Part 2

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.

HELLENISM IN ASIA MINOR[10]

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 Diadochi[12] 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.