Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence

by David Brewer

  The education minister Mariétta Yannákou battled back. ‘I believe in truth,’ she said, ‘in what really happened in history. We must not tell children fairy tales at school.’ She initially resisted calls for the book’s withdrawal, but in August 2007 accepted that it contained mistakes and inaccuracies, and said that a revised version would be used in schools from September.

  This might seem like a straightforward confrontation between obscurantism and enlightenment, a repeat of the debates of the decades before the war of independence, but the background was now very different. In 1999 the foreign ministers of Greece and Turkey had signed an agreement to review their respective school textbooks for nationalist bias. The 2006 Greek book was one of this agreement’s first results, and its treatment of the destruction of Smyrna in 1922 was an example of the new approach that particularly angered the critics.

  In 1922 at the end of the disastrous Greek invasion of Turkey, Greek troops fell back to Smyrna, which already had a large Greek and Armenian population. On 9 September Turkish forces entered the town, and four days later a fire began that raged for days, almost entirely destroying the Greek and Armenian quarters, though not the Turkish, and forcing into the sea many of those at the harbour hoping for escape by boat. Turkish historians have blamed the Greeks or the Armenians for starting the fire, but it was probably lit by the Turks and there is overwhelming evidence that they fed it by first spraying houses with petrol and then setting fire to them. But all the textbook has to say of the event is: ‘The Turkish army enters Smyrna. Thousands of Greeks crowd at the port and try to leave for Greece.’

  This seems too bland even for twelve-year-olds, and the critics were surely right to object to it. It demonstrates the main difficulty of the textbook writers. If all Greek nationalist bias against Turks is to be removed, Turks cannot be blamed for anything, even if they are clearly responsible for it. History with false judgements is replaced by history containing no judgements at all. Nevertheless perhaps this is a stepping stone on the way to a history with valid and objective judgements.

  Before that goal can be reached maybe a deeper shift in attitudes is needed: away from the idea of ‘self’ being defined in relation to some ‘other’ that is different or inferior or evil – of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’, or, in the jargon, identity versus alterity. This way of thinking goes back to the ancient Greeks who, as Paul Cartledge has argued, constructed their identities negatively by means of polarised oppositions of themselves to what they were not: Greek–barbarian, citizen–alien, free–slave and so on. He concludes that ‘It was one of the less celebrated but none the less essential aspects of “the Greek achievement” to take this process of negative polarization to extremes.’1 This legacy has been inherited by the western world as a whole and markedly by the Greeks in their view of the Turks, for better or worse, sustaining them through centuries of Turkish rule but blighting all their subsequent relations with the Turks.

  The conclusion of the schoolbook story shows that the process of rewriting the old Greek histories still has some way to go. In the parliamentary elections of September 2007 Mariétta Yannákou, who had championed other radical and fiercely opposed educational reforms, lost her seat, gaining less than half the votes she had won in the previous election, and with it her post as education minister. Her successor immediately withdrew the textbook.

  It is impossible to ignore this background to the writing of Greek history, but there is no need to be constrained by it. What then can be said about the centuries of Turkish and other foreign rule in Greece? Where, for both the foreign rulers and for the Greeks themselves, do praise and blame lie?

  One of the continuing causes of Greek resentment against the Turks is the devshirme or child-collection, an incident of which is described at the opening of this book. The most appropriate word for it is conscription, rather than voluntary ‘recruitment’ or criminal ‘kidnapping’ – the terms debated in the textbook controversy. It can be argued, of course, that the devshirme was increasingly rare after about 1650 and ended altogether in the early 1700s, so the grudge is a very old one. It can also be argued that many of the conscripted boys achieved fame and fortune, rising as high as grand vizier, and that sometimes parents volunteered their sons for the devshirme. But these arguments do not soften the harsh reality that for many if not most Greek families, in which ties of kinship have always been particularly strong, the removal of a son was a heartbreaking loss.

  The devshirme faded out over time but taxation, another cause of Greek resentment became steadily more of a burden. It was resented because it was heavy and was arbitrary, and we have seen instances of both. It became heavier because of the deteriorating Ottoman economy and more arbitrary because central control of officials became weaker. Greeks and other non-Muslims paid a higher poll tax than Muslims, which was often cited as a cause of resentment, but on the other hand Muslims were liable for military service and non-Muslims were not. The balance was a reasonable one.

  Was the taxation of the Greeks heavier and more arbitrary than for their counterparts in western European countries? Even if this assessment could be made it would not really be relevant. The Greeks, with very few exceptions, could not choose where to live and be taxed; they had to put up with what they had.

  The Turks are also blamed by Greeks for failing to develop the country, and leaving little of value behind; some elegant bridges but no decent roads, some fountains but no major buildings except mosques and a few bazaars. This was one aspect of a general neglect of the Greek economy whose development was almost impossible when manufacture was regulated by official guilds and exports were government controlled. These complaints are valid, and from the time when the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji opened the way for increased trading on land and sea Greek economic development was remarkable.

  Greek revolts, which occurred for a variety of reasons over the centuries, were ruthlessly suppressed. Governments in western Europe, for example in Spain and France, could be just as savage, but again this is hardly relevant to a situation from which the Greeks had no escape; it matters little to a sufferer that others elsewhere may be suffering more. Some forms of Turkish retribution, such as impalement, were particularly horrible. This raises the question of how a historian should judge such matters: by the standards of his or her own day, or by the standards of the time. Either alone leads to absurdities: to blaming Genghis Khan for not complying with the Geneva conventions, or to treating impalement simply as part of Ottoman culture. The historian probably veers between the two approaches, guided by the light of some absolutes of justice and decency.

  Against these darker aspects of Turkish rule can be set certain advantages for the Greeks. First, they were spared for much of the period from wars fought on their mainland territory. The original Turkish conquests of the fifteenth century had ended the turmoil of wars fought in Greece by the dying Byzantine Empire, and no further wars were fought on the Greek mainland until the invasion of Venice and her allies in 1684, their expulsion in 1715, and the Orlov revolt of 1770.

  Second, the Greeks were given religious freedom. This included not only freedom of worship but freedom, with only minor restrictions, to build churches. It was never Turkish policy to convert, forcibly or otherwise, Christians to Islam, and the preachings of the Church against apostasy were apparently against a largely exaggerated danger. Besides religious reasons there were strong social pressures on the Greeks to remain in the Orthodox Church, and the instances of conversion seem to have been for some personal benefit. Finally, with freedom of religion went freedom of education, which was left in the hands of the Church.

  Greek religion was, paradoxically, more under threat from fellow Christians, the Venetians and other Italians, than from Muslims. In many of their territories the Venetians directed that all bishops should be Catholic, and elsewhere Jesuit missionaries often aggressively proselytised. This threat should not be overstated: both Catholic and Orthodox churches could be found in Cretan towns, cong
regations were often mixed, and help from Catholic and Orthodox priests was called on without distinction. Nevertheless, many Greeks welcomed the Turks when they replaced the Venetians because the Turks offered greater religious freedom, especially in permitting the appointment of Orthodox bishops.

  The role of the Orthodox Church was central during the centuries of Turkish rule. As travellers to Greece noted, holy images were everywhere and religious ceremonies spontaneously practised – especially by sailors – and prayers for intercession, most often to the Mother of God, were the response to misfortune. When after early setbacks in the war of independence Kolokotrónis, the rough military leader, was alone and in despair, he tells us that he went into a little church, threw himself down and wept for Hellas. ‘“Holy Virgin,” I cried, “help us now, that the Greeks may take heart once more.”’2 Religious belief was heartfelt and almost universal among the Greeks, and the Church achieved what it saw as its main purpose, that of sustaining the faith and worship of its flock.

  In other areas the Church could have done more. Education, for which the Church had sole responsibility, was badly neglected, and efforts to improve it in response to Enlightenment ideas were consistently blocked by conservative diehards. The Church attitude to modernising the language of the New Testament was also unnecessarily restrictive. This attitude has been credited with preserving the Greek language, but the Church of England revisers of the prayer book in 1662, with their more flexible approach, enormously enriched the English language; they did not impoverish it, let alone destroy it.

  A persistent weakness of the Church was the revolving door of the patriarchate, with patriarchs constantly losing office after a short reign only to return later, the same patriarch going in and out up to five times. The suggestion that all this was engineered by Turks wanting to maximise the number of payments on accession is unconvincing. It was the Holy Synod who elected the patriarch, to be approved by the Sultan, and it is more likely that constant factional strife within the Holy Synod was the main cause of these frequent changes that so debilitated the Church.

  One cannot speak of one role of the Church in the war of independence because its two parts played diametrically opposed roles. Bishops were deeply involved in planning the revolution, and bishops and lower clergy fought throughout the war. By contrast the patriarchate consistently condemned the revolution, often in the fiercest terms. This should not be seen as a despicable lack of patriotism: the patriarchs had respectable reasons for the line they took.

  The Church, despite its shortcomings, clearly played a major part in sustaining the Greek people during the centuries of foreign rule and preserving their sense of themselves as special, with a distinguished ancestry and one day a bright future. The Church was, some say, the custodian of Greek national identity, though references to national identity in any context can be irritatingly imprecise. It is sometimes necessary to rewrite any statement about national identity without using the words ‘national’ or ‘identity’ to see what, if anything, the statement means. Religion was only one aspect of what it meant to be Greek, and a more complex picture is given by one of Greece’s most distinguished modern poets, George Seferis.

  Seferis’ career and character were full of apparent contradictions. He was a diplomat who rose from lowly and unenthusiastic government service in the 1930s to become Greek ambassador to Britain. But he is best known as a poet and his verse is cerebral in tone but packed with memorable images. In 1963 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, the first Greek Nobel laureate of any kind.

  He was a man of ideas, but claimed that he rejected the abstract for the concrete. ‘My task’, he said, ‘is not with abstract ideas but to hear what the things of the world say to me,’ and these things of the world were primarily Greek things – Greece’s mountains and stones, the shore and its seashells, the sea itself, and above all the light of Greece that illuminates and suffuses them all.3 He also wrote metaphorically of light as the basis for optimism. ‘Deep down’, he wrote, ‘I am a matter of light,’4 and the ‘I’ is all humanity. Perhaps at the back of Seferis’ mind was the doctrine of Divine Light of the early Church fathers, who taught that he who participates in God’s grace becomes the Light, and is united to the Light.

  There were further seeming anomalies in Seferis’ life. He was passionately Greek, but as a diplomat spent the greater part of his life abroad. He was born outside Greece in Smyrna, and lived there till he was fourteen, spending his summers in the nearby coastal village of Skala, and it was Skala, not any place in Greece, which he called his lost paradise. Near the end of his life in 1969, despite his diplomatic standing and his aversion from politics, he publicly denounced the military junta that had seized power in Greece two years earlier. His character too was complex. His friend Henry Miller described him as a cross between bull and panther, and they met through a shared love of American negro jazz. So there were many sides to Seferis. He was both an intellectual and involved in public affairs; he was a patriot, often an expatriate one, but not a narrow nationalist; and he was deeply attached to the Greek people but well aware of their failings. He was thus uniquely placed to articulate what it means to be Greek

  Seferis distinguished three elements of being Greek. One of these is a basically false one, which Seferis called Ellinikótita, usually translated as ‘Greekness’. Seferis loathed it. He saw it as a derivative, like the ‘Greekness’ of the Athens Academy buildings, the work of a Danish architect in 1887, basically north European but with the superficial appearance of a classical temple. ‘Greekness’ was also false because it was narrowly nationalistic, like the petty authoritarianism of the so-called Third Greek Civilisation proclaimed by the Metaxas dictatorship of the 1930s. This ‘Greekness’ is just pseudo-Greekness.

  The false ‘Greekness’ of Ellinikótita is opposed to the genuine Hellenism of Ellinismós. This Hellenism embraces everything of value in the Greek tradition, from ancient Greece through Byzantium to modern times. For Seferis it was a living tradition, continuous but constantly developing, not something fixed and rigid. It was the inheritance of all Greeks, not of the narrow Greek state, and Seferis found this genuine Hellenism in Cyprus, which had never been part of the Greek state. It was a tradition to which non-Greeks could contribute. Examples for Seferis were T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in which he found an element of tragedy that could not but be moving to a Greek, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, a classical Greek story retold in the wholly different frame of a day in the seedier parts of Dublin. And for Seferis Hellenism was even wider than that. It embraced the whole of humanity, embodying as it did the idea of human worth and freedom.

  Seferis distinguished both Ellinikótita and Ellinismós from Romiosíni, which is something different again. It is today’s reality of being Greek, and derives from the time when Greeks were part of the Ottoman millet-l-Rum, and a Greek was not Éllinas but Romiós. Patrick Leigh Fermor has written very engagingly about his view of this distinction. As he puts it, the word Romiós ‘conjures up feelings of warmth, kinship and affection, of community of history, of solidarity in trouble, of sharing the same hazards and aspirations, of being in the same boat’. Romiós can also be partly derogatory. A Greek told Leigh Fermor that ‘it reminds us of our dirty linen,’5 that is, the compromises, deviousness and downright dishonesty that became part of Greek life under foreign rule. In short, Romiosíni is everything that is real about being Greek, good or bad, source of pride or of sorrow. Seferis was clear that many things were wrong in Greece’s history, and much of that could be laid at the door of Greeks themselves, not Greece’s enemies. Nevertheless he wrote, towards the end of his life, ‘But the Greek people has compensated us richly for all.’6

  The prologue to this book quoted Gaetano Salvemini on how we should think about the past: ‘Impartiality is a dream, honesty is a duty.’ It is fitting to end the book with Seferis’ advice for thinking about the future. Smyrna was Seferis’ birthplace and scene of some of his happiest memories, and its destru
ction in 1922 affected him deeply. Nevertheless he wrote: ‘The Greeks say it was the Turks who burned down Smyrna, the Turks say it was the Greeks. Who will discover the truth? The wrong has been committed. The important thing is: who will redeem it?’7

  Chronology

  1204

  Fourth Crusade takes Constantinople

  1204–61

  Latin Byzantine Empire

  1205

  Venetian rule in Cyclades begins

  1211

  Venetian rule established in Crete

  1249

  Mistrás established as seat of government in the Peloponnese

  1259

  Byzantines defeat Villehardouin, ruler of the Peloponnese, at Pelagonia

  1282–99

  Aléxios Kalléryis leads Cretan revolt against the Venetians

  1346

  Genoese rule begins in Chíos

  1361

  Edirne becomes capital of Ottoman Empire

  1402

  Turks defeated by Tamerlane at Ankara

  1430

  Turkish possession of Thessalonika finally established

  1439

  Agreement at Council of Florence to unify the Catholic and Orthodox Churches

  1444–6

  and

  1451–81

  Sultanate of Mehmed II, the Conqueror

  1449

  Constantine XI crowned as last Byzantine Emperor

  1453

  Constantinople falls to the Turks (May)

  1454

  Yennádhios becomes patriarch

  1460