Chapter II: Preface: By THEODORE P. ION, D.C.L (1)

The German dream of dominion from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf has naturally attracted the attention of the world to Asia Minor, a country which has been for centuries in a dormant condition on account of its subjection to a moribund state. Conquered and reconquered by Asiatic hordes, its wealth ravaged and pillaged many and many times, its cities, towns and villages razed to the ground more than once, and its inhabitants having been subjected again and again to massacres _en masse_, Asia Minor has been and will naturally continue to be the reservoir, so to speak, of European civilization for the Great East.

From ancient times the rays of civilization which shone on this peninsula were not Asiatic but European, that is Hellenic, the civilizing influences of the language of Homer and Plato having been kept alive even during the rule of the Mohammedan Arabs.

As is well known, the Arabian Caliphs of Bagdad were always surrounded by Hellenists and considered the books of the Greek sages more valuable than gold.[2]

Hence came the great impetus given to Arabian philosophy and positive science through the translation of the writings of the Greeks, which were subsequently transplanted to Europe by the Moors even before the time of the renaissance.

The darkest epoch of Asia Minor began undoubtedly with the advent of the followers of Osman, who, ever since their irruption into that country, have wrought havoc among its people, and within a comparatively short space of time have reduced that fair land to barbarity and desolation. The ancient seats of learning, the theaters, the stadia, the treasures of art and other tokens of Hellenic civilization are now nothing but heaps of ruins, inarticulate witnesses to the ancient glory of Hellenism.

It is a remarkable phenomenon that beneath these smoldering ruins civilization was not entirely destroyed, for in spite of the slowly burning fire Hellenism continued to exist, and toward the close of the 18th century began to show clear signs of that vitality and vigor which blossomed forth so quickly in the following century, and, in our own time, have produced such far-reaching results.

Hence the apprehension shown by the Turkish conquerors during the tyrannical régime of Abdul Hamid. Hence the great efforts made by that potentate to bring from the confines of Russia Mohammedan hordes such as Circassians and other unruly tribes and freebooters in order that they might roam about or settle there according to their fancy, with the view to offsetting the ever-increasing Greek population of Asia Minor. Hence the inrush to that country of Mohammedan emigrants from the territories which have been wrested from the Turk ever since the events of 1878, it being immaterial whether these Mussulman fanatics gave themselves to robbery, murder and massacres of the Christians in the land, or settled there in order to develop the great possibilities of agriculture in the country.

The diplomacy of Europe, having been satisfied with the platitudes embodied in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 as to the introduction of reforms by the Sublime Porte, both in its European and Asiatic provinces, has let things take their natural course, the first outcome being the Armenian horrors of the Hamidian era, which were continued under the “constitutional régime of the Young Turks” and culminated in the scientific extermination, by starvation, of that highly gifted Armenian nation, carried out under the high patronage and guidance of the Germano-Turanians, whose diabolical activities during the present world war have overwhelmed in a like catastrophe the Hellenic population of the Ottoman Empire and particularly of Asia Minor.[3]

From the time that the present German emperor resolved to make the Near and perhaps the Far East the great market for Teutonic trade, German scientists of all kinds have been dispatched to Asia Minor to study the country from every point of view, so that the German Government may, at the opportune moment, be ready to seize the “golden fleece.”

As a result there have appeared various essays dealing with Asia Minor from different points of view, and in particular the one with which we are here concerned, by Dr. Karl Dieterich, forming the principal part of the present publication of the American-Hellenic Society.[4]

It is worth noticing that the German essayist describes in a vivid manner the vitality and the potentialities of the Hellenic population of Asia Minor, and, unlike the ruling class of Germany and many of his compatriots, he speaks favorably of the Greek populations of Anatolia.

Dr. Dieterich, referring to the persecution of the Greeks, says erroneously that these “systematic persecutions,” as he admits them to be, began with the spring of 1914 (see p. 19), while, as a matter of fact, they commenced on the very day that the Young Turks consolidated their power (1908-1909), when, in spite of their much heralded formula of “equality, justice and fraternity,” they designed and instituted a well-organized method for the annihilation of the Christian populations, the Adana massacres of the Armenians in April, 1909, being the precursors of all the subsequent horrors.

Nor did these would-be “reformers,” or “constitutionalists,” conceal their plans for the Turkification of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire, for they openly resorted either to forced conversions to Mohammedanism or to the annihilation of those who seemed unlikely to submit to be “Ottomanized.” Thus, as early as September, 1908, one of the moving spirits of the Committee of Union and Progress, namely, Dr. Nazim, during his visit to Smyrna, at a social gathering held in the house of a British subject, spoke freely about this matter.[5]

The Young Turks having thus initiated, under the very eyes of Europe, a systematic extermination of the Armenians,—whom the bloody hand of Abdul Hamid had not completely destroyed,—turned their attention to the “more dangerous Greeks.”

It was this plan for the destruction of the Christian nations that, in 1912, brought together the Balkan States, who saw that under the new régime in Turkey the peoples of these various nationalities would gradually be annihilated, if they did not take some preventive steps. The result was the war of these States against Turkey, the complete defeat of the latter and the freeing from the Turkish yoke of hundreds of thousands of people. As a further consequence of this war, there began on the part of Turkey a wholesale expulsion of the Greek population from the coast of Asia Minor simply because the neighboring islands of the Ægean had been incorporated with the Greek Kingdom. Up to the declaration of the present world war hundreds of thousands of Greeks were expelled from Turkey, having been, at the same time, deprived by the Turks of all their movable and immovable property. All these unfortunate people took refuge in Greece and gave no little embarrassment to the Greek Government.[6]

It is therefore incorrect to say, as the German writer alleges, that the persecutions of the Greeks began with the outbreak of the present war (p. 19).

The difference, however, between the _ante-bellum_ persecutions and those perpetrated subsequently is this, that while in the former cases the Greeks were expelled from their native country and were deprived only of their wealth and their property generally, in the latter not only were they compelled to abandon everything they owned, but they also perished through untold hardships and starvation. (See details about the tragical condition of the Greeks in Publication No. 3 of the American-Hellenic Society cited above.)

Nor did the Turks in carrying out this cruel work care whether Greece was friendly or unfriendly to Turkey. As a matter of fact, these persecutions were in full swing during the “régime of Constantine” (see dates in _Persecutions of the Greeks_, etc.) when that potentate was in close relationship not only with the Germans, but also with the Bulgarians and the Turks, and consequently the persecutions of the Greeks had nothing to do with the alleged projected territorial compensations to Greece; besides, Turkey was assured by Germany that Constantine, who then had the upper hand in Greece, would under no circumstances attack Turkey.

Therefore it is not correct to say, as the German writer asserts, that one of the reasons for these persecutions was the promise made to Greece by the Entente Powers in 1915 of territorial concessions in Asia Minor (see p. 19).

An indication that even such an evidently impartial writer as Dr. Dieterich cannot divest himself of the German point of view is his statement that in the struggle for life the Greeks were on the offensive, while the Turks were on the defensive (see p. 19). This, in plain words, means that it suffices for a nation to be intelligent, active, frugal, moral (as he too acknowledges the Greeks to be, p. 50), in order to acquire the odium of carrying on an offensive struggle if another nation living side by side with it happens to be stupid, fatalist, immoral and incapable of holding its ground in the struggle for life.

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.

The Seljuks, who were bent chiefly on gaining new pasturing grounds, seem to have drawn the Greek population closer to themselves and to have made them of some service, instead of attempting to drive them out by force. This is proven by the accounts of voluntary or forced submission to the conquerors, into which the inhabitants were driven by the unsound agrarian conditions in Asia Minor, which were characterized by an ever-growing tendency toward larger and larger estates, a tendency against which, even in the 10th century, the clear-sighted emperors had vainly enacted the strictest laws. The consequences appeared at the time of the inroads of the Seljuks; evidently with full knowledge of these conditions, they promised the oppressed peasants in the conquered regions complete freedom in return for the payment of a head tax, if they would yield to their control. Thus great masses of the Greek population went over to the Turks and were lost to Hellenism. Emperor John Comnenos, on one of his campaigns against the Seljuks of Iconium (1120), was forced first to fight bitterly with the Greeks of that region, who had either been already half Turkified, or were, at any rate, strongly Turcophile. We see, then, that at that time large intermixtures of the native Greeks (or of the Hellenized native population) with the Seljuks must have taken place, for only through such intermixture is the fact to be explained that the Anatolian population of today, both Christian and Mohammedan, instead of showing a distinct racial stamp, rather presents strongly modified features which cannot be described as either Aryan or Mongolian.[17]

The Ottomans were less bent on peaceful assimilation than on forcible subjection and extermination. In their character as masters they sought to make the conquered as harmless as possible, and they used to this end a means that they had learned from the Byzantine emperors; they transplanted, from the conquered cities that had a large Greek population, large numbers of these Greeks to other cities where the Greeks were less numerous, so that everywhere the Greeks were forced into a minority. Furthermore, the Greeks were no longer permitted to live in the large cities that were at that time still strongly walled, but were compelled to settle outside in the suburbs. From these suburbs there gradually developed later, as the Greek population increased, entirely new towns, which crowded the old city-center from its predominating position and established itself in its place. This system, as we shall see, resulted in strengthening rather than weakening the Greek element. And yet, in this Turkish conquest, a great part of the Greeks in the towns were constantly being forced to leave Asia Minor and to take refuge in the European part of the Empire, for the Byzantine historians of that time (the 14th century) tell of mass emigrations to Europe, of homeless refugees crowded in and around Constantinople, and of growing insecurity in the neighborhood of the capital. This exodus from the towns betokens a second essential difference as compared with what had happened in the Balkan Peninsula. While, in the Balkans, the cities appear as the supporting centers, the bulwarks, of the Greeks against the Slav inundation, forming a base of operations for winning back the open country that had become Slav, in Asia Minor not only the country regions but the towns as well fell into the hands of the conquerors, evidently because the Turks were better trained soldiers and more familiar with the art of besieging towns than were the Slavs, who were accustomed only to campaigns in the open. The degree to which the Greek communities of Asia Minor suffered under the Turkish conquest is shown by the old Church Acts which are still preserved in the Patriarchate in Constantinople.[18] While Asia Minor before the Turkish invasion counted no less than fifty seats of Metropolitans (the highest church dignitaries) it has today only twenty.[19] Of these, twelve alone are distributed in the western provinces, while the other provinces have only eight. Even of these the greater part are maintained only for the sake of the names. These numbers show better than anything else how seriously the Greek town-population in the interior of Asia Minor melted away as a result of the Turkish conquest, for every withdrawal of the seat of a Metropolitan, and every uniting of several such seats in one, presupposes a decided decrease in the population of a district.

The greatest direct losses of the Greeks were caused by the two great Mongolian invasions of the years 1241 and 1402, especially the latter under the much-feared Timur. These hordes found their only joy in burning, murdering and pillaging, and poured forth like a plague of locusts “in separate bands over Galatia, Phrygia, Bithynia, Paphlagonia, the coast region of Caria, Lycia and Pamphylia in such a way that it seemed as if the whole Tartar army was billeted in every separate province, so numerous were they.” So says one of the last Byzantine historians (Dukas), who pictures also, in vivid colors, the consequences of this predatory incursion in the words, “Timur left neither living men, nor weeping children, nor barking dogs, nor crowing cocks, but everywhere nothing but the stillness of death.” Thus every one of these three Turkish inundations had in its own way contributed to decimate the Greek population of Asia Minor.

Only in two greater districts have compact groups of Greeks of considerable extent preserved their nationality, their speech and, in part, their religion, that is, in Middle Cappadocia, in the interior of eastern Asia Minor, and in Pontus, in the extreme northern coast region; in the former as a relic of the old church settlements and in the latter as the last remains of that latest Greek effort at establishing a state in Asia Minor, the Empire of Trapezus. The Greek population of these two districts can therefore serve to bring clearly before us the Asia Minor Greeks of the Middle Ages, in their physical as well as their linguistic character.

Before proceeding further I must state that these peoples, like those of the Balkan Peninsula, must already have acquired their present physical stamp in the early Middle Ages, at any rate, before the Seljuk-Turkish conquest, for the modified, ethnically but slightly distinguished type of the western Anatolian peasant population is not characteristic of these Greeks. Rather do the Cappadocian Greeks show unmistakable Armenian influence, especially in the broad and extraordinarily high skull, and the large fleshy nose, as well as in their compact and sturdy build, while those of the mountainous coast region of Pontus have retained the more finely cut features of the Greeks and their more graceful form. Some claim to find a third type in the Greeks of south-eastern Asia Minor, a type which shows strikingly Semitic features, and which is probably to be traced back to the numerous Syrian immigrations into Asia Minor during the supremacy of the Isaurian Dynasty of Byzantium, 717-867. In the same way the Armenian type of the inland Greeks is to be traced back to the extensive intermingling of Byzantine Greeks and Armenians during the 9th and 10th centuries, when the Byzantine Empire received a strong quickening of Armenian blood. A dynasty of Armenian origin at that time gave the Byzantine imperial throne a new hold and lent renewed strength to the new kingdom and a great Byzantine province of Asia Minor was called “the Armenian Province.” In any case, we must be on our guard against deriving our present ethnographical picture of Asia Minor directly from the old racial divisions into Hittites, Phrygians and Lydians. The fact that Asia Minor served as a bridge between Asia and Europe prevented such a preservation of the old ethnical relations, as had been the case in the Balkan Peninsula, that great reservoir of people in migration; here as there, in judging of ethnological characteristics, we should, far more than has up to now been the case, start out from Byzantine times, which completely transformed the ancient ethnological nature of both peninsulas.[20] That we have to do, however, in the case of the Cappadocian and Pontic Greeks with autochthonous remains of pre-Turkish times, and not with later immigrants, is shown not only by their racial type but by their dialect. This belongs to the very oldest forms of the Modern Greek language, if one leaves out of account the still more ancient Tzakonian, and enables us to conclude that it broke away from other Greek at a very early period, and followed a separate development of its own. This is particularly true of the Pontic dialect of Samsun (Amisos), Œnoe (Unieh) and Ophis; there is in the phonetics of the dialect, as well as in the vocabulary, so much that is peculiar that it is almost unintelligible to those conversant with the ordinary Modern Greek. But this holds true also of the dialect of some twenty Cappadocian towns—for with only twenty are we here concerned—a dialect which is still quite on the level of the Greek of the early Middle Ages, evidently going back to the time of the settlements in the country of the old monks, which can be proved, in the region of Cæsarea, to go back in many cases as far as the 4th century B.C. These dialects,[21] however, are, as compared with those larger and continuous regions where common Greek is spoken, only small and distinct islands of the Greek speech, which are constantly wearing away and giving up ground, more and more, although the proportion of Greeks in these regions is much higher than elsewhere. The ratio is highest in Pontus, where there are nearly 250,000 Greeks (25 to 30 per cent of the population), and where they form a large percentage even of the city population, especially in Trebizond and Samsun. On the contrary, in Cappadocia they are to be found settled only in a large number of villages, comprising altogether something like 40,000 souls.[22] The number of these Greeks in Pontus as well as in Cappadocia is, furthermore, all the harder to fix accurately, because there are among them many communities of Christians who conceal the fact that they are Christians, and, for political reasons, pass as adherents of Islam (even making use of the Turkish language), but who are really devoted to Christianity and have kept up their Greek national feeling. In Pontus they are especially to be found in the districts of Tonia and Ophis, where in the seventies of the last century they were estimated at about 14,000, while in other districts, as in Krom and Torul, a strong process of Christianizing them anew has taken place.[23]

Apart from these two isolated areas of Greeks, the Turks have inundated the whole peninsula, subjecting it to the Turkish nationality and to the Turkish language, while Hellenism, though not entirely destroyed, has been so seriously broken up and shattered that it has been obliged to give up even its language and its religion, that is to say, has completely lost its national consciousness. The numerous Greek names of rivers, villages and mountains have, with very few exceptions, all disappeared, being replaced by Turkish names.[24] As far as administration and ways of living were concerned, the Turkish conquest produced very few radical changes. The very towns which under Greek control had formed commercial and administrative centers, continued to be such under the Turks, keeping, for the most part, their old Greek names as a proof of the strength of 1500-year-old traditions. Towns like Smyrna, Prusa, Pergamon, Magnesia, Attalia, Adana, Tarsus, Iconium, Ancyra, Cæsarea, Amasia, Castamuni, Trapezus, Sinope, Amisos and others experienced a new quickening under their old names, which the Turks altered only slightly. Not only did they continue to be the capitals of their various districts for purposes of administration, but their names were extended so as to apply to the entire districts of which they were centers. Practically all the vilayets and sanjaks of Asia Minor received their names from these old centers of city-civilization and comparatively few have Turkish names, the ancient Tralles, Philadelphia and Dorylæum, for example, bearing the Turkish names Aïdin, Alashehr and Eskishehr respectively. On this weighty point, therefore, the Turks, as an unhistoric people, have been as little able to interrupt the continuity of civilization as in the Balkan Peninsula, where the larger towns likewise have kept their Greek names.

Just as the Turks in Asia Minor have taken over the way of living of their predecessors in power, so too have they accepted almost unchanged their social relations. Two points alone deserve special mention here, the possession of large landed estates and the feudal system. The Turkish landowners, the Beys, are nothing but the direct successors of the Byzantine archontes, and the Turkish peasants have been forced to render compulsory service to the Beys just as the Christian peasants did to the archontes. That strongly developed feudal system, too, which has existed from Byzantine times, especially ever since the 11th century, with its distinction between the little and large fiefs for foot soldiers and cavaliers, respectively, was taken over by the Turks, and was by them even more highly developed.

In this accommodation to the conditions and institutions of the subject peoples did the strength, as well as the weakness, of the new masters consist: in so far as they found before them fast-bound customs, which they simply took over, they were obliged to accept, along with their advantages, their drawbacks as well. The only real advantage that they received came from their acceptance of feudalism, while the retention of cultural and social conditions in town and country was bound gradually to weaken their power, because these conditions either outlived them or, at any rate, were not suited to them. The first statement applies to agrarian relations, and the latter to commercial relations in the towns. This free shepherd and peasant race (for this they had previously been) lost its free character through taking over the Byzantine provincial nobility without, however, in doing this, developing a genuinely urban civilization, which is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for trade-activity. Thus the Turkish peasantry went backward without a Turkish bourgeoisie arising. At any rate, only a limited town-folk arose which made its living by handicraft but did not know how to conquer economically the regions that it had subdued politically. There existed here, therefore, a twofold, dangerous breach in the social organism of Mohammedanism, and into this breach sprang the ever-alive and ever-enterprising Greek, first the Greek trader, and then the Greek farmer. Both had in the west coast of Asia Minor and in the islands, regions where Greeks have always lived, a field for their activity that, though at first modest, has slowly but steadily broadened out.

In the first place, Greek trade in Asia Minor was destined to have an awakening. The impulse to this came from the trade policy inaugurated in the Levant by Colbert, the gifted Minister of Louis XIV. A special trade-society was founded for this purpose (1664), the consular system was reformed, French merchants were united in permanent corporations and a state system of control was arranged between the most important harbors of the Levant and Marseilles. An interesting account has been preserved, dating back to the year 1733, which tells of measures taken to increase the trade of Smyrna as over against its rival Constantinople, and one from the year 1778, containing a regulation decided upon by the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce for the French merchants of Smyrna.[25]

The number of firms there that represented French houses had, in the period from 1752 to 1783, already increased to twenty-nine as against eleven in Constantinople and eight in Salonika. This French trade-policy was systematically based on a strengthening of Smyrna, with the evident purpose of driving the rival trade of Italy out of the field. In this it must have succeeded, for in the forty years from 1750 to 1789 the value of French goods imported from Smyrna to Marseilles rose from 5,629,000 pounds to 12,805,000 pounds and, at the same time, the export from Marseilles to Smyrna rose from 4,250,000 pounds to 9,500,000 pounds. This increase in the trade of Marseilles naturally postulated a similar increase in the trade of Smyrna; this attained even in 1787 no less a figure than 52,750,000 Turkish pounds, in which figures is included the rapidly increasing trade with Russia which resulted from the latter’s position as Turkey’s protector since 1774. Smyrna thus became a new and important reloading place in the trade of the Levant, and although, at the beginning of the 18th century, it had numbered hardly 30,000 inhabitants, it had, in the year 1803, 100,000, of whom about a third were Greeks. The new blood was mostly to the advantage of the Greeks. In fact, one may say that the new enlargement of Smyrna, which had formerly been the center of Hellenism in Asia Minor and became so in an increasing degree from now on, opened a new period of prosperity to the Greeks of Asia Minor; from all parts of the Greek Orient a stream of enterprising Greeks gathered together here, so that the old capital of Ionia soon became once more an almost purely Greek city; in 1850, of about 125,000 inhabitants, 60,000 were Greeks, in 1880 of about 160,000, 75,000 or 80,000 were Greeks, and in 1910, over 100,000 inhabitants of the city’s 225,000 were Greeks. On the contrary, the number of Turks has, in the last 100 years, dropped from 75,000 to 60,000, or, according to some authorities, to 50,000, while the number of Greeks has almost quadrupled.[26] The trade of Smyrna has correspondingly increased, especially since the opening up of the interior through the railroads that go out from Smyrna into the valleys of the Hermos and Mæander. Though the trade in 1839 amounted only to 53 million francs, it had increased in 1855 to 120 million, and by 1881 had even reached the figure of 220 million francs. It had already surpassed the commerce of Constantinople, and the Turks therefore call Smyrna too, mingling envy and scorn, “the infidel Smyrna” (Giaour Ismir). For Hellenism in Asia Minor, however, it became a new and firm support for its interests and a source of prosperity. Even in the year 1818 the Greek merchants of Smyrna were able to build at their own expense a beautiful casino, intended alike to serve business and social ends. This proved, however, to be a tender blossom that had come out prematurely and was soon destroyed by the storms of the Greek War for Independence (1821-1829), though it did bloom forth all the more strongly after the war’s fortunate ending.

For Hellenism began to spread over the west coast in a large number of little places, which were in part old Hellenic sites, and in part places settled during the Middle Ages, or in later Turkish times. Among the very old sites is Phocæa, which through a strange play of circumstances has formed the beginning and the ending of a development that has embraced the world. Famous as the metropolis of Marseilles (Massilia), it was, after a long period of decay, revived in modern times by the reflux movement from her daughter of old, a movement that affected Smyrna first, and then its neighbor Phocæa as well, for this too, in spite of its changing political fortunes, had always been a bulwark of Christianity and was again destined to experience a new, though modest, rejuvenescence. Although, during the first half of the 19th century, the Greeks there were still in the minority, as compared with the Turks, constituting two-fifths of the population (2,000 out of 5,000), the relation has in the intervening decades so changed that now out of 8,000 inhabitants, 6,000 are Greeks, so that these now form three-quarters of the inhabitants. This increase is due to the vigorous local shipping trade which centers here and which numbers annually something like 3,000 ships. The most remarkable thing is, however, that this rejuvenated Old Phocæa has already become once more the mother-city of a young Phocæa (New Phocæa), which is about ten kilometers northwest of the old and although only a few decades old already has about 5,000 inhabitants of whom about 4,000 are Greeks. New and Old Phocæa then, taken together, already number about 10,000 Greek inhabitants as compared with 3,000 Turks. Working the salt pits and exportation of raisins constitute the chief sources of livelihood of the two cities.