Abstract
The Greek-Turkish antagonism is neither perennial nor primordial and it is a 19th century rivalry only in part, as we have seen. Thus, a good case could be made that the rivalry and enmity is mainly, though of course not exclusively, a contemporary conflict, a clash of the 20th century. The turning point is the 1st Balkan War (1912),1 which catapulted relations to their worst ever level for a decade, with armed conflict, persecution and ethnic cleansing being the rule of the day. Before picking up the thread from 1912, three events are worth highlighting as preludes to what was to come.
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Notes
On the First Balkan War as a watershed after which nothing could be the same in the Empire, see Michael Llewellyn Smith (1973), Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor (London: Allen Lane), pp. 11–12, 30
Geoffrey Lewis (1974), Modem Turkey (London: Ernest Benn Limited), pp. 56–7
Eric J. Zürcher (1993), Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris), pp. 111–14
Feroz Ahmad (1993), The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 6
Çağlar Keyder (1997), ‘The Ottoman Empire’, in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder: Westview), pp. 38–9.
Smith, op. cit., p. 6; Faruk Birtek (2005), ‘Greek Bull in the China Shop of Ottoman “Grand Illusion”: Greece in the Making of Modern Turkey’, in Faruk Birtek and Thalia Dragonas (eds), Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey (London: Routledge), pp. 37–8.
Smith, op. cit., pp. 5–6; Yiannis Yianoulopoulos (1999), ‘I eugenis mas tyflosis…’. Exoteriki politiki kai ‘ethnika themata’ apo tin itta tou 1897 eos ti Mikrasiatiki Katastrophi [’Our Noble Blindness…’. Foreign Policy and ‘National Issues’ from the Defeat of 1897 to the Asia Minor Disaster] (Athens: Vivliorama), pp. 3–196.
Şükrü Hanioğlu (2008), A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), pp. 147–8.
Alexis Alexandris (1983), The Greek Minority in Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918–1974 (Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies), pp. 38–40.
Bernard Lewis (1968) [1961], The Emergence of Modem Turkey (London: Oxford University Press), pp. 210–30; G. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 53–60; Zürcher, op. cit., pp. 97–108; Ahmad, op. cit., pp. 31–47; Keyder, op. cit., pp. 38–9
Hugh Poulton (1997), Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (London: Hurst and Company), pp. 67–70; Hanioğlu, op. cit., pp. 150–7.
Richard Clogg (1982), ‘The Greek Millet in the Ottoman Empire’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The Functions of a Plural Society (New York and London: H&M Publishers), p. 200.
B. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 223–5; G. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 58–9; Ahmad, op. cit., pp. 6, 37; Zürcher, op. cit., pp. 107–8, 111–15; Jacob M. Landau (1995), Pan-Turkism: From Irredentism to Cooperation (London: Hurst and Company), pp. 51–6
Sina Akşin (2007), Turkey from Empire to Revolutionary Republic (London: Hurst and Company), p. 86; Hanioğlu, op. cit., pp. 156–7.
For what transpired, see the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1914), Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan War.
Arnold J. Toynbee (1970) [1922], The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations (New York: Howard Fertig), p. 138.
For a succinct presentation of the Armenian massacres, see Zürcher, op. cit., pp. 119–21. For a wider discussion, see Ronald Grigor Suny (1998), ‘Empire and Nation: Armenians, Turks, and the End of the Ottoman Empire’, Armenian Forum, 1, 2, pp. 17–51.
Ayhan Aktar (2007), ‘Debating the Armenian Massacres in the Last Ottoman Parliament, November-December 1918’, History Workshop Journal, 64, p. 248. For details of the discussions that followed in parliament, see pp. 251–63.
Smith, op. cit., pp. 89–91. See more generally Toynbee, op. cit. and a recent study in Greek by Tasos Kostopoulos (2007), Polemos kai ethnokatharsi: i xehasmeni plevra mias dekaetous ethnikis exormisis [War and Ethnic Cleansing: The Forgotten Aspect of a Ten Year National Campaign] (Athens: Vivliorama), pp. 91–149.
As Venizelos had written to the Greek government (October 1922), ‘our moral standing in the civilized family of nations has been terribly diminished as a result of the arson and other acts of violence which the Greek army allowed itself to commit in Asia Minor’. Quoted in Bruce Clark (2006), Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta Books), p. 55. According to Kostopoulos, the deliberate aim was ethnic cleansing modelled along colonial lines. See Kostopoulos, op. cit., pp. 91–105.
For balanced presentations on the Greek-Turkish war of 1919–22, see Toynbee, op. cit., pp. 153–319; Smith, op. cit., pp. 180–299; G. Lewis, op. cit., pp. 81–4; Zürcher, op. cit., pp. 158–63; and Kostopoulos, op. cit., pp. 91–153. For a blatantly pro-Turkish presentation, see Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw (1977), History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), vol. II, pp. 340–65.
Justin McCarthy (1995), Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton: Darwin Press), pp. 291–2. Even Arnold Toynbee’s initial reaction was that those to blame were probably the Greeks
See Arnold Toynbee (1922), ‘The dénouement in the Near East’, The Contemporary Review, 682, p. 413.
Renée Hirschon (2003), ‘“Unmixing Peoples” in the Aegean Region’, in Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Exchange of Populations Between Greece and Turkey (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books), p. 11.
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Heraclides, A. (2010). The Contemporary Perspective. In: The Greek-Turkish Conflict in the Aegean. New Perspectives on South-East Europe Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283398_4
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