Greeks and Assyrians (or adherents of the Assyrian or Syriac churches) were slaughtered. (Greek historians speak of more than a million Greeks who were murdered.)
> By our estimate, over the course of the 30-year period, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Christians from the three religious groups were either murdered or intentionally starved to death, or allowed to die of disease, and millions more were expelled from Turkey and lost everything.
> In addition, tens of thousands of Christians were forced to convert to Islam, and many thousands of Christian women and girls were raped, either by their Muslim neighbors or by members of the security forces. The Turks even opened markets where Christian girls were sold as sex slaves.
> One of the people killed was a Greek bishop. The commander of the First Army handed him over to the mob. They chopped off his beard, gouged his eyes out and cut off his ears, nose and hands before they killed him.
> These atrocities were committed by three very different, successive regimes: Sultan Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian-Islamist regime; the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (the Young Turks) during World War I, under the leadership of Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha; and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s post-war secular nationalist regime.
> The three regimes worked to eliminate the Christian minorities in Anatolia for similar reasons, including suspicion of their ties with external Christian enemies of the state, anger at the extra privileges granted to Christians in previous years, revenge for real or imagined massacres and expulsions of Muslims by Christians in the Balkans, as well as out of jealousy of the Christian minorities’ wealth and success. But the main reason was a lethal combination of religion and nationalism. Sultan Abdülhamid II may have had an imperialist worldview, but during his time, the budding Turkish national identity was already evident, hand in hand with a pan-Islamist outlook. In his attempt to undo the reforms of his predecessors, which aimed to accord full rights of citizenship and a degree of equality to religious minorities, Abdülhamid strove for the political unification of the Muslim peoples and worked to suppress the national aspirations and civil rights of the Christian minorities in his country. Since the Greeks already had a homeland – Greece obtained independence in 1830 – and the Assyrians had no real national movement to speak of, the sultan identified the Armenians as posing the greatest danger to the empire’s territorial integrity.
> Indeed, in that period, an Armenian national movement arose that occasionally attacked soldiers, policemen, officials and collaborators. Between 1894 and 1896, approximately 200,000 Armenians and possibly more were massacred or persecuted to death by Abdülhamid’s regime. He believed that, as a result, the Armenians would not thereafter dare to “raise their heads” and threaten his regime and empire.
> When the members of the Committee of Union and Progress seized power in the 1908 revolution, however, they discovered that Abdülhamid had failed in his mission, and that the Armenian national movement had survived. A Greek cultural revival was also identified. By Greeks we mean those who belonged to the Greek Orthodox church and identified themselves as being of Greek origin (mostly living in the Pontus and along Turkey’s Aegean coastline). Many of the ethnic Greeks also spoke Turkish as a first language and lacked strong ties to Greece. But the fear of an uprising by the large Greek communities came to the fore during the Balkan Wars that immediately preceded World War I. During and right after the war, the Young Turks’ governments brutally expelled tens of thousands of Greeks from the border region and from the Aegean coast. In addition, in a local conflagration in 1909, between 20,000 and 30,000 Armenians were slaughtered in the Adana region in southeastern Anatolia. The horrible massacre in Adana may not have been planned by the government, but the indifference it was met with around the world made it all the more clear to the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress that the major powers would not lift a finger to save the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
Population exchange between greece and turkey was agreed by both sides, also greek king and government needed additional population to fill empty villages and greek minority cities in greece at the time. Same for turkey.
*had*. Proper grammar goes a long way. But what do I expect of populist bullshit?
Todays Turkey is bad post .
There was a lady I grew up with who was from Smyrna.
She remembered going down to the pier with her parents and brothers. Her father put her and her mother into a fishing boat while he and the boys tried to protect them.
He told his wife and daughter that he would find them. He and the boys perished and were never found.
She was an elegant and wonderful lady. A pious and kind Orthodox Christian. May her memory be eternal!
5 comments
> Then Came the Chance the Turks Have Been Waiting For: To Get Rid of Christians Once and for All In the late 1800s, Christians made up 20 percent of Turkey’s population. By the late 1920s, they were down to just 2 percent. New research reveals the scope of the genocide committed by three successive regimes
> Nov 4 2021, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi
> In May 1919, six months after the end of World War I, a Greek Navy fleet made its way to the city of Izmir in western Anatolia, escorted by British warships. The preceding October, the Ottoman rulers had signed an armistice agreement in Moudros harbor on the Aegean island of Lemnos, an accord that clearly reflected the Allied victory. By its terms, the Ottomans ceded control over large chunks of their empire to Britain, France and Italy, which in turn gave the Greeks the go-ahead to take control of the western coast of Anatolia, an area that prior to the war was populated mainly by Greek Christians. After landing in Izmir, the Greek forces made their way into the country’s interior. At the height of their expansion, in August 1921, they reached the outskirts of Ankara, the capital city of General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, leader of the Turkish national movement. From that point on, the forces under Atatürk’s command began to push the invaders back in the direction of the Aegean Sea, and on September 9, 1922, their victory was completed. The invading Greek army retreated to its ships and sailed back to Greece; Atatürk’s First Cavalry Division entered Izmir (Smyrna, to the Greeks) at a light canter, with swords drawn.
> What happened in Izmir in the early days of the Turkish occupation boggles the imagination. The first day was characterized by mass plunder and rape, which only intensified when another Turkish division entered the city. An American naval officer, Lt. Commander H.E. Knauss, whose ship was anchored in the port at that time, recounted: “En route we passed many dead on streets.… The smaller shops were being looted. Invariably, the owner was lying dead.” In another place, he saw four people murdered in cold blood. Another eyewitness told about seeing many Christian men being executed. Others died when their houses were set on fire. One of the people killed was the Greek Bishop Chrysostomos. When the bishop came to shake the hand of the commander of the First Army, Nureddin Pasha, the latter spit on his outstretched hand and handed the bishop over to the mob. They chopped off his beard, gouged his eyes out and cut off his ears, nose and hands before they killed him. Afterward, his body was dragged through the streets.
> But that was just the start of the nightmare for the two-thirds of Izmir residents who were Christians – a majority of them Greek and a minority Armenians. (Muslims made up the other third, with 30,000 Jews.) On September 10, Atatürk came to the city and evidently ordered Commander Nureddin to expel all the Christians from the city. The next day, Turkish soldiers surrounded the Armenian Quarter and launched a hunt for Christians. They pulled people out of their homes, looted their properties and raped the women. Many Armenian men were arrested, hauled away and shot.
> Two days later, the city was set ablaze in a massive fire. Initially, several buildings in the Armenian Quarter were observed to be on fire, and crowds of refugees, mostly women and children, fled in a panic toward the seashore. By evening, “The entire waterfront seemed one solid mass of humanity and baggage of every description,” wrote Arthur Japy Hepburn, the local U.S. Navy squadron’s chief of staff, who was on a ship near the port at the time. An estimated 150,000 people crowded onto the quay as the mass of flames moved directly toward the waterline. Escape routes out of the area were blocked by the Turks, and the fire was advancing rapidly. Within minutes, it had reached the piers and they began to burn. Sailors from Allied ships that were anchored in the port succeeded in rescuing thousands of people who leapt into the sea or fled the shore in small boats. But thousands more Greeks and Armenians were either slaughtered by the Turks or perished in the great fire.
> Ethno-religious massacres
> This was the beginning of the end of one of the worst and longest genocides in modern history. It is common to speak about the massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916, during World War I, as President Biden did in his statement on April 24, 2021, in which he announced U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide. But the story of what happened in Turkey is much broader and deeper.
> It goes deeper, because it covers not just what occurred during World War I, but a series of giant ethno-religious massacres that lasted from the 1890s through the 1920s and beyond. It is broader, because it was not only Armenians who were persecuted and killed. Along with hundreds of thousands of Armenians – the Armenians cite a figure of more than 1.5 million killed over the entire period – a similar number of Greeks and Assyrians (or adherents of the Assyrian or Syriac churches) were slaughtered. (Greek historians speak of more than a million Greeks who were murdered.)
> [How Israel quashed efforts to recognize the Armenian genocide – to please Turkey](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-israel-quashed-efforts-to-acknowledge-the-armenian-genocide-1.9766390)
> By our estimate, over the course of the 30-year period, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Christians from the three religious groups were either murdered or intentionally starved to death, or allowed to die of disease, and millions more were expelled from Turkey and lost everything.
> In addition, tens of thousands of Christians were forced to convert to Islam, and many thousands of Christian women and girls were raped, either by their Muslim neighbors or by members of the security forces. The Turks even opened markets where Christian girls were sold as sex slaves.
> One of the people killed was a Greek bishop. The commander of the First Army handed him over to the mob. They chopped off his beard, gouged his eyes out and cut off his ears, nose and hands before they killed him.
> These atrocities were committed by three very different, successive regimes: Sultan Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian-Islamist regime; the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (the Young Turks) during World War I, under the leadership of Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha; and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s post-war secular nationalist regime.
> The three regimes worked to eliminate the Christian minorities in Anatolia for similar reasons, including suspicion of their ties with external Christian enemies of the state, anger at the extra privileges granted to Christians in previous years, revenge for real or imagined massacres and expulsions of Muslims by Christians in the Balkans, as well as out of jealousy of the Christian minorities’ wealth and success. But the main reason was a lethal combination of religion and nationalism. Sultan Abdülhamid II may have had an imperialist worldview, but during his time, the budding Turkish national identity was already evident, hand in hand with a pan-Islamist outlook. In his attempt to undo the reforms of his predecessors, which aimed to accord full rights of citizenship and a degree of equality to religious minorities, Abdülhamid strove for the political unification of the Muslim peoples and worked to suppress the national aspirations and civil rights of the Christian minorities in his country. Since the Greeks already had a homeland – Greece obtained independence in 1830 – and the Assyrians had no real national movement to speak of, the sultan identified the Armenians as posing the greatest danger to the empire’s territorial integrity.
> Indeed, in that period, an Armenian national movement arose that occasionally attacked soldiers, policemen, officials and collaborators. Between 1894 and 1896, approximately 200,000 Armenians and possibly more were massacred or persecuted to death by Abdülhamid’s regime. He believed that, as a result, the Armenians would not thereafter dare to “raise their heads” and threaten his regime and empire.
> When the members of the Committee of Union and Progress seized power in the 1908 revolution, however, they discovered that Abdülhamid had failed in his mission, and that the Armenian national movement had survived. A Greek cultural revival was also identified. By Greeks we mean those who belonged to the Greek Orthodox church and identified themselves as being of Greek origin (mostly living in the Pontus and along Turkey’s Aegean coastline). Many of the ethnic Greeks also spoke Turkish as a first language and lacked strong ties to Greece. But the fear of an uprising by the large Greek communities came to the fore during the Balkan Wars that immediately preceded World War I. During and right after the war, the Young Turks’ governments brutally expelled tens of thousands of Greeks from the border region and from the Aegean coast. In addition, in a local conflagration in 1909, between 20,000 and 30,000 Armenians were slaughtered in the Adana region in southeastern Anatolia. The horrible massacre in Adana may not have been planned by the government, but the indifference it was met with around the world made it all the more clear to the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress that the major powers would not lift a finger to save the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
Population exchange between greece and turkey was agreed by both sides, also greek king and government needed additional population to fill empty villages and greek minority cities in greece at the time. Same for turkey.
*had*. Proper grammar goes a long way. But what do I expect of populist bullshit?
Todays Turkey is bad post .
There was a lady I grew up with who was from Smyrna.
She remembered going down to the pier with her parents and brothers. Her father put her and her mother into a fishing boat while he and the boys tried to protect them.
He told his wife and daughter that he would find them. He and the boys perished and were never found.
She was an elegant and wonderful lady. A pious and kind Orthodox Christian. May her memory be eternal!