Dear Andrew,
A hundred years ago, most of the people in Istanbul and the Western coast of Asia minor were Greek speaking. They were the descendants of the Byzantines, and were still in the majority.
After WWI and during a Balkan war, (don't know which one), Greece took over the Greek speaking city of Smyrna, and to be honest I don't know what else. I have to assume it was the whole coastline since the people there were also predominantly Greek speaking. The Greek soldiers kept advancing towards Constantinople and were stopped by the ally armies of the English, Italians and French.
As the Greek army then went towards Ankara, Kemal Ataturk roused the Turks. Well they defeated the Greek army, and began to massacre the Greek civilians. They all ran towards Smyrna, (Izmir) and the port where Italian, French and British ships were stationed.
Well the Turks set fire to the city and the one's that swam towards the ships were pushed back into the water. Luckily an American, (I believe he was a teacher), managed to get the Greek navy to make him an admiral. I believe he placed an American flag on the ships and helped save some of the people.
The Treaty of Lausanne was signed and I believe that there were about two and a half million Greek refugees exchanged for a half a million Turks living in Greece. The Treaty stipulated that the Patriarch was allowed to remain in Consltantinople as long as 25,000 Turks will remain in Thrace. Well today there are about one hundred and thirty thousand Turks in Thrace.
During the 1950's and 60's with the problems in Cyprus, (no doubt encouraged by Britain in order to keep control of the island...which was promised to Greece both during the First and Second World Wars), the Turks started their pogroms of the Greeks living in Constantinople. The Greeks or 'Romaii', (as the Byzantine Greeks always called themselves), were therefore forced to leave for the Greek mainland...pennyless of course.
Turkey then made a law stipulating that the Patriarch must be a Turkish citizen. Today there are only five thousand elderly Greeks left in Turkey, so this patriach will be the last one living in Turkey. You know Turkey plays it's cards well. :rolleyes:
For the past ten plus years, Turkey has been flying its jets over the Greek waters in the Aegean and the Greeks chase them back. When Greece decided that the so called 'disputed' waters should go to the Hague, Turkey said that the situation in Thrace should also be brought up...yet there is no situation in Thrace. The Muslems there have complete representation, but I'm sure at Turkey's command they will make up abuses.
Now we have to understand that as long as the majority of people living in certain area's were not Turks, they were a threat. If the Armenians were not massacred, then part of Turkey would today be Armenia, and if the Greeks in Pontus, Constantinple, Smyrna and the whole coastline were not massacred and forced to leave, that part of Turkey today would be part of Greece. Turkey lost Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. during WW I, and it didn't want to end up a small nation.
This would be understandable had Turkey not been so vicious in the way it did things. Today it has the same problem with the Kurds. Twenty percent of Turkey is basically part of Kurdistan, as is twenty percent of Iraq and ten percent of Iran. It's methods towards them is as equally vicious as it was towards the lands within her boundaries that were Greek and Armenian. The reason Turkey did not allow us to go through it's territory into Iraq during this war, was because it wanted to have its troops enter with us. All of Europe knows that if Turkey enters into the Northern Kurdish area of Iraq, it's troops will never leave in the same way they never left Cyprus. (They are still there). It 'covets' the Iraqi oil wells in the same way it covets the waters and islands of the Aegean.
Zenovia
