This week my local town of Gaziemir--and the key points of Izmir--decked themselves in red & white. There were photos of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the "Father of the Turks (that's what Atatürk means) everywhere.
As it turns out, today is the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Alıören, the turning point of the Turco-Greek War that had begun in 1919 with the occupation of Smyrna, as Izmir was then known.
In Western histories, World War I ended with Armistice Day, November 11, 1918. Less-known in the United States, where I grew up, are the results of the Paris Peace Conference or the Versailles Treaty, which achieved little more than guaranteeing another world war, and setting countries like Greek and Turkey on collision courses.
President Woodrow Wilson had arrived at Paris with a cool goal, "Make the world safe for democracy." What he accomplished at Paris made the world far less safe than it should have after four years of devastating warfare. And the "democracy" was a laughable claim, considering what the three other great powers at Paris, Italy, France, and Britain, would try next as the empires of the war's losers, Germany, Austria, and Ottoman Turkey, were divided with little concern for the voices of those who lived there.
Turkey in World War I
As with most of the war's participants, Turkey's experience in the war was mixed. The country's rulers initially opened the war with attacks against the Russian Empire. Two German warships have been given to the sultan--their German crews flew Ottoman flags and wore Ottoman naval uniforms. These ships shelled the Russians at Sevastapol.
In the east Enver Pasha, one of the Young Turks who dominated the government, launched an ill-fated invasion of Georgia over the winter of 1914-15. Crossing the South Caucasus Mountains, his army was decimated by the cold and finished off by entrenched Russian defenses.
In the west, a botched invasion of the Dardanelles by British, French, Australian, and New Zealand troops was blocked by Turkish troops under the command of a rising, young leader named Mustafa Kamal. His able leadership--and ham-handed efforts to block his rise by the powers in Constantinoble--set him on a course for greater things.
The war for the Ottomans ended quietly. Once Bulgaria--an ally in the Central Powers--surrendered at the end of September, 1918, the Ottoman government realized that a new front would open very close to Constantinople and sued for peace. Most importantly, the allied troops who defeated Bulgaria included a large number of Greeks, and they were now poised close to Adrianople and Constantinople, the Ottomans' key European cities.
The most important outcome of World War I for Turkey was that the Ottoman government was wholly discredited. There was still a sultan in Constantinople, but World War I ended a series of defeats that had cost the empire its territories in the Balkans and around the Black Sea.
And while Ottoman armies had suffered defeat after defeat, the people remaining in areas under Ottoman control were a mix of nationalities and religions. About 30% of the population was Christian, with large numbers of Greeks along the Aegean coast and Armenians in the east. (Armenians had taken the Russians' side during the early years of the war, and had faced brutal repression in response.) There were also hundreds of thousands of Turkish refugees, expelled from Serbia, Greece, Bessarabia and Circassia, where horrible holocausts had followed "Christian" victories.
The only people who identified as "Ottoman" were the sons of Osman in the ruling family. The term recognized no race or nationality. It described only subjects to the sultan, whose time had passed.
After Paris, 1919.
After the Paris Peace Conference, it took little time for the allied winners to divy up the Ottoman state. France occupied Adana and southeastern Turkey. The Italians took over many Aegean islands and occupied southwestern Turkey. The Brits sailed up the Dardanelles and occupied Constantinople.
They met no resistance. Who was left to fight for the Ottomans?
But Turkish resistance found its focal point on May 29, 1919, when Greek troops disembarked on the pier at Smyrna, beginning an occupation that would last three years. At the time, Smyrna was a cosmopolitan city with distinct, Turkish, Jewish, Armenian, Greek, and European quarters. There was even an American quarter called "Paradise," home of an American college. At the time of occupation, Smyrna already housed more than twice as many Greeks as the city of Athens, and they were rich: key players in the maritime economy that made the city wealthy.
With the landing at Smyrna, suddenly there was an identity of "Turk," and this term meant something to the Muslims who had settled in all quarters of the Ottoman empire. Mustafa Kemal had been dispatched to the east by the Ottoman government, and he used his position there to consolidate his power and marshall the nationalist cause. His would be a war for the Turkish people, not the dregs of the Ottoman lineage.
The Greco-Turk War (1919-1922)
On the other side of the Aegean, the Greek politician, Eleftherios Venezilos pushed the "Megali Ideal" that was pure fantasy: this Big Idea was nothing less than the reconstruction of the Byzantine Empire with its headquarters in Constantinople and with Greek control of the Aegean and Black Sea costs of Anatolia. Never mind the mix of peoples living on this fantasy map, this would be a Greek Empire.
And why shouldn't he expect to conquer? Greece had won its independence in 1830 with the support of Britain and France, and it had joined the winning side in World War I. Moreover, the Ottomans were "oh for the century" in wars fought since 1900, which had brought independence to Serbia, Bulgaria, and Albania, among other countries.
When Greece invaded the Aegean coast, its soldiers treated the Muslim civilians with brutality. There was no place for them in its Big Idea. The sooner they were burned out, murdered, or expelled, the more likely Vanizelos's fantasaical Greek Empire could come about. This introduced to every person in Turkey the idea that there was such a thing as a "Turk," and that this identity was worth life or death struggle.
Other developments behind the scenes undercut the army. Venizelos had lost an election back at home, and King Constantine had returned to the throne with a more realistic view of the Big Idea than the prime minister. The idealists and fantacists who had launched the war in Turkey were replaced. The heretofore successful General Papoulos was replaced with the utterly incompetent Georgios Hatzianestis. The Greeks had also moved a division of soldiers to Thrace (the region between the Black & Aegean seas to the west of Istanbul) in an insane effort to intimidate the British and gain control of Constantinople.
Victory Day
This leads to August 30, 1922. One hundred years ago today.
There was no defensive front for the Greeks to fall back to. The remaining forces turned and raced westward for the coast with nationalist forces nipping at their heels. The campaign resulted in the loss of 50,000 Greek soldiers.
I write that the Greeks "raced" for the coast a little prematurely. Despite the desperation of their flight, they still managed to ravage the communities through which they retreated, leaving little for their Turkish pursuers that was unburnt or unmolested.
Just eight days later, the first Turkish cavalry would enter the city and the final weary Greek soldiers would board transports back to Greece--not the "Big Idea" they had fought for, but the homeland they had left on their foolish crusade in 1919.
The war wasn't over. And poor Smyrna would face bitter days, but that is for another upcoming anniversary that I have already written about.
The nationalist cause would, of course, bring about the Republic of Türkiye, and like George Washington, General Mustafa Kemal Atatürk would become his nation's first and most consequential leader (he would not step down after two terms as Washington had done, but remain president for life).
And Constantinople and Smyrna? They would become Istanbul and Izmir. Turkish names for Turkish cities, emptied of Greeks and Armenians, for a time, but home for one American who writes these words.
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