By Karl Dieterich
Translated from the German
By CARROLL N. BROWN, Ph.D.,
The College of the City of New York
By Theodore P. Ion, D.C.L.
The German dream of dominion from Hamburg to
the Persian Gulf has naturally attracted the attention of
the world to Asia Minor, a country which has been for
centuries in a dormant condition on account of its
subjection to a moribund state. Conquered and reconquered
by Asiatic hordes, its wealth ravaged and pillaged
many and many times, its cities, towns and villages
razed to the ground more than once, and its inhabitants
having been subjected again and again to massacres en
masse, Asia Minor has been and will naturally continue
to be the reservoir, so to speak, of European civilization
for the Great East.
From ancient times the rays of civilization which
shone on this peninsula were not Asiatic but European,
that is Hellenic, the civilizing influences of the language
of Homer and Plato having been kept alive even during
the rule of the Mohammedan Arabs.
As is well known, the Arabian Caliphs of Bagdad
were always surrounded by Hellenists and considered
the books of the Greek sages more valuable than gold.2
Hence came the great impetus given to Arabian philosophy
and positive science through the translation of
the writings of the Greeks, which were subsequently
transplanted to Europe by the Moors even before the
time of the renaissance.
The darkest epoch of Asia Minor began undoubtedly
with the advent of the followers of Osman, who, ever
since their irruption into that country, have wrought
havoc among its people, and within a comparatively
short space of time have reduced that fair land to barbarity
and desolation. The ancient seats of learning, the
theaters, the stadia, the treasures of art and other tokens
of Hellenic civilization are now nothing but heaps of
ruins, inarticulate witnesses to the ancient glory of
Hellenism.
It is a remarkable phenomenon that beneath these
smoldering ruins civilization was not entirely destroyed,
for in spite of the slowly burning fire Hellenism continued
to exist, and toward the close of the 18th century
began to show clear signs of that vitality and vigor
which blossomed forth so quickly in the following century,
and, in our own time, have produced such far-reaching
results.
Hence the apprehension shown by the Turkish conquerors
during the tyrannical régime of Abdul Hamid.
Hence the great efforts made by that potentate to bring
from the confines of Russia Mohammedan hordes such
as Circassians and other unruly tribes and freebooters
in order that they might roam about or settle there
according to their fancy, with the view to offsetting
the ever-increasing Greek population of Asia Minor.
Hence the inrush to that country of Mohammedan
emigrants from the territories which have been wrested
from the Turk ever since the events of 1878, it being
immaterial whether these Mussulman fanatics gave themselves
to robbery, murder and massacres of the Christians
in the land, or settled there in order to develop
the great possibilities of agriculture in the country.
The diplomacy of Europe, having been satisfied
with the platitudes embodied in the Treaty of Berlin
of 1878 as to the introduction of reforms by the Sublime
Porte, both in its European and Asiatic provinces,
has let things take their natural course, the first outcome
being the Armenian horrors of the Hamidian era, which
were continued under the “constitutional régime of the
Young Turks” and culminated in the scientific extermination,
by starvation, of that highly gifted
Armenian nation, carried out under the high patronage
and guidance of the Germano-Turanians, whose diabolical
activities during the present world war have overwhelmed
in a like catastrophe the Hellenic population of the
Ottoman Empire and particularly of Asia Minor.3
From the time that the present German emperor
resolved to make the Near and perhaps the Far East
the great market for Teutonic trade, German scientists
of all kinds have been dispatched to Asia Minor to
study the country from every point of view, so that the
German Government may, at the opportune moment,
be ready to seize the “golden fleece.”
As a result there have appeared various essays dealing
with Asia Minor from different points of view, and in
particular the one with which we are here concerned,
by Dr. Karl Dieterich, forming the principal part of the
present publication of the American-Hellenic Society.4
It is worth noticing that the German essayist describes
in a vivid manner the vitality and the potentialities
of the Hellenic population of Asia Minor, and,
unlike the ruling class of Germany and many of his
compatriots, he speaks favorably of the Greek populations
of Anatolia.
Dr. Dieterich, referring to the persecution of the
Greeks, says erroneously that these “systematic persecutions,”
as he admits them to be, began with the spring
of 1914 (see p. 19), while, as a matter of fact, they
commenced on the very day that the Young Turks
consolidated their power (1908–1909), when, in spite of
their much heralded formula of “equality, justice and
fraternity,” they designed and instituted a well-organized
method for the annihilation of the Christian populations,
the Adana massacres of the Armenians in April, 1909,
being the precursors of all the subsequent horrors.
Nor did these would-be “reformers,” or “constitutionalists,”
conceal their plans for the Turkification of the
Christians in the Ottoman Empire, for they openly
resorted either to forced conversions to Mohammedanism
or to the annihilation of those who seemed unlikely to
submit to be “Ottomanized.” Thus, as early as September,
1908, one of the moving spirits of the Committee
of Union and Progress, namely, Dr. Nazim, during his
visit to Smyrna, at a social gathering held in the house
of a British subject, spoke freely about this matter.5
The Young Turks having thus initiated, under the
very eyes of Europe, a systematic extermination of the
Armenians,—whom the bloody hand of Abdul Hamid
had not completely destroyed,—turned their attention to
the “more dangerous Greeks.”
It was this plan for the destruction of the Christian
nations that, in 1912, brought together the Balkan
States, who saw that under the new régime in Turkey
the peoples of these various nationalities would gradually
be annihilated, if they did not take some preventive
steps. The result was the war of these States against
Turkey, the complete defeat of the latter and the
freeing from the Turkish yoke of hundreds of thousands
of people. As a further consequence of this war, there
began on the part of Turkey a wholesale expulsion of
the Greek population from the coast of Asia Minor
simply because the neighboring islands of the Ægean
had been incorporated with the Greek Kingdom. Up
to the declaration of the present world war hundreds
of thousands of Greeks were expelled from Turkey,
having been, at the same time, deprived by the Turks
of all their movable and immovable property. All these
unfortunate people took refuge in Greece and gave no
little embarrassment to the Greek Government.6
It is therefore incorrect to say, as the German writer
alleges, that the persecutions of the Greeks began with
the outbreak of the present war (p. 19).
The difference, however, between the ante-bellum
persecutions and those perpetrated subsequently is this,
that while in the former cases the Greeks were expelled
from their native country and were deprived only of
their wealth and their property generally, in the latter
not only were they compelled to abandon everything
they owned, but they also perished through untold hardships
and starvation. (See details about the tragical
condition of the Greeks in Publication No. 3 of the
American-Hellenic Society cited above.)
Nor did the Turks in carrying out this cruel work care
whether Greece was friendly or unfriendly to Turkey.
As a matter of fact, these persecutions were in full
swing during the “régime of Constantine” (see dates
in Persecutions of the Greeks, etc.) when that potentate
was in close relationship not only with the Germans,
but also with the Bulgarians and the Turks, and consequently
the persecutions of the Greeks had nothing
to do with the alleged projected territorial compensations
to Greece; besides, Turkey was assured by Germany
that Constantine, who then had the upper hand
in Greece, would under no circumstances attack Turkey.
Therefore it is not correct to say, as the German
writer asserts, that one of the reasons for these persecutions
was the promise made to Greece by the Entente
Powers in 1915 of territorial concessions in Asia Minor
(see p. 19).
An indication that even such an evidently impartial
writer as Dr. Dieterich cannot divest himself of the
German point of view is his statement that in the
struggle for life the Greeks were on the offensive, while
the Turks were on the defensive (see p. 19). This,
in plain words, means that it suffices for a nation to be
intelligent, active, frugal, moral (as he too acknowledges
the Greeks to be, p. 50), in order to acquire the odium
of carrying on an offensive struggle if another nation
living side by side with it happens to be stupid, fatalist,
immoral and incapable of holding its ground in the
struggle for life.
The writer’s theory of the existence of a Greek
propaganda in Asia Minor, “forwarded by every possible
means,” is a gratuitous supposition. Dr. Dieterich
evidently misunderstands the conditions in which the
Greek populations have been living in Asia Minor
and trying to promote or revive their national ideals.
As a matter of fact, all the existing Greek schools in
Asia Minor,—which is also the case with the Greek
educational institutions in every part of Turkey,—have
been established and supported by the Greek communities
themselves, and if, at times, they have received
outside financial aid, this was due to the generosity of
persons who were natives of the country, who had emigrated
to foreign lands and acquired wealth abroad. The
many names of these benefactors appearing on the Greek
school buildings attest the accuracy of this statement.7
Therefore the allegation of the writer that a Greek
propaganda is carried out in Asia Minor is totally incorrect.
Another supposition of the German author that the
Greeks of Anatolia intermarried with the “Seljuk
Conquerors” is not a historical fact. On the contrary,
judging from the general character of the people and
their attachment to the Christian religion, it is certain
that the Greeks did not intermarry with the Seljuks,
since they invaded Asia Minor after their conversion to
Mohammedanism.
That many Greeks, abandoning the faith of their
forefathers, embraced Mohammedanism, is an incontrovertible
and historical fact, but that Turks or other
adherents of Islam could not become Christians and
consequently could not intermarry with the Greeks is
also a truism. For, according to Mohammedan Law,
a “true believer” who abandons Islam is liable to be
put to death. Therefore, although many Greeks by
becoming Mohammedans lost their nationality, no Turks
or other Mussulmans could become Christians and, consequently,
Greeks. That has been the strongest shield
of Hellenism for the preservation of the Greek nationality.
In the same way his allegation that, as the language
of the Greeks in the interior of Asia Minor was Turkish,
they “did not share in the national and racial consciousness
of their kinsmen on the coast” (p. 52) is
equally erroneous. Anyone who has lived in that country
and intermingled with these people could not have
helped noticing their intense patriotic spirit and their
attachment to Greek ideals, the best evidence of these
being the creation of schools for the study of the language
of their forefathers, namely Greek. Nor is the
other statement of this writer that the Greeks “succeeded
in introducing the Greek language in their
schools alongside of the Turkish” correct, because, as a
matter of fact, these schools were established for the
study of the Greek and not the Turkish language, the
latter tongue being taught as a foreign language, occupying
the same place in the curriculum of the Greek
schools as foreign languages hold in European or American
schools.
The observation of the author that Germany will
have to come to terms with the Greek peasant of Asia
Minor, because “he is on a higher moral plane,” is
worthy of especial notice, and his further remark that
“it would be just as perverse as it would be foolish to
depend on the Turk to the exclusion of the Greek, who
has the controlling hand in trade and traffic, as well
as in the cultivation of the soil” (p. 50), confirms the
favorable opinion of both German and other writers
and travelers as to the vitality of the Hellenic element
of Asia Minor.
Thus, a distinguished French geographer,—whose
statistics, however, on the populations of Asia Minor
are not accurate, since they are presumably based principally
on Turkish sources,—referring to the Greeks
of the Province of Smyrna, says that “among all
the Christian communities of the Province of Smyrna
that of the Orthodox Greeks is the most considerable
and that it is, in a general way, better educated
and more prosperous. It is among them,—apart
from the merchants who are best fitted for handling
large enterprises,—that are found the most clever
mechanics, often excelling in their various callings, and
the best agriculturists, their well-known characteristics
being industry and activity.” (See Vital Cuinet, La
Turquie d’Asie, Géographie Administrative, etc., vol.
III., p. 355.)
So, too, the famous English historian of the Crimean
War, Kinglake, writing in 1845, refers to Smyrna, which
the Turks call, as he says, “infidel Smyrna,” in the
following terms: “I think that Smyrna may be called
the chief town and capital of the Grecian race. For
myself, I love the race, in spite of all their vices.”8
(See Eothen, or Traces of Travel brought Home from
the East, by Alexander William Kinglake, p. 41, ed.
1876).
Another English traveler, who made the tour of
Asia Minor on foot, describing the American College
in the city of Marsovan and referring to the Greek
students there, says: “Like all Greeks, whether
of Europe or of Asia, they have a quality which always
compels interest. In general intelligence, in quickness
of perception, in the power of acquiring knowledge, they
are said, as a race, to have no equals among their fellow-students—nor
in their capacity for opposing each other
and making mountains of difference out of nothing.
Watching them, it grows upon the observer that traditional
Greek characteristics have survived strongly in
the race, and that Asia Minor Greeks of today are
probably not different from the Greeks of twenty centuries
ago.” (See W. J. Childs, Across Asia Minor on
Foot, p. 55, 1917.)
An English general, who during the administration
of Lord Beaconsfield was sent to Asia Minor on a
special mission after the conclusion of the Cyprus Convention
of 1878, after referring to some of the well-known
characteristics of the Greeks of Anatolia as an
enterprising, keen-witted people, well gifted with a rare
commercial instinct, goes on to say:
“Profuse expenditure on education is a national
characteristic, and to acquire a sufficient fortune to
found a school or hospital in his native town is the
honorable ambition of every Greek merchant....
The Anatolian Greeks generally are active and
intelligent, laborious and devoted to commercial pursuits.
They learn quickly and well, and become doctors,
lawyers, bankers, innkeepers, etc., filling most of
the professions. They are good miners and masons,
and villages are generally found near old lead and
copper mines. They have much of the versatility, the
love of adventure and intrigue, which distinguished the
ancient Greeks, and a certain restlessness in their commercial
speculations which sometimes leads to disaster.
The democratic feeling is strong; the sole aristocracy is
that of wealth, and ancient lineage confers no distinction.
The children of rich and poor go to the same
schools and receive the same free education” (Sir Charles
W. Wilson, Murray’s Hand-book for Travellers in Asia
Minor, 1905, pp. 70–71).
A brilliant French Hellenist and scholar, in referring
to the Greeks of Smyrna, gives the following picturesque
description of them. “They are,” he says, “so numerous
in that city, that they consider it as part of
their domain. Wide-awake, lively, playfully sly and
always interesting, they are here the tavern-keepers, the
grocers, the boatmen. These are the three trades that
most of the Greeks of the poor class prefer, just as
the profession of lawyer and that of physician are particularly
popular among the Greeks of the well-to-do
class. As tavern-keepers they talk all day long; they
keep up with the news, they discuss politics, they run
down the Turks, they are always stirring, bustling and
struggling, in their way, for the ‘grand idea.’”
“As grocers they sell a little of everything. They
do business as money changers, an infinite happiness for
a Hellene. As boatmen they have the sea, this old
friend of the descendants of Ulysses, as their constant
companion; they go right and left in the hustling of the
port, they see new faces; they question the travelers who
come from afar; they dispute with them about the boatfare,
which is yet another rare pleasure for the Greeks.
An amusing race, sympathetic, on the whole, notwithstanding
its faults; patriotic, persistent, sober, mildly
obstinate in its indomitable hope.”
“Because of their constant activity and their wit, the
Greeks have supplanted the Turks in many places in
Turkey.”9
The vivid description of Hellenism in Asia Minor
given by the German author, and corroborated by
numerous other writers and travelers, shows the important
rôle that the Hellenic element is destined to
play if that unfortunate country is ever favored with
the blessings of good government.
The Hellenic State should undoubtedly be the natural
inheritor or at any rate the executor of the estate of
the Sick Man of the East; if not of all of Asia Minor,
at any rate of a great part of it, i.e., western Anatolia.
But if the Ottoman sway in Anatolia is prolonged, it is
to be hoped that the country will, at least, be under
the joint tutelage of some civilized states which will
take into consideration the wishes and aspirations of the
Hellenic people.
By Karl Dieterich,
Privatdocent in Mediæval and Modern Greek Literature in the
University of Leipzig.
The political unrest in the Near East which preceded
the present world war and accompanied its beginnings
has turned attention once more to the existence of the
Greek element in the population of Asia Minor. Two
factors in particular have entered into this feeling of
unrest: first, the systematic persecutions of the Greeks
by the Young Turks, which have been going on ever
since the spring of 1914, and secondly, the recent communications
in the press dealing with alleged promises
on the part of the Triple Entente to indemnify Greece
through extensive territorial concessions in Asia Minor—the
talk was of an extent of 100,000 to 120,000 sq. km.—in
order to repay her for her intervention in the war.
However one may feel as to both these points and their
justification, this much is clear, that the Turks believed
that they were in the presence of a Greek peril.11
There was thus started, in Asia Minor, a defensive
struggle on the part of the Turks that was just as
sharply defined as the offensive which this Greek element
had for a long time been actually carrying on
against the Turks of this region; with this difference,
however, that the Turkish defensive has only recently
acquired sufficient strength to make its action felt, while
the Greek offensive has for decades been quietly at work
getting the upper hand economically, culturally and nationally
in that land where they once ruled for a period
of more than a thousand years. Granted that the Greek
propaganda, which has, for a considerable time, been
forwarded in Asia Minor by every possible means, has
in many particulars been carried on too bitterly, and
has injured the sensibilities of the Ottomans, the fact
remains that the Greeks in Asia Minor economically
and culturally have control of Asia Minor even now,
not as an outside or foreign element in the population,
though the movement has been forwarded from the
outside, but as something that has developed from within
on the very soil of the country itself, something that
has in centuries of growth become a historic fact and
that is only to be understood when one has fully grasped
what has gone before.
To do this one must go back into times which are
long since past, though their resultant forces, far from
having ceased to operate, seem just now, as a matter of
fact, to be renewing their strength.
Asia Minor was in prehistoric times a field for Greek
colonization. Long after its littoral had, in early Hellenic
times (dating back, in fact, to the 10th century
B.C.), been bordered with a fringe of Greek settlements,
which were the basis of the old Ionic and Æolic
civilizations, this coast colonization had, in later Greek
times, been extended and developed through the victorious
eastern expeditions of Alexander the Great into
a real colonization of the interior.
Just as had been the case in the whole of the western
regions of Asia Minor, there arose in the 4th to 2nd
centuries B.C., in the interior of the country as well,
a whole series of new Greek cities, which from that time
on have constituted firmly fixed centers for the Hellenizing
and civilizing of the land. This began with
Byzantine and Turkish times and has extended up to
the present, forming a sure testimony to the stubborn
endurance of this late Greek civilization. One needs
only to think of towns like Nicæa, Nicomedia, Prusa,
Pergamon, Philadelphia, Thyatira, Laodicea, etc., which
were all founded in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. and
were named after the Diadochi12 or their wives. After
the fall of the states founded by the Diadochi, the
Romans came in and conquered Asia Minor. Without
having succeeded in permanently Romanizing it, they
gave it a solidity which enabled the Byzantine emperors,
after the later Hellenizing of the Eastern Roman
Empire, to advance farther and farther into the interior
and toward the east, accompanying the victorious advance
of Christianity: in Cappadocia, the home of Greek
monastic life in the East, there was firmly established in
Cæsarea, in the 6th century, a new outpost of Greek
civilization.
Thus, throughout the centuries, by a process of
colonization that was forwarded now by peaceful means
and again by war, Hellenism forced its way steadily
eastward, and on the basis of the older indigenous population
a new sphere for Greek colonization was opened
up which developed its own peculiar cultural strength
only after the passing away of the ancient Greek civilization,
in Christian, that is, and Byzantine times. Up to
the end of the first millennium of the Christian Era,
at a time when the Balkan Peninsula, including Ancient
Greece, had long since lost its ancient city-life and
culture beneath the inroads and devastations of Goths,
Avars and Slavs, Asia Minor was still a populous and
blooming land with countless large cities, whose inhabitants
combined Hellenistic culture with Christian fervor.
Intellectual traditions, associated with the names of
Arrian, Dio Cassius, Strabo, Galen and Epictetus, were
still living and were perpetuated in the writings of the
Byzantine historians of the 10th-14th centuries, the
most famous of whom came from Asia Minor.13 At
that time the strongly ascetic ideals of Greek monastic
life were still in full vigor, as they had been first
preached and practiced by the three great Church
Fathers, Basil of Cæsarea, the Cappadocian, and the
two Gregories of Nyssa and Nazianzus, and as they had
assumed controversial form in the monastic castles of
Asia Minor (the forerunners of the monasteries of
Mount Athos), built on the Bithynian Olympus, which
is still called by the Turks Keshish-Dagh, i.e., Monks’
Mount, on the Auxentios (also in Bithynia), on Mounts
Sipylus, in Lydia, and Latmos, in Caria. In ecclesiastical
architecture, too, Asia Minor was an originator:
the so-called “Domed” Basilika, which reached its
greatest perfection in St. Sophia in Constantinople and
its most perfect reproduction in St. Mark’s in Venice,
owes its development to Asia Minor.14
Finally there arose in Asia Minor a new folk-poetry
that dealt with the deeds of heroes. What the Nibelungen
is to the Germans, the Chanson de Roland to the French,
and Beowulf to the English, that, to the Greeks of the
Middle Ages, was the romantic epic of Akritas (i.e.,
Count) Basilios. Discovered only a few decades ago,
though scattered widely, wherever Greek is spoken, in
countless fragments of folk-poetry, it is a sort of crystal
precipitate in verse of those struggles which the
Byzantine Counts were forced to wage against the
Saracens on the eastern confines of their realm, in
Cappadocia. The poem has for us a double value:
first, as proving that the national center of gravity of
Hellenism lay then in Asia Minor, and second, as
enlightening us as to the ethnological relations of the
country, for its hero is the son of a Greek woman by
an Arab Emir (hence his surname Digenis, that is,
born of two races).15
From a political as well as a cultural point of view,
Asia Minor formed a center of Hellenism. From here
sprang all the great ruling families, which from the 8th
century to the 13th constantly renewed the kingdom:
the Isaurians (717–867), the Armenians (867–1057),
the Comneni (1057–1185), the Laskarides (1204–1261),
the Palæologi (1261–1453). They are all rooted in the
feudal nobility of Asia Minor, which is comparable with
our east Elbe colonial nobility. If it had not been for
these powerful and energetic noble families the Byzantine
Empire, and with it Hellenism as well, would long
ago have been destroyed, and if the Greeks in Asia
Minor had not succeeded in these struggles, that lasted
300 years, in stemming the advance of the Turks, their
hordes would have poured over the Balkan Peninsula
and Hungary centuries earlier than they did. We must
briefly review these wars, for in no other way can the
present ethnical and cultural constitution of the country
and the position of Hellenism in it be fully understood.
The annihilation of Hellenism and the coincident erection,
one after the other, of two Turkish empires came
in two great phases: the first, at the end of the 11th
century, in the conquest by the Seljuks, and the second,
at the beginning of the 14th century, in that by the
Ottomans. The geographical situation of the capitals of
these two kingdoms, Iconium (Konia) and Prusa
(Brussa), is in itself an indication of the swinging of
the Turkish center of gravity from the east toward the
northwest.
Although the Seljuk kingdom did not embrace the
whole peninsula within its boundaries, it threatened, at
first, with that terrific thrusting strength of the Mongolian
conquerors, to reach out far beyond its boundaries,
and to wrest from the Greeks that northwestern part
of Asia Minor that was so greatly coveted. In 1080
the Seljuks were already in the extreme northwest in
Bithynia, and in possession of Nicæa and Nicomedia,
and were ranging the whole coast regions from Smyrna
to Attalia (Adalia) as pirates. The Greeks, who were
at first purely on the defensive, joined in with the
Crusaders, and succeeded, after twenty years of stubborn
fighting, in thrusting the Turkish conquerors back
of a line which corresponds pretty closely to that of the
Eskishehr-Karahissar-Akshehr railroad line of today.
This was in the early part of the 12th century (1117).
A second thrust by the Greeks (1139) drove them back
upon their old base and center, Iconium. Western Asia
Minor was thus again rescued to the Greeks and nearly
forty years of quiet followed. This time was utilized
by the Greek emperors to build a strong line of fortresses
against possible further attacks; all strategically
important points were defended by strong forts, especially
the valley of the Sangarios, which formed the
corridor of attack against Constantinople. Even today,
as one travels over the railroad from Ismid-Eskishehr,
he sees numerous, fairly well preserved ruins of these
Byzantine forts which served the same purpose of border-defense
as those of today in the valley of the Saal in
our own land.16 They bear Turkish names, but he who
has studied into these things knows that these are only
literal translations of old Greek names: Inegeul, shortened
from Angelokome = Angelstown; Kupruhissar,
from the Greek Gephyrokastron = Bridgefort; Karadjahissar
= Greek Melangeia (Turkish, karadja = blackish).
They mark, therefore, the boundary between
Byzantine and Turkish history.
Thanks to these fortresses, the Greeks succeeded in
repulsing the Turkish assaults, so vehemently renewed
in 1177, until, by the Latin conquest of 1204, the
Byzantine Empire was entirely restricted to Asia Minor,
where, in the so-called Nicæan Empire, it experienced
such a promising rebirth that it soon embraced the whole
northern half of western Asia Minor. This new kingdom
secured to the Greeks the mastery in Asia Minor
for 125 years more, and it would have secured it to them
for an even longer period if the Mongol invasion of
1241 and the consequent weakening of the Seljuks had
not tempted the ambitious Greek emperors to stretch
out their hands once more toward that fatal Constantinople,
instead of using their whole strength in maintaining
their hold on Asia Minor; for the Greek Empire
of that time was no longer strong enough to hold control
over two continents that were so seriously threatened,
especially since a new avalanche was already rolling in
from the east, the mighty Ottomans, who rose up in
the strength of youth among the ruins of the fallen
empire of the Seljuks. What the Seljuks in 240 years
had failed to accomplish, the Ottomans were destined to
bring about in a single generation, the ruination of Hellenism
in Asia Minor.
It was in 1299 that the petty Turkish feudal prince,
Osman, broke through the fortified region of the Sangarios,
and after sixteen years of desperate fighting
succeeded in forcing his way through to Nicæa, the chief
defensive point of the Greeks, in order to lay the
foundations of that great Ottoman Empire that was to
be the mighty successor to the Byzantine Empire. He
still met with almost invincible resistance; Nicæa with
its mighty walls could not be forced, and it was only in
1326, the year of his death, that Prusa, after a ten-year
siege, fell, and under the name of Brussa became the
first Ottoman capital. In 1330, and after a siege of
fifteen years, came the fall of Nicæa, and later that of
Nicomedia. The hardest part of the task had thus been
done, the first great breach had been made in the stronghold
of the Greek Empire, and the conquerors now
turned to the south. Pergamon fell in 1335, Sardis in
1369, and Philadelphia (Alashehr), the last of the Greek
cities of the interior, which, according to the expression
of a Greek chronicler, stands like a star in a clouded sky,
was captured in 1391. Smyrna, the old Greek acropolis,
had already fallen a prey early in the 14th century to
the Seljuks, who had found in Aïdin, the ancient Tralles,
a last support for their sinking power. Apart from
Trebizond in the extreme northeast, which up to 1461
maintained itself as the capital of the little coast state
which was also called Trebizond, all Asia Minor was
now in the hands of the Turks. The Greeks, as a
political factor, had ceased to play any part. The
question as to whether they had ceased to be of any
importance as a civilizing and cultural factor we must
now attempt to investigate.
Byzantine sources show clearly enough that Asia
Minor, even in the 11th century, was suffering from
decrease in its population. This was caused partly by
the endless levies of troops, necessitated by the struggles
against the Bulgarians in the Balkans, and partly by
agrarian conditions in Asia Minor, of which I have yet
to speak. The consequences of this systematic depopulation
first became evident when the country collapsed
under the inroads of Seljuks, Mongols and Ottomans;
for the defensive military strength that was for a while
maintained could not disguise the fact that the national
strength of the Greeks was already broken when the
inroads of these peoples began. Furthermore, there was
no longer any means at hand to renew this strength
which had been for centuries so systematically drained.
On the contrary, the depopulation went on from bad
to worse, and it took place in different ways according
to the varying character of the three conquering peoples.
The Seljuks, who were bent chiefly on gaining new
pasturing grounds, seem to have drawn the Greek population
closer to themselves and to have made them of
some service, instead of attempting to drive them out
by force. This is proven by the accounts of voluntary
or forced submission to the conquerors, into which the
inhabitants were driven by the unsound agrarian conditions
in Asia Minor, which were characterized by an
ever-growing tendency toward larger and larger estates,
a tendency against which, even in the 10th century, the
clear-sighted emperors had vainly enacted the strictest
laws. The consequences appeared at the time of the
inroads of the Seljuks; evidently with full knowledge
of these conditions, they promised the oppressed peasants
in the conquered regions complete freedom in return
for the payment of a head tax, if they would yield to
their control. Thus great masses of the Greek population
went over to the Turks and were lost to Hellenism.
Emperor John Comnenos, on one of his campaigns
against the Seljuks of Iconium (1120), was
forced first to fight bitterly with the Greeks of that
region, who had either been already half Turkified, or
were, at any rate, strongly Turcophile. We see, then,
that at that time large intermixtures of the native Greeks
(or of the Hellenized native population) with the Seljuks
must have taken place, for only through such intermixture
is the fact to be explained that the Anatolian
population of today, both Christian and Mohammedan,
instead of showing a distinct racial stamp, rather presents
strongly modified features which cannot be described
as either Aryan or Mongolian.17
The Ottomans were less bent on peaceful assimilation
than on forcible subjection and extermination. In their
character as masters they sought to make the conquered
as harmless as possible, and they used to this end a
means that they had learned from the Byzantine emperors;
they transplanted, from the conquered cities that
had a large Greek population, large numbers of these
Greeks to other cities where the Greeks were less
numerous, so that everywhere the Greeks were forced
into a minority. Furthermore, the Greeks were no
longer permitted to live in the large cities that were at
that time still strongly walled, but were compelled to
settle outside in the suburbs. From these suburbs there
gradually developed later, as the Greek population increased,
entirely new towns, which crowded the old
city-center from its predominating position and established
itself in its place. This system, as we shall see,
resulted in strengthening rather than weakening the
Greek element. And yet, in this Turkish conquest, a
great part of the Greeks in the towns were constantly
being forced to leave Asia Minor and to take refuge in
the European part of the Empire, for the Byzantine
historians of that time (the 14th century) tell of mass
emigrations to Europe, of homeless refugees crowded in
and around Constantinople, and of growing insecurity
in the neighborhood of the capital. This exodus from
the towns betokens a second essential difference as compared
with what had happened in the Balkan Peninsula.
While, in the Balkans, the cities appear as the supporting
centers, the bulwarks, of the Greeks against the
Slav inundation, forming a base of operations for winning
back the open country that had become Slav, in
Asia Minor not only the country regions but the towns
as well fell into the hands of the conquerors, evidently
because the Turks were better trained soldiers and more
familiar with the art of besieging towns than were the
Slavs, who were accustomed only to campaigns in the
open. The degree to which the Greek communities of Asia
Minor suffered under the Turkish conquest is shown by
the old Church Acts which are still preserved in the
Patriarchate in Constantinople.18 While Asia Minor before
the Turkish invasion counted no less than fifty
seats of Metropolitans (the highest church dignitaries)
it has today only twenty.19 Of these, twelve alone are
distributed in the western provinces, while the other
provinces have only eight. Even of these the greater
part are maintained only for the sake of the names.
These numbers show better than anything else how
seriously the Greek town-population in the interior of
Asia Minor melted away as a result of the Turkish
conquest, for every withdrawal of the seat of a Metropolitan,
and every uniting of several such seats in one,
presupposes a decided decrease in the population of a
district.
The greatest direct losses of the Greeks were caused
by the two great Mongolian invasions of the years 1241
and 1402, especially the latter under the much-feared
Timur. These hordes found their only joy in burning,
murdering and pillaging, and poured forth like a plague
of locusts “in separate bands over Galatia, Phrygia,
Bithynia, Paphlagonia, the coast region of Caria, Lycia
and Pamphylia in such a way that it seemed as if the
whole Tartar army was billeted in every separate province,
so numerous were they.” So says one of the last
Byzantine historians (Dukas), who pictures also, in
vivid colors, the consequences of this predatory incursion
in the words, “Timur left neither living men, nor weeping
children, nor barking dogs, nor crowing cocks, but
everywhere nothing but the stillness of death.” Thus
every one of these three Turkish inundations had in its
own way contributed to decimate the Greek population
of Asia Minor.
Only in two greater districts have compact groups of
Greeks of considerable extent preserved their nationality,
their speech and, in part, their religion, that is,
in Middle Cappadocia, in the interior of eastern Asia
Minor, and in Pontus, in the extreme northern coast
region; in the former as a relic of the old church settlements
and in the latter as the last remains of that latest
Greek effort at establishing a state in Asia Minor, the
Empire of Trapezus. The Greek population of these
two districts can therefore serve to bring clearly before
us the Asia Minor Greeks of the Middle Ages, in their
physical as well as their linguistic character.
Before proceeding further I must state that these
peoples, like those of the Balkan Peninsula, must already
have acquired their present physical stamp in the early
Middle Ages, at any rate, before the Seljuk-Turkish
conquest, for the modified, ethnically but slightly distinguished
type of the western Anatolian peasant population
is not characteristic of these Greeks. Rather do
the Cappadocian Greeks show unmistakable Armenian
influence, especially in the broad and extraordinarily
high skull, and the large fleshy nose, as well as in their
compact and sturdy build, while those of the mountainous
coast region of Pontus have retained the more finely
cut features of the Greeks and their more graceful form.
Some claim to find a third type in the Greeks of south-eastern
Asia Minor, a type which shows strikingly
Semitic features, and which is probably to be traced
back to the numerous Syrian immigrations into Asia
Minor during the supremacy of the Isaurian Dynasty
of Byzantium, 717–867. In the same way the Armenian
type of the inland Greeks is to be traced back to
the extensive intermingling of Byzantine Greeks and
Armenians during the 9th and 10th centuries, when
the Byzantine Empire received a strong quickening of
Armenian blood. A dynasty of Armenian origin at
that time gave the Byzantine imperial throne a new
hold and lent renewed strength to the new kingdom
and a great Byzantine province of Asia Minor was
called “the Armenian Province.” In any case, we
must be on our guard against deriving our present
ethnographical picture of Asia Minor directly from the
old racial divisions into Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians.
The fact that Asia Minor served as a bridge between
Asia and Europe prevented such a preservation of the
old ethnical relations, as had been the case in the Balkan
Peninsula, that great reservoir of people in migration;
here as there, in judging of ethnological characteristics,
we should, far more than has up to now been the case,
start out from Byzantine times, which completely
transformed the ancient ethnological nature of both
peninsulas.20 That we have to do, however, in the case
of the Cappadocian and Pontic Greeks with autochthonous
remains of pre-Turkish times, and not with
later immigrants, is shown not only by their racial type
but by their dialect. This belongs to the very oldest
forms of the Modern Greek language, if one leaves out
of account the still more ancient Tzakonian, and enables
us to conclude that it broke away from other Greek at
a very early period, and followed a separate development
of its own. This is particularly true of the Pontic
dialect of Samsun (Amisos), Œnoe (Unieh) and Ophis;
there is in the phonetics of the dialect, as well as in
the vocabulary, so much that is peculiar that it is almost
unintelligible to those conversant with the ordinary
Modern Greek. But this holds true also of the dialect
of some twenty Cappadocian towns—for with only
twenty are we here concerned—a dialect which is still
quite on the level of the Greek of the early Middle Ages,
evidently going back to the time of the settlements in
the country of the old monks, which can be proved, in
the region of Cæsarea, to go back in many cases as far
as the 4th century B.C. These dialects,21 however, are,
as compared with those larger and continuous regions
where common Greek is spoken, only small and distinct
islands of the Greek speech, which are constantly wearing
away and giving up ground, more and more, although
the proportion of Greeks in these regions is
much higher than elsewhere. The ratio is highest in
Pontus, where there are nearly 250,000 Greeks (25 to 30
per cent of the population), and where they form a
large percentage even of the city population, especially
in Trebizond and Samsun. On the contrary, in Cappadocia
they are to be found settled only in a large
number of villages, comprising altogether something
like 40,000 souls.22 The number of these Greeks in
Pontus as well as in Cappadocia is, furthermore, all the
harder to fix accurately, because there are among them
many communities of Christians who conceal the fact
that they are Christians, and, for political reasons, pass
as adherents of Islam (even making use of the Turkish
language), but who are really devoted to Christianity
and have kept up their Greek national feeling. In
Pontus they are especially to be found in the districts
of Tonia and Ophis, where in the seventies of the last
century they were estimated at about 14,000, while in
other districts, as in Krom and Torul, a strong process
of Christianizing them anew has taken place.23
Apart from these two isolated areas of Greeks, the
Turks have inundated the whole peninsula, subjecting
it to the Turkish nationality and to the Turkish language,
while Hellenism, though not entirely destroyed,
has been so seriously broken up and shattered that it
has been obliged to give up even its language and its
religion, that is to say, has completely lost its national
consciousness. The numerous Greek names of rivers,
villages and mountains have, with very few exceptions,
all disappeared, being replaced by Turkish names.24 As
far as administration and ways of living were concerned,
the Turkish conquest produced very few radical changes.
The very towns which under Greek control had formed
commercial and administrative centers, continued to be
such under the Turks, keeping, for the most part, their
old Greek names as a proof of the strength of 1500-year-old
traditions. Towns like Smyrna, Prusa, Pergamon,
Magnesia, Attalia, Adana, Tarsus, Iconium,
Ancyra, Cæsarea, Amasia, Castamuni, Trapezus, Sinope,
Amisos and others experienced a new quickening under
their old names, which the Turks altered only slightly.
Not only did they continue to be the capitals of their
various districts for purposes of administration, but
their names were extended so as to apply to the entire
districts of which they were centers. Practically all
the vilayets and sanjaks of Asia Minor received their
names from these old centers of city-civilization and comparatively
few have Turkish names, the ancient Tralles,
Philadelphia and Dorylæum, for example, bearing the
Turkish names Aïdin, Alashehr and Eskishehr respectively.
On this weighty point, therefore, the Turks, as
an unhistoric people, have been as little able to interrupt
the continuity of civilization as in the Balkan Peninsula,
where the larger towns likewise have kept their Greek
names.
Just as the Turks in Asia Minor have taken over
the way of living of their predecessors in power, so too
have they accepted almost unchanged their social relations.
Two points alone deserve special mention here,
the possession of large landed estates and the feudal
system. The Turkish landowners, the Beys, are nothing
but the direct successors of the Byzantine archontes,
and the Turkish peasants have been forced to render
compulsory service to the Beys just as the Christian
peasants did to the archontes. That strongly developed
feudal system, too, which has existed from Byzantine
times, especially ever since the 11th century, with its
distinction between the little and large fiefs for foot
soldiers and cavaliers, respectively, was taken over by
the Turks, and was by them even more highly developed.
In this accommodation to the conditions and institutions
of the subject peoples did the strength, as well
as the weakness, of the new masters consist: in so far as
they found before them fast-bound customs, which they
simply took over, they were obliged to accept, along with
their advantages, their drawbacks as well. The only real
advantage that they received came from their acceptance
of feudalism, while the retention of cultural and social
conditions in town and country was bound gradually to
weaken their power, because these conditions either outlived
them or, at any rate, were not suited to them. The
first statement applies to agrarian relations, and the
latter to commercial relations in the towns. This free
shepherd and peasant race (for this they had previously
been) lost its free character through taking over the
Byzantine provincial nobility without, however, in doing
this, developing a genuinely urban civilization, which is
an absolutely necessary prerequisite for trade-activity.
Thus the Turkish peasantry went backward without a
Turkish bourgeoisie arising. At any rate, only a limited
town-folk arose which made its living by handicraft but
did not know how to conquer economically the regions
that it had subdued politically. There existed here,
therefore, a twofold, dangerous breach in the social
organism of Mohammedanism, and into this breach
sprang the ever-alive and ever-enterprising Greek, first
the Greek trader, and then the Greek farmer. Both
had in the west coast of Asia Minor and in the islands,
regions where Greeks have always lived, a field for their
activity that, though at first modest, has slowly but
steadily broadened out.
In the first place, Greek trade in Asia Minor was
destined to have an awakening. The impulse to this
came from the trade policy inaugurated in the Levant
by Colbert, the gifted Minister of Louis XIV. A special
trade-society was founded for this purpose (1664), the
consular system was reformed, French merchants were
united in permanent corporations and a state system of
control was arranged between the most important harbors
of the Levant and Marseilles. An interesting account
has been preserved, dating back to the year 1733,
which tells of measures taken to increase the trade of
Smyrna as over against its rival Constantinople, and
one from the year 1778, containing a regulation decided
upon by the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce for the
French merchants of Smyrna.25
The number of firms there that represented French
houses had, in the period from 1752 to 1783, already
increased to twenty-nine as against eleven in Constantinople
and eight in Salonika. This French trade-policy
was systematically based on a strengthening of Smyrna,
with the evident purpose of driving the rival trade of
Italy out of the field. In this it must have succeeded,
for in the forty years from 1750 to 1789 the value of
French goods imported from Smyrna to Marseilles rose
from 5,629,000 pounds to 12,805,000 pounds and, at the
same time, the export from Marseilles to Smyrna rose
from 4,250,000 pounds to 9,500,000 pounds. This increase
in the trade of Marseilles naturally postulated a
similar increase in the trade of Smyrna; this attained
even in 1787 no less a figure than 52,750,000 Turkish
pounds, in which figures is included the rapidly increasing
trade with Russia which resulted from the latter’s
position as Turkey’s protector since 1774. Smyrna thus
became a new and important reloading place in the trade
of the Levant, and although, at the beginning of the
18th century, it had numbered hardly 30,000 inhabitants,
it had, in the year 1803, 100,000, of whom about a third
were Greeks. The new blood was mostly to the advantage
of the Greeks. In fact, one may say that the new
enlargement of Smyrna, which had formerly been the
center of Hellenism in Asia Minor and became so in
an increasing degree from now on, opened a new period
of prosperity to the Greeks of Asia Minor; from all parts
of the Greek Orient a stream of enterprising Greeks
gathered together here, so that the old capital of Ionia
soon became once more an almost purely Greek city;
in 1850, of about 125,000 inhabitants, 60,000 were
Greeks, in 1880 of about 160,000, 75,000 or 80,000
were Greeks, and in 1910, over 100,000 inhabitants of
the city’s 225,000 were Greeks. On the contrary, the
number of Turks has, in the last 100 years, dropped from
75,000 to 60,000, or, according to some authorities, to
50,000, while the number of Greeks has almost quadrupled.26
The trade of Smyrna has correspondingly
increased, especially since the opening up of the interior
through the railroads that go out from Smyrna into the
valleys of the Hermos and Mæander. Though the
trade in 1839 amounted only to 53 million francs, it
had increased in 1855 to 120 million, and by 1881 had
even reached the figure of 220 million francs. It had
already surpassed the commerce of Constantinople, and
the Turks therefore call Smyrna too, mingling envy and
scorn, “the infidel Smyrna” (Giaour Ismir). For Hellenism
in Asia Minor, however, it became a new and
firm support for its interests and a source of prosperity.
Even in the year 1818 the Greek merchants of Smyrna
were able to build at their own expense a beautiful
casino, intended alike to serve business and social ends.
This proved, however, to be a tender blossom that had
come out prematurely and was soon destroyed by the
storms of the Greek War for Independence (1821–1829),
though it did bloom forth all the more strongly after the
war’s fortunate ending.
For Hellenism began to spread over the west coast in
a large number of little places, which were in part old
Hellenic sites, and in part places settled during the
Middle Ages, or in later Turkish times. Among the
very old sites is Phocæa, which through a strange play
of circumstances has formed the beginning and the
ending of a development that has embraced the world.
Famous as the metropolis of Marseilles (Massilia), it
was, after a long period of decay, revived in modern
times by the reflux movement from her daughter of old,
a movement that affected Smyrna first, and then its
neighbor Phocæa as well, for this too, in spite of its
changing political fortunes, had always been a bulwark
of Christianity and was again destined to experience a
new, though modest, rejuvenescence. Although, during
the first half of the 19th century, the Greeks there were
still in the minority, as compared with the Turks, constituting
two-fifths of the population (2,000 out of
5,000), the relation has in the intervening decades so
changed that now out of 8,000 inhabitants, 6,000 are
Greeks, so that these now form three-quarters of the
inhabitants. This increase is due to the vigorous local
shipping trade which centers here and which numbers
annually something like 3,000 ships. The most remarkable
thing is, however, that this rejuvenated Old Phocæa
has already become once more the mother-city of a young
Phocæa (New Phocæa), which is about ten kilometers
northwest of the old and although only a few decades
old already has about 5,000 inhabitants of whom about
4,000 are Greeks. New and Old Phocæa then, taken
together, already number about 10,000 Greek inhabitants
as compared with 3,000 Turks. Working the salt pits
and exportation of raisins constitute the chief sources of
livelihood of the two cities.
The two other important harbors north of Smyrna
are, like Phocæa, of recent origin and are therefore
purely Greek; I mean Dikeli and Aïvali. Dikeli may
really be described as founded by the German archæologist
Karl Humann, who in 1869 had the road that
led to this place from Pergamon rebuilt, in order the
better to transport the Pergamene sculptures excavated
by him. Enterprising Greek merchants have taken
advantage of this road in the exportation of the products
of the country, and have built up here a trading
place which in 1880 had 3,000 exclusively Greek inhabitants
but which now contains 5,000 such.27 Owing to
this fact the older harbor of Chandirli, situated more
to the north, has steadily diminished in importance. The
chief exporting harbor of northwest Asia Minor is,
however, Aïvali, newly built in the third decade of the
19th century on the site of an older Greek settlement
named Cydonia, a name which, like Aïvali, means
“quince.” It is an almost unique example, on Asia
Minor soil, of a large, purely Greek and practically
self-governing community, with 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants,
a yearly export business of ten to twelve million
francs and a shipping of over 3,000 vessels. It has
thoroughly modern business institutions as well as a
Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture and an Agricultural
Bank. It is the seat of three consular agents,
those of England, France and Italy. Through Aïvali’s
growth the ancient Adramit (Adramyttium), which was
formerly on the coast but is now further inland away
from the bay, has been put into the background and
now contains about 6,000 inhabitants. As compared
with these three ports, the three that are situated on
the west coast, south of Smyrna, are by no means so
important, perhaps just because they are older settlements,
in which Hellenism has had to force its way
against the Turks, who were here numerically superior.
This is particularly true of Chesme, which lies on the
projecting west point of the peninsula of Clazomenæ.28
It is a town of about 6,000 inhabitants, which prospers
through its raisin trade. The Turks, to be sure, form
the majority of the population (about two-thirds), but
the shipping (2,500 ships annually) is entirely in Greek
hands. The chief place of export for the products of
the Mæander valley is Scalanova, settled in the Middle
Ages and named by the Turks Kush-Adassi, by the
Greeks New Ephesus. The Greeks, 3,000 to 4,000 in
number, are constantly forcing the Turks, who are settled
in the old walled town and are about equal to them
in number, further into the background, and in commerce
they completely control the field. Lastly, Budrum,
a Turkish settlement on the site of the ancient Halicarnassus
and still inhabited by about 3,000 Turks, has
become Hellenized in proportion as the growing importance
of the place as a center of export for southwest
Asia Minor—the ancient Caria—has been appreciated
by the Greeks. Their number, which twenty years ago
was a little over 2,200, may since then have come to
equal that of the Turks, or may even have surpassed it.
The other little seaport towns on the southwest coast,
as Marmaras, Macri, Levisi, Kalamaki and Phœnix,
since they are not connected by railroad lines with the
interior, are as yet without any commercial significance
and are of importance only in connection with local
coast-shipping. None of them has more than 3,000
inhabitants, but these are overwhelmingly Greek.
With these constantly increasing Greek settlements on
the west coast, settlements which have their economical
support in the great islands just off the coast, Mitylene,
Chios, Samos and Rhodes, the settlements on the extended,
exposed and less indented north and south coasts
of Asia Minor can bear no comparison either in number
or in importance, and this is true particularly of the
south coast. The chief places here are the ancient
Adalia (Attalia) founded in Hellenistic times, with
about 30,000 inhabitants, and the entirely modern Mersina,
founded in 1832, with about 22,000 inhabitants.
In Adalia, which was an important station for the fleet
in Byzantine times, and is now the chief emporium
for the whole interior of the southwest, there live about
10,000 Greeks, i.e., about a third of the total population,
while in Mersina they form the majority. This city,
too, owing to the fact that it is connected with the
Bagdad railroad by the Mersina-Adana line, has obtained
the commercial supremacy on the south coast;
it had in 1911 an import and export business of some
twelve to thirteen million francs, while Adana had a
business of only two and a quarter million. Here too,
therefore, the more flourishing condition of the cities is
in direct ratio with the increasing number of Greeks.
On the north coast, which is twice as long as the
southern, no new Greek settlements have developed,
but those that have existed since antiquity have maintained
their importance, thanks to the fact that they
have preserved their Greek element, which from these
bases has controlled the trade of the Black Sea.
Trebizond, Kerasunda (Kiresun), Œnoe (Unieh),
Amisos (Samsun), Sinope (Sinop), Ionopolis (Ineboli),
Heraclea (Eregli) are still strong supporting and gathering
points of the Greeks, who constitute in Trebizond
half of the population (about 25,000 Greeks out of
50,000 inhabitants), while Samsun, the greatest trade
center of the north coast, with an export business of
about forty million francs, has even a larger proportion
of Greeks.
Economically developed in quite another way, because
more blessed by nature and more highly favored by its
nearness to Constantinople, and on these accounts from
of old, more densely populated, is the northwest coast
of Asia Minor, the littoral of the Sea of Marmora.
Here are situated on relatively shorter stretches of
coast, no less than seven important old seaports which
also belong completely to the Greek sphere of influence.
There lie first, at and on the peninsula of Cyzicus, the
old cities of Panormos (Panderma) and Artake (Artaki).
The former is the more important as being the
chief place of export for the sheep of Asia Minor, the
value of which, even in 1893, amounted to fifteen million
francs. Since then, the town, which has about 12,000
inhabitants, of whom 2,000 are Greeks, has become the
terminus of the road that branches off from Manissa,
and will take a sudden jump as soon as it has direct
steamer connection with Constantinople. Artaki, an
almost purely Greek town of about 7,500 inhabitants,
subsists, in great part, from its manufacture of wine,
liqueurs and cognac. In particular, the white wines produced
here are highly esteemed in Constantinople. In
the southeast corner of the Sea of Marmora are situated
Mudania and Gemlik, the former, the old Apamea, the
point of departure of the railroad to Broussa, having
about 4,000 Greek and 2,000 Turkish inhabitants; the
latter, the ancient Kios, which the Greeks have once
more renamed by its old name, being an almost purely
Greek town of 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, which, like
Aïvali, enjoys an almost complete independence. The
chief exports are chromium-ore and tobacco (Kios-cigarettes!).
Finally, in the deep bay of Ismid, besides
Ismid itself, are at one and the other side of the city
Karamursal (the ancient Prænetus) and Gebize (the
Byzantine Dakibyza). Both are the capitals of districts
in which the Greek population already surpasses the
Turkish (1893: 15,000 Greeks and 11,000 Turks), although
in the towns themselves the Turks are still in
the majority (Gebize has about 4,000 Turks and 2,000
Greeks). Alongside of these places, however, especially
along the line of the Haidar-Pasha-Ismid Railway
are to be found many Greek places whose Greek population
increases, in a very striking way, the nearer one
gets to Constantinople. So, for example, Daridsha, the
Byzantine Aretzu, which is now once more inhabited
exclusively by Greeks, and Cadikioi, the ancient Chalcedon,
which now numbers 30,000 to 35,000 inhabitants,
who consist in almost equal numbers of Armenians,
Greeks and Turks, while at the beginning of the 19th
century it was inhabited almost entirely by Turks.
Coming now to the last of these places, Ismid (the
ancient Nicomedia), we find that this has lost its old
significance as a place of transfer, toward Constantinople,
of the products from the rich Bithynian plain,
since the Anatolian Railroad has drawn this business
in great part to itself, and its exports, which in 1893
amounted to thirty-two million francs, have since then
decreased proportionately with the decrease in the number
of its inhabitants, which furthermore is fluctuating
greatly, being now reported as 40,000, again as 25,000,
and again as only 20,000. The number of the Greeks
up to twenty years ago, when they numbered 6,000,
was constantly increasing, for in the first half of the
19th century they were estimated at not more than 1,000.
The whole Greek population of these sixteen towns is
about 240,000, of which number about half are found
in Smyrna, so that the other fifteen comprise a number
about equal with that in Smyrna. But the number of
Greek inhabitants of the coast has not yet been fully
enumerated. For if we add the number of those who
are settled in the districts of the various provinces that
border on the coast, we arrive at almost twice this
number, i.e., 450,000. There must then be living in
these coast regions, scattered outside the cities in the
country, more than 200,000 Greeks. These make their
living by fishing, and grape and fruit raising, and extend
in almost unbroken stretches between the towns along
the whole coast, so that the whole Greek population
of the coast consists in about equal proportions of city
and country dwellers, a ratio that we shall also find
obtaining in the interior as well.
This fringe or wreath of Greek colonies which extends
toward the south as well as toward the north forms
not only a strong economical force, but also a no less
strong spiritual force. This is usually underestimated,
as is too, in general, that idealistic element which is coexistent
in the Greeks with that confessedly very prominent
materialistic element, and this even in the times of
its deepest national humiliation it has never lost. This
idealistic element is rooted in a very strong national
feeling, which has been nourished by the recollection of
a great intellectual past and which finds its finest and
most effectual expression in the fostering of Greek
schools. This desire for schooling is implanted in the
Greek nature from the times of late antiquity, and
though it often savors rather strongly of scholasticism,
it has prevented the Greeks from losing their national
consciousness, as have the Jews and, to a certain degree,
Armenians. Even the church is held so sacred by
the Greeks only because she has been the bearer
of national ideals in the times of slavery and has, at
the same time, been a powerful political organ of
administration, forming the only means in Turkey of
putting through the national demands for schools.
The relation of church and school is therefore, in the
Greek Orient, quite different from that in Catholic
or even Protestant Christian lands. The church regards
itself not as the mistress of the school but rather
as her servant and patron. This fact must be clearly
understood in order rightly to estimate the relations
now to be considered. If, for example, a Greek community
wishes to establish a school on Turkish soil, the
council of the community informs the bishop of the
diocese of this desire and the latter communicates it to
the superior bishop, who then acquaints the Greek
Patriarchate in Constantinople with the matter. The
latter is the religious head of the Greeks in Turkey
and must therefore represent their educational interests.
It is his task then to obtain the Sultan’s permission to
establish the desired school, and in obtaining this, money
plays a not unimportant rôle. The richer the community
is, therefore, the more easily does it obtain the permission,
and since the Greek communities of the coast of
Asia Minor have always been, for the most part, very
rich, they were able to proceed to establish their own
schools at an early date. The oldest are those in Smyrna,
Aïvali and Chesme, and those that first came into existence
were not common schools but higher institutions of
learning, corresponding to the development of the times
and the aristocratic character of the Greek merchants.
The oldest and most famous of these schools, and the
only one which still exists, is the so-called Evangelical
School in Smyrna. It goes back to 1708, but the year
1733 is really to be regarded as the year of its foundation.
Existing under English protection since 1747, and
being therefore absolutely autonomous, it was, in 1810,
recognized by the Sultan as a fully authorized gymnasium,
and after being twice reorganized—in 1810 and
1828—the Greek Government, too, gave it full recognition.
Although supported entirely by the funds of the
community and benefactors’ gifts, and demanding for
its upkeep more than 100,000 francs, it still maintains
in Smyrna two great affiliated schools. Its significance
for the intellectual life of Smyrna rests in its ancient
museum and in its rich library (30,000 volumes and 200
manuscripts), the only one on Asia Minor soil.29
In Smyrna too is still published the first Greek newspaper
to appear on Turkish soil, Amalthea, which has
existed now for almost seventy-five years. Alongside
of this old school for advanced studies there were in
Smyrna in 1894 other Greek schools, and in particular
seventeen grammar schools, two trade schools (the oldest
having existed since 1857), four private girls’ schools
and one large girls’ college with three associated schools
and more than 2,000 pupils in all. The largest Greek
school community in Asia Minor, next to that of
Smyrna, is that of Aïvali, the second largest Greek
colony of the west coast. It supports more than twenty
grammar schools, two intermediate schools, a gymnasium
and a girls’ boarding school, which in 1892 were attended
by more than 1,100 pupils. Then comes Chesme, known
for its old advanced-school, which at that time possessed
only eleven schools but showed the largest number of
pupils (675). Nearly equal to this were Phocæa with
nine schools and 560 pupils, Adramit with nineteen
schools and about 600 pupils, Artaki with twenty-two
schools and 700 pupils, Panderma with fifteen schools
and 536 pupils, Gemlik (Kios) with nine schools
and 530 pupils, Mudania with eight schools and
330 pupils, Gebize with thirteen schools and 1,000
pupils. Although the wide dissemination, as well as
the prosperity and the intellectual development of the
Greeks on the north part of the west coast is reflected
in the large number of Greek schools, that of the
southern part is in this particular far more backward.
Apart from Scalanova with five Greek schools and 440
pupils, Adalia on the south coast is alone worthy of
mention with its ten schools and 600 pupils. Taken all
together these sixteen cities have more than two hundred
schools with more than 17,000 pupils,30 a number, the
significance of which can only rightly be appreciated
when compared with the corresponding Turkish figures,
which show, to be sure, that the number of schools is
a hundred larger but that the number of pupils is 6,000
less than that of the Greeks. There are therefore nearly
three times as many pupils per school in the Greek
schools as in the Turkish. The Greek settlements on
the north and south coasts are to be distinguished from
those on the west coast not only through their smaller
number, but also through the fact that only scanty and
weak settlements in the inland correspond to them. In
the west, on the contrary, as we have already seen, Greek
colonization has, since late antiquity, extended up into
the interior, and the consequences of this have been
felt even up to the present time, or, at any rate, have
been made anew noticeable, owing to the fact that the
Greeks of the west coast have for several decades been
pressing farther and more vigorously into the interior,
and have settled there more definitely. This region that
has at present been occupied by them only in its chief
centers is, in general, bounded by a line which may be
drawn from Ismid in the north, past Eskishehr, Afiun-Karahissar,
and Isbarta to Adalia. All that lies between
this line and the west coast may be regarded as
within the Greek sphere. The second phase of these
Hellenizing efforts of today begins with this forward
push into the interior of this region. Just how far and
in what way has this succeeded?
If we start on the basis of the actual facts of the case,
we find that in thirty towns of the western interior of
Asia Minor of more than 5,000 inhabitants, the Greeks
have a share in the population of from 1,000 to 10,000
inhabitants. Arranged according to the ratio of this
share in the population, these cities fall into different
groups, as follows:
First, a Greek majority is found in only two cities,
Michalitsh (about 7,000 Greeks out of a total of 8,000)
and Koplu (about 5,000 out of 8,000). Second, in nine
cities the Greeks form between one-half and one-third
of the population: Baindir (4,500 out of 10,000), Tireh
(6,000 out of 14,000), Edemish (3,000 out of 7,000),
Menemen (about 3,000 out of 10,000), Bergama (5,500
out of 14,500), Isbarta (7,000 out of 20,000), Sokia
(4,000 out of 12,000), Soma (2,000 out of 6,000),
Manissa (11,000 out of 35,000). Third, in four cities
the Greeks form about a fourth: Inegeul (about 2,000
out of 8,000), Kassaba (6,000 out of 23,000), Kermasti
(1,200 out of 4,800), Aïdin (8,500 out of 35,000).
Fourth, in five cities they form from a fifth to a sixth
part: Kutaiah (4,000 out of 22,000), Dimetoka (1,300
out of 7,000), Alashehr (4,500 out of 22,000), Milas
(2,000 out of 12,000), Bigha (1,600 out of 10,000).
Fifth, in five cities the Greeks form from a seventh to
a ninth of the total population: Kirkagatch (2,000 out
of 18,000), Ushak (1,500 out of 12,500), Balukiser
(1,300 out of 10,000), Sabandsha (1,000 out of 7,500),
Kyrkagatch (about 200 out of 18,000). Sixth, less
than a tenth in seven cities: Denizli (1,600 out of 17,000),
Soyut (1,500 out of 18,000), Nazilli (1,700 out of
21,000), Brussa (6,000 out of 80,000), Adabazar (1,600
out of 24,000), Eskishehr (1,150 out of 19,000), Nugla
(1,100 out of 15,000).
From this combination of facts several interesting conclusions
may be drawn as to the distribution of the
Greek population in the interior itself, and as to the
relation between the Hellenization of the interior as
compared with that of the coast regions.
If we group the cities named above according to their
distribution in the various provinces and districts, we
find that only fifteen of these fall within the province
of Aïdin, the largest province of the west coast of Asia
Minor, and the one that is held to most stubbornly by
the Turks. Of these fifteen, again, only thirteen come
in the district of Smyrna, Sarukan and Aïdin, which
form the most populous part of this province. These
are Menemen, Manissa, Kassaba, Alashehr; Kirkagatch,
Soma, Bergama; Baindir, Tireh and Odemish; Sokia;
Aïdin and Nazilli. Now these thirteen towns, with the
exception of Bergama, all lie, as the above grouping
indicates, on the four railroad lines which go out in four
directions from Smyrna, that is in those regions of the
province which belong economically to Smyrna. At
any rate, the significance for the Greek settlements of
the economic factor is clearly evidenced in these towns,
for they are, almost without exception, “capitals,” so
to speak, of smaller districts, and are therefore important
distributing and collecting centers for the local trade
to and from Smyrna. With the increase of this trade
the number of the Greeks in this group of interior cities
is bound to increase quickly or has already done so.
Most of the other towns named above are in the
province of Hodavendikiar, which lies due north of that
of Aïdin; and once more is it true that they are in the
most densely inhabited parts of the province, Brussa,
Ertogrul and Kutaiah. Of the nine cities that belong
here, five, again, are found on the line of the Anatolian
Railroad, namely, Biledjik, Soyut, Eskishehr, Kutaiah
and Ushak; one, Brussa, on a branch road and
three on no railroad at all, though within reach of
the Michalitch-Kirmasti-Inegeul Railroad. Here, too,
therefore, the cities which are more or less decidedly
Greek in their population lie along the main railroad
lines, though they are not quite so strongly Greek as
those in the province of Aïdin; for we are here in the
very heart of Turkey, and its greatest city Brussa, which
more than all the other cities of this region has preserved
its Turkish character more purely. It is always
to be borne in mind that the Anatolian Railroad goes
out from Constantinople and that this, with its strong
Greek population, is as important a gate of entrance to
the northwest of Asia Minor as Smyrna is for the west.
Although up to this time it is impossible to speak of
a Hellenizing of the great interior cities of western Asia
Minor, since these are (thus being quite different from
the coast cities) very far from succumbing, either
numerically or culturally, to the Greek invasion—the
number of Greeks is the largest in Manissa—yet, if one
looks into the matter narrowly, he gains the impression
that in the interior the Hellenizing influence comes from
the smaller towns. This supposition, to be sure, is
opposed to the view, still broadly accepted, that the
Greek element is purely a city element, and that the
country-folk consist only of Turks. This view, which,
as we have seen, does not hold even in the coast regions,
is, however, absolutely false and is only to be explained
as arising from the impressions of superficial travelers
who have rarely penetrated into the remoter regions
with a predominantly rural population. Anyone who
has, for example, visited the larger Greek islands of
the Asiatic coast, like Mitylene, Chios, Samos and
Rhodes, knows that these dense populations live in great
measure from grape and fruit-raising or from silk culture,
and only in a very small degree from trade.
Farming plays no very large part, simply because of
the lack of arable land. Since now, as we have said,
these very islands for something like fifty years have
become very densely populated or even in part overpopulated
(as, for instance, Samos), there have been
periodical emigrations of the island peasants, in considerable
numbers, over to the mainland, where they
have, in particular, settled in the fruitful valleys of the
Mæander and the Hermos in the western parts of Asia
Minor and in that of the Sangarios, farther north. In
part, it is the descendants of the former Greek landowners
who have been reduced to socagers or serfs, who,
on getting possession of some little capital, have now,
in their turn, driven back the Turks by buying them out
or by working the soil more scientifically, a process in
which they were helped by the immigrant islanders. If
a sufficient number of them is thus found settled together,
they try to obtain the Sultan’s firman permitting
them to settle in a town. Thus the English traveler
Hamilton states that the Greeks in a little town of
Lydia (Singerli), in which they had settled ten years
before, had, in his time (1837), increased to 40–50
families and were busied with building a new market.
In this way numerous new and dense settlements came
into existence in the midst of the more scattered Turkish
populations, and the higher fecundity of the Greek
settlers, combined with their industry, their intellectual
keenness, their frugality and their community-feeling,
helped always by the retrogression of the Turkish population
itself, have contributed to extend the Hellenizing
process more and more to the country districts.31
In particular have they taken possession of the regions
adapted to silk culture, like that of the lower Sangarios
Valley, and also of such regions as are adapted to
raising grapes. More recently, Greek industrial enterprises,
too, especially silk-spinning mills, cognac factories
and steam oil mills, have sprung into existence,
meeting with no rivalry on the part of the Turks. With
this Greek peasant of Asia Minor, who is on a higher
moral plane, and who is therefore more congenial to
us Germans than the Greek trader or innkeeper in the
coast-towns, our German spirit of enterprise which is
seeking to get the economic control over Asia Minor,
will have to come to terms, and it would be just as
perverse as it would be foolish to depend on the Turk
to the exclusion of the Greek, who has the controlling
hand in trade and traffic, as well as in the cultivation
of the soil.32
Even to a traveler of a hundred years ago the great
difference between the Greeks of the cities and the peasants
was especially noteworthy. The former were subservient
and cringing like the Armenians, while the latter
were energetic and intelligent, irreconcilable in their
hatreds and by no means lacking in courage. And it is
to these praiseworthy qualities, and not to their much-bruited
craftiness, that they owe their progress in the
interior of Asia Minor.33
As to the numbers of the Greek inhabitants of the
interior of Asia Minor, only an indirect estimate can
be made. The whole number of all the Greeks in the
interior of the two provinces of Brussa and Aïdin,
exclusive of the inhabitants of the coast regions, even
twenty years ago, amounted to 200,000, i.e., less than
half as many as in the coast regions. About 100,000
of these lived in places with a population of more than
5,000, so that about 100,000 were scattered among the
villages and towns. The distribution of this interior
population is very uneven. The densest Greek populations
have gathered in the Prefecture of Aïdin and here
chiefly in the sub-prefecture of Smyrna, with its five
districts (Sarukan, with four districts, and Aïdin, with
only one). These three sub-prefectures, therefore, in
their ten districts, comprised, twenty years ago, a fifth
part of the entire population. In the province of Brussa
the number of districts with a considerable Greek population
was only five, in the sub-prefecture of Ertogrul,
three; in those of Brussa and Kutaiah, one each.
There were the largest numbers in the district of
Eskishehr, the ancient Dorylæum, where they comprised
two-fifths of the population, and in Michalitch, where
they formed one-third of the total. In fifteen of the
twenty-five districts of the interior of the two prefectures
fifteen, therefore, already contained a considerable part
of the population. To speak in greater detail, these
districts may be classified as follows, with relation to
the proportions of their Greek inhabitants: The Greek
population is densest in the districts of Magnesia (Sanjak
Sarukan), and Eskishehr (Sanjak Kutaiah),
where they constitute a fifth of the population; less
dense in the district of Sokia (Sanjak Aïdin), with
about a third; next comes the district Michalitch
(Sanjak Brussa), with from a fourth to a third; and
then those of Bergama, Menemen, Baindir, Tireh
and Odemish (Sanjak Smyrna), where they form
about a fourth; next those of Alashehr (Sanjak
Sarukan) and Yenishehr (Sanjak Ertogrul) with about
a fifth; and finally those of Inegeul, Biledjik (Sanjak
Ertogrul) and Soma (Sanjak Sarukan), with a sixth
to a seventh of the entire population.
What made the estimating of the numbers of these
Greeks in the interior so very difficult was the fact that
up to a few years ago they spoke Turkish and therefore
did not share in the national and racial consciousness
of their kinsmen on the coast, and also the fact
that they do not essentially differ in physical type from
the Ottomans, who have become assimilated to the race
type of the conquered people and have lost their special
Turkish characteristics. This state of affairs began to
change when the Greeks, with the help of their church,
succeeded in introducing the Greek language in their
schools alongside of the Turkish. Since then, that is,
since the seventies of the last century, the national
propaganda has made great progress among them, and
the number of schools has greatly increased.
In the thirty cities of the interior of this region (prefectures
of Aïdin and Brussa) they possessed in the last
decade of the 19th century more than 400 schools with
about 25,000 pupils, while the Mohammedans in their
thousand schools had only 20,000 pupils. The number
of pupils in each Greek school therefore averaged 60,
while those in the Turkish schools averaged only 20,
a disproportion which is to be explained by the fact that
the Mohammedan schools are almost exclusively poorly
attended mosque-schools, while the Greek schools are
community-schools that are very well attended. The
religious character of the Turkish educational system is
just as prejudicial to the Turks as the nationalistic
tendency of the Greek schools is beneficial to the Greeks.
There are towns in which, in spite of the Greeks being
in a minority, more Greek children attend the schools
than Turkish children. So Sokia, with 180 Turkish and
218 Greek children in school; the same is true of Bigha
(125:140), Alashehr (250:525), Nazilli (162:220),
Menemen (220:325), Biledjik (1,100:1,113). In other
towns, such, for example, as Bergama, Magnesia, Milas,
Soyut, the number of the Greek pupils almost equals
that of the Turkish, and in most of them the number
is more than half as large as that of the Turkish pupils,
even in that stronghold of Mohammedanism, Brussa,
where there are something like 2,500 Greeks, as compared
with 5,000 Turkish pupils, although the Greeks
comprise here only ten per cent of the population.
These are figures which more than anything else are
indicative of the activity and capacity for education of
the Greek part of the population. The intellectual
superiority of the Greeks is set forth in an even stronger
light when one compares the sum total of the Greek
schools and of their pupils in both prefectures with that
of the Turkish. For we find that even in 1894 there
were 540 Greek schools, with about 30,000 pupils, as
compared with 1,900 Turkish schools, with about 42,000
pupils. The slight numerical superiority of the Turkish
scholars is, to say the least, entirely disproportionate to
the large majority of Turks in the population.
According to recent statistics, which are, to be sure,
taken from Greek sources34 and are, therefore, perhaps
a little too optimistic in their tone, the number of Greek
schools has since then risen to more than 700 and that
of the pupils to more than 100,000 (69,274 boys and
48,468 girls), which leads one to conclude that the Greek
population numbers a million, a number which, compared
with the 650,000 of twenty-five years ago, does not seem
to be too high an estimate, particularly if we take into
account the great increase of the Greeks through a higher
birthrate and through immigration. Thus, the sum
total of the Greeks in both prefectures, which have together
a population of about three millions, would be
about a third of this number and would, at any rate,
not fall far below this.
With this rapidly increasing Greek population of the
west coast and interior, the prefectures of Brussa and
Aïdin, and that in the mountains of Pontus (prefecture
of Trebizond) and Central Cappadocia (prefecture of
Angora), which number together a million and a third
more, we have not exhausted the list of Greeks of Asia
Minor. There are, as a matter of fact, large numbers
scattered through the interior and along the south coast,
chiefly in the prefecture of Sivas and Konia, where their
number in 1890 approximated 75,000. Next comes the
prefecture of Adana, with about 50,000, and, least
strongly Greek, the prefectures Angora (about 30,000)
and Kastamuni (about 25,000). It has, however, been
observed that the number of Greeks in the middle and
eastern provinces is always decreasing, which is doubtless
due to the fact that they wander away into the livelier
and more fruitful regions to the westward.35 These are
in this way becoming more and more solid nuclei for
the process of crystallization for Hellenism in Asia Minor,
which is thus once more, as it did in late antiquity,
shifting its center of gravity toward western Asia Minor,
as though it felt that here is ever that original free-flowing
source to which it now for the fourth time owes
its strengthening and rejuvenation: the first being when
in the last centuries before the Christian Era the native
Lydians and Phrygians were assimilated; the second,
when in early Byzantine times it turned back the Romanizing
process which had been going on since the beginning
of this era; the next, when in the 7th to the 10th centuries
it averted the threatening Arabic peril, and finally
when, though apparently defeated by the Turkish conqueror,
it has after 500 years of relaxation again regained
its vigor and strength in order to fulfill its old
historical mission, which consists not in forcing its way
on with the wild alarum of weapons, but through the
peaceful weapons put in its power by nature, i.e., by
material and spiritual civilizing agencies, that do their
work quietly. This mission Mohammedanism must meet
through appropriate measures in administration and
education, if it desires to secure its political control even
in the western part of Asia Minor, now and in the
future.
