Work shop organised by Konrad Adenaur Foundation for Greek, Turkish and German Journalists, spring 2000, Kemer, Antalya.

I understand my task to day to reflect upon what I think is traumatic in being a Turk and a Greek in our relation with each other in a context of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and how we may generate katharsis processes so that we may avoid being neurotically conditioned by this, whatever it is, traumatic element of our identities as Turks and Greeks.

 Before beginning to try to do what I promised to do, let me please state where I stand as the individual you see and hear as Yahya Tezel. I was born in Trabzon, on the east Black Sea coast of Turkey in 1941, into a Turkish speaking Muslim family. Among the earliest remembrances of my childhood are, a Greek family living in the same building as my father’s tenants, a few other Greek families and individuals in the social fabric that I was trying to decipher, and a very positive image of Greeks as ‘people’ conveyed to me by my illiterate grandmother, and little read father, mother and a few close relatives, and last, a very early bringing to consciousness that, Greeks and Turks had lived together almost ‘naturally’ for long periods, but somehow ‘they had to go’ and ‘we were left alone’. This last image building started well before primary school age, through growing up with empty churches in my neighbourhood and town and reference to furniture and household items that were bought from the Rums when they had to leave because of the ‘mübadele’, the ‘exchange’ of Greeks of Turkey and Turks of Greece in the 1920s. I went to a school the building of which was once a Greek school, next to a monumental ex Greek High School, now being used as a teachers’ training college. I am now 58. I have ceased to have a religion and stopped seeing nationalism as a positive ideology or a way of living a proper human life, since my twenties. I have a strong commitment to the historical and sociological paradigm that, local cultures in history or in our present world can only be read, made a meaning of, as parts of the accumulated heritage of mankind as a whole. I am not a cultural relativist. I do believe that, from the accumulated heritage of homo sapiens sapiens, we can produce universal ethic and aesthetic reasoning which we can use and entitled to use to evaluate all the lived and living cultures, including religious traditions. I also would like to live in a world, and therefore am trying to increase the chances of living in a world, by producing my iota of contribution, where Turks and Greeks see each other, less of ‘the other’ but more of ‘the we’. I do believe that, if I was asked, in which present culture your ‘soul’ would feel nearest to ‘home’, my sincere answer would be Greek culture of Greece, in spite of the large influence of Orthodox Christianity in Greece and my dislike of religion defined life styles and cultural environments.

 This is enough for a short personal confession.

 Now let us turn to the issue of trauma, Turkishness and Greekness. I am absolutely sure that we can only start by an essential reference to how these two identities living now, metaphorically so to speak, think their fortunes were cast in history in such a way that they had to encounter the other. I shall do my best to be brief. And I shall do my best to try to look at this history as if I am a Shinto Japanese, not as an a religious Turk..

 Around AD 600, by then to a very large extent Hellenised Eastern Roman Empire,[1] was controlling the coastal regions all around the Mediterranean, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and what is now Turkey, after a century of cultural glory. However, by 626, it lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria and east of the Euphrates in Asia Minor to Sasanian Persian Empire, which itself quickly collapsed in front of the rising Islamic Caliphal state. The Islamic Empire began to control, Islamise and Arabise these regions and Persia and Western and Central Inner Asia. The border zone between the Hellenic and Islamic worlds in Asia Minor stabilised around the Euphrates between 650 and 1071, the Byzantine rule extending to Van lake region towards the end of this period. Then began the Turkish inflow. After the 1071 battle of Manzikert Byzantine state first lost control of all Anatolia, then repelled, together with the Crusaders, the Turks from Western part and coastal regions of Anatolia by the end of the 11^th century. The Latin crusader conquest of 1204, broke what was left of the Byzantine state into three pieces, the central one around Istanbul falling into Catholic Latin rule. There are two important points in the history of the decline of the Byzantine state in the 1071-1204 period regarding our reference to the issue of trauma and Turkish and Greek identities. First, by the 11^th century the Eastern and Western Churches had divided and inter church disputes, rivalries, conflicts became, from the view point of Orthodox Church, more and more as important as conflict with Islam. Second, connected with this issue of religious division between the two churches, the attention and energy of the Hellenic, ‘Byzantine establishment’ in the project of reviving the Byzantine state was directed to conflicts in Europe. As explicitly revealed in the classical historical account of Anna Comnena (1083-1153), daughter of Emperor Alexius I, the Turks coming from the East were seen by this establishment as barbarians posing little danger, to be assimilated, like all the previous barbarians before them, perhaps to be used as forces against the ‘real’ threat coming from the West.[2] As the Byzantine center was trying to regain control over Greece and Thrace in the 13^th century, the destruction of the Islamic agrarianate states, including the Anatolian Selçukis, pushed and opened the way for more Turkic tribal populations into Anatolia. The Greek political/religious establishment lost territorial control in Western Turkey in late 13^th century, and in Thrace and Greece in the 14^th century. In 1453, Constantinopolis fell. By the fall of Trebizond in 1461, all Greek speaking peoples, belonging to the Orthodox Church, living around the Black Sea, the Aegean, and Eastern Mediterranean, began to live under alien rule, the Turkish speaking Muslim cadres of the Ottoman centre.

 Ottoman Empire was ‘an imperial state’ in the genre of the Achamenid,  Roman and Caliphal empires, ruling ethnically and religiously heterogeneous subject populations without a policy of religious conversion or ethnic cleansing. It definitely lacked such modern values and institutions as equality in front of law, citizenship with civic rights irrespective of religion or ethnicity. However, it rested on the principle of non-intervention in the internal self-governing of non-Muslim religious communities of the ‘people of the book’, as long as they did not challenge the political supremacy of the Ottoman centre. Historic record of the Ottoman state has clean pages as long as the ruled religious and ethnic minorities did not challenge their status as secondary subjects, and has bloody pages in cases of rebellions of, not only Christian but ‘heretic’ minorities. But it is almost impossible to refer to a policy of  ‘forced conversion’ or religious or ethnic cleansing before the rise of nationalism and independence wars of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries.[3]

 But conquest is conquest and alien rule is alien rule, long centuries of alien rule are long centuries of alien rule. As a result, whereas before the battle of Manzkiert, probably a sizeable majority of population living on the territory of what is now Turkish Republic were Greek speaking Orthodox Christians, by the middle of the 16^th century, a sizeable majority of people living in this part of the world had become to be Turkish speaking Muslims. From the viewpoint of a historian, an excellent historian with a Greek identity, this was ‘the decline of Hellenism in and process of Islamisation in Asia Minor’.[4]

 Dissolution of the multi ethnic multi religious empires in the modern ages has been traumatic through out the world. Traumas were suffered by peoples encountering these dissolution processes as peoples associated with the ruling imperial centre, religion or ethnicity, and by people trying to ‘gain their independence’ from what they saw as alien Imperial rule. The contraction of the Ottoman Empire took the form of, first, quick loss of territories to such European powers as Austrians and Russians, and second, loss of territories to populations that waged successful ‘independence’ wars, such as the Serbians, Greeks and the Bulgarians. Ottoman state, saw these ‘independence wars’ as rebellions and reacted violently. At the time of these ‘independence wars’, there were millions of Muslims living in the villages and towns of the Balkans, by now for centuries. The wagers of these ‘independence wars’ tried to clean their lands from the Turkish Muslim communities, in places like Morea and Crete, successfully. Churches played leading roles in nationalist revivals, ‘independence wars’, and on many occasions, ‘ethnic cleansing’s.[5] Millions of Turkish speaking and other Muslims vanished or retreated into contracting Ottoman territories.

 The 19^th century saw the emergence of constitutional reformism among the Turkish speaking Muslim elite in and around the Ottoman state establishment. Reforms were made towards constitutional citizenship with equal civic and property rights irrespective of religious or ethnic identity concomitantly with the introduction of non-Islamic, secular, alla franca institution of state, education and judicial system. Parliaments were convened with genuine elections in which non-Muslim communities participated in 1876 and 1908. It is interesting to note that over half of the members of the Ottoman Parliament of 1908 were non-Muslim, representing still sizeable share of local Greeks and Armenians, but also Jews, Assyrians and other religious groups among the total population of the Empire on the eve of the First World War.  In a total population of 16 million living in 1914 on what is now Turkey, about 20 % were non-Muslim. 1.7 million, (about 10 % of the total), were Greek speaking and/or belonging to Greek Orthodox Church. They were sons and daughters of ancestors who had lived continuously in such regions as the Pontos, Aegean and Kappadokya for thousands of years.

 Let me stop here and make another personal confession. When I was a student at Cambridge in the 1960s, I had an English girl friend whose father was an Anglican vicar. During a Christmas holiday I visited my friends family. Her father said that he wanted to show me something. He went to the attic and brought back a chart of the history of the world that was published as the supplement of the London Times on the turn of the last century. In it ‘God had created the World about 6000 years ago. In the meanwhile had given seven severe warnings to naughty homo sapiens sapiens in the form of shocking catastrophes. One was the flood. Another was the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. But there was another one, ‘the appearance of the Turks in the Middle East. He was joking of course. I was used to such jokes in England. My English friends doing postgraduate work in history, in my first weeks had already made me acquainted with Gladstone’s remarks about ‘semi-human semi-beast creatures, the Turks, and the civilised Christian Europe’s duty to save the remaining Christians in the Ottoman Empire by pushing back these creatures to where they came from, that is to say to inner Asia. Some leading groups in English and French politics, leave aside the Russians, had committed themselves to cleaning Thrace, Ýstanbul and Asia Minor from Turkish-Muslim political control, in a sense which was tantamount to cleansing what is now Turkey from Turks.

 The Ottoman defeat in the First World War created a situation in which it seemed as if Gladstonian project was now feasible. The major local historical Christian populations, the Greeks and Armenians were in a situation in which they could try to create their own states end/or a greater Greece on Anatolian territories. In spite of some dissent among Armenians and Greeks, especially among Pontic Greeks, leading cadres of both communities attempted to test their chances. Had they won, there would have been a border between Armenia and Greater Greece running somewhere east or west of Ankara, and Turkish and Kurdish and émigré Muslim populations in what is now Turkey, would have been reduced to the political situation of Palestinians now, if not decimated. The Ottoman state, during the First World War, reacted not only against Armenians or Greeks with arms fighting against the Ottoman state, but also against the civilian local Christian populations in the Black Sea and Eastern Anatolia. Millions of Armenians and Greeks were deported forcefully, under inhumane conditions, were killed in clashes, or died on the way. It is important to say this from the Turkish side of our historical background. But it is also equally important to say that, Armenian and Greek regular armies and/or Armenian and Greek militia formed by local populations killed local Turks and Muslims. It was the dirty record of ethnic cleansing of communities trying to establish monopolistic control over territories on which, multi ethnic multi religious populations had been living in order for centuries.

 Our story is about trauma with reference to Greekness, Turkishness and not Armenianness and Turkishness, so let us bracket the issue of trauma in connection with Turkishness and Armenians and consider only the Turkishness, Greekness part of a sad history.

 The Greek armies occupied Western Turkey in 1919, in order to exert pressure on Turks for the enactment of the Gladstonian project with the political and military help of the Allies. However the Turks defeated them conclusively by 1922. The 1919-1922 ‘adventure’ turned out to be the ‘Great disaster’ in modern Greek history, with major repercussions on Greek society and history. Thousands of Greeks fled to Aegean islands and mainland Greece.

 What was miraculous was the sudden emergence of rapprochement between the leaders of Turkey and Greece after 1922, especially during the later stages of the Lausanne Peace negotiations from which modern Republic of Turkey emerged. The Greek and Turkish governments agreed to exchange their Turkish and Greek minorities reciprocally, with the exception of Greeks of Ýstanbul and Turks/Muslims of Western Thrace. By 1927, there were only 110 000 Greeks left in Turkey, mostly in Ýstanbul. The last major exodus of Greeks from Turkey took place in 1964, when Greeks of Ýstanbul with Greek passports were forced to leave Turkey as the Turkish government’s response to the Cyprus conflict. We are now in a situation where only about 3000 Ethnic Greek citizens of Turkey are living in our country in a total population of about 66 million people.

 Counter factual arguments arguments about history are heuristically meaningfull, although they may seem idle talk to many. Had the Greek armies not occupied Turkey, had the local Greek populations decided to remain, as a local ethnic minority, loyal to a project of building a multi-ethnic Turkey after the disasters of the First World War, had they not threatened the Tukish/Muslim majority with ethnic cleansing in the Black Sea and Western Turkey, no one could have been able to evacuate them from lands which had been the country of their ancestors for thousands of years. We would probably had several million of ethnic Greeks living in Turkey today. But what would have been the political environment in such a substantially multi-ethnic and multi-religious social situation in our counterfactual, imaginary Turkey of 2000? We have to speculate, using various scenarios. I shall leave this for you to elaborate on.

 I am trying to be sincere to my best. I am empathising and asking myself the following question. If I was born in Greece in 1941 to a family who had to leave Trebizond in 1926, leaving the graves of their ancestors, homes, gardens, churches, monasteries, mountains, the sea behind, and if I saw today that these cemeteries, churches, monasteries have been eradicated or turned into ruins, how would I relate to the history of this part of the world? How would I relate to such dates as 1071, 1453, 1461 and 1922. I am sure that I feel sadness, a deep sadness, when I try to empathise with my Greek counterfactual soul mate. Similar empathy could be exercised by a Greek friend in Greece, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be a son of Muslim Circassian, Bosnian, Tatar, Cretan whose ancestors were either killed or sacked from lands which had been their home for hundreds of years. I am sure he will also feel a deep sense of sadness of pains inflicted by man over other man in the name of race, ethnicity, religion or politics.

But what can we do now, as Turks and Greeks? Can we undo history?

Can we wage vengeance wars? Can we escape our individual identity as a Turk or a Greek, that necessarily ties each of us to ‘our’ societies, cultures in which we had been socialised and which are placed on history.

 Did we kill each other more than the Germans and French had killed each other? No. So why should we not be able to transcend past sufferings that we inflicted upon each other, like the Germans and French transcended the sufferings that they inflicted upon each other. Are we less human than the Germans and French and less able to do such an ascend into a new understanding of being in the world and history in wich traumas are healed?

[1] As a short cultural history oriented source see Brown, Peter (1971) The world of late antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 137-59.

[2] The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, English translation, (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987 reprint).

[3] For an impartial non Muslim source on the status of the Dhimmi, non-Muslim minorities in Caliphal and Ottoman Empires, with a large selection of documents see Ye’Or, Bat (1985) The Dhimmi, Jews and Christians under Islam (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press).

[4] Vryonis, S. (1971) The decline of medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the process of Islamisation from the eleventh through the fifteenth century (Berkeley: University of California Press).

[5] For an account of ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims in areas lost by the Ottoman state, see McCarthy, J. (1995) Death and exile: the ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press).