Dear potential readers,
our last week in Atolye raised
questions to children concerning national identities and more specifically
questions about Turkish-Greek Relations. The motive for such questions was
given by a panel that we attended under the name “Izmir Remembers” at French
Culture Center. After the panel was over and on the way back home, children
started a discussion about “how I feel or think, as a greek, about our common
history”. It is this discussion and my thoughts on it that I would like to transmit
and share with you through this blog of Atolye, shedding light on facts about
the Izmir of 1922.
Turkish-Greek Relations had always
been for me one of the most interactive topics in my life, from the time I
didn’t even know what “political” meant. The most intense child memory of mine
starts back in the 5th grade , when I heard my grandmother calling
Turkish people barbarian, while watching the Aegean news on tv. My little self
demonstrated against this static and bigoted thought of hers and responded back
that “Turkish people are not barbarians, they are people like us”. This gap
between me and my grandmother went on during my entire adulthood, with epic
fights in front of the tv, while we were watching together soap operas, like
Yabanci Damat. And this gap goes on until today under the silent acceptance
that national bigotry needs a very personal and conscious internal effort to be
understood historically and politically, a privilege that my grandmother would
never have. It's because of her age, her education, her class, her gender,
because of chances that were never given, because of her religion and also
because of the heavy historical memories that she was carrying along. I used to
blame her and get angry, but now I realize that I cannot ask her anything more than just to share these
heavy historical memories with me.
Furthermore, I used to be one of
those kids whose actions would challenge new discussions about turkish-greek
relations, because I had to find out, know and discuss about how the rest of
the people feel about this topic. For this reason, at my 17th
birthday, I ordered a cake with the greek and Turkish flag on it and treated my
friends at school with it. That day I heard all kinds of comments about the
cake, comments of bewilderment, of negativism, comments of same belief and this
is how a whole dialogue had begun.
And somehow, like this, tentative,
you are growing up and you are realizing through your involvement in social
movements that politics has nothing to do with parties, with the Parliament or
the laws, but politics is our tiny, everyday choices, even before we manage to
find out what the word “choice” means. Politics is our words, our actions, our
photos, our trips, our beliefs, our friends, our relations, the entire range of
our choices and the way that we approach and analyze this world. And somehow,
like that, even when we don’t desire it, we cannot escape from the framework of
politics and our political being.
This means that when we try to review
history, we owe to set aside our blinkers of the national “I never forget”(what
happened) and start seeing the past from distance, through an “I never forget”,
which is historical, political and nationally decentralized. We owe to use
history as a tool to find the “commonplace” among peoples, a “commonplace”
against nationalism, imperialism and fascism, against ethnocentrism, religious
fundamentalism and war. In this way we will be able to fairly share the
unreasonable of the national arrogance of the 19th century.
The 19th century is
characterized by two world wars, the wars in Balkans, the Cold War and
thousands of Izmir’s, which change conquerors according to the political
fluctuations in the area. Our Izmir was inhabited by Greeks, Turks, Armenians,
Jews and Levantines when the ideas of nationalism shed roots to every of these
populations leading to the long adventure of Izmir. The adventure reached to an
end when big parts of Izmir were burned down.
The adventure of Izmir offers us the
foundations of multiple political analysis. A greek nationalist would made a
completely different analysis from a Turkish nationalist and a greek patriot a
completely different analysis from a Turkish patriot respectively. The average
greek, a genuine ideological child of the ethnocentric greek education would
make a completely opposite political and historical analysis from the average
turkish, who is also the genuine ideological child of ethnocentric turkish
education. And with an absolute certainty, none of them would have realized the
historical reality of that period of time, because they have all chosen to
analyze history through a spectrum which is designed in such a way, through
national myths, to relieve respectively Hellenism and Turkishness from their
historical accountability.
The national cohesion necessity and
the “Big national Ideas” of that period resulted in the construction of “The
bad turkish and the good Greeks” or the “good turkish and the bad Greeks”,
because history demanded a separate state for all nations, at any cost, through
the conflict between nationalisms. This is the story of how Venizelos with the
support of England, France and Italy started a war by slaughtering and
conquering until the River of Saggarios, where the army was weakened by the
Kemalist power, which from its side slaughtered and conquered until the
compulsory escape of the Christian populations in Izmir.
The purpose of this article though is
not to restore an objective truth about what happened in Izmir in 1919-1922,
because objectivity is itself relevant to the beliefs and the identities of the
narrator. The only thing I can offer is a subjective reality according to my
beliefs and identities which offers another view of history and sheds light to
small events that contradict the dominant national narratives of both sides.
Unfortunately, my experience and knowledge is limited to my national limits,
since I haven’t lived in turkey, I don’t speak the language and I cannot study
or come in touch with any other alternative narrations from the turkish side. I
would really like to come in touch with the narration of the other side, one
day.
What history left behind, is
something that Greeks don't want to remember and Turkish conservatives will
possibly never even try to unravel; it is the fact that historical facts are
not linear or monotonous. Greek nationalism, which was what brought the war in
Turkey in the first place, in order to uphold the Greek population in Izmir and
the coasts of Minor Asia, left the very same Greeks on their own fate during
the days of the destruction of Izmir. Only very few allied ships were sent to
carry the Greeks of Izmir to Greece, as the prime minister of Greece, Dimitris
Gounaris, denied to provide help to the refugees - “So that the country won't
suffer from a demographic problem”.
Even
after 1922 and the mandatory population exchanges, the refugees' fate remained
far from promising. The local Greeks treated refugees with great distrust,
while calling them “Turkish-born”. They also called their women “pastrikes”,
which in Greek means “clean”, yet at the time was also used to mean
“prostitutes”. The former merchants of Izmir were brought to a place that
didn't have the resources or the possibilities to provide them not even the
basic goods.
What's more,
the nationalistic ideology was not followed by all the Greeks. The partisan
lefts in Greece, the ideological child of mother Russia, chose to support the
kemalist nationalism, reinforcing the kemalist forces of the area. Russia
preferred to have in its territory the allied turkish force, rather than the
western English and French imperialistic force. Thus, the Greek left partisans
supported the “anti-imperialistic” kemalist nationalism, as the communist
Russia enforced.
Therefore,
ourselves, the heirs of this insanity, cannot vindicate any of the two sides.
Because nationalism won't ever represent our political identity, neither
Turkish nationalism, nor the Greek one. Their fate is to conflict with each
other, until either one will fall.
If you ask me
what I believe and feel about the relations between Greeks and Turks, I will
ask you, “Which Greeks and which Turks?”. For the Turks and Greeks
nationalists, the future is definitely full of wars and modern destructions
like the one happened in Izmir. For those Greeks and Turks, however, whose
existence and political identity is defined by the disestablishment of
nationalism and the dominant national narratives; those who believe that nation
is nothing but an exploitable construction by those who have the power; among
those Turks and Greeks, a shared future exists. Which is a shared battle
against nationalism, fascism, sexism, class inequalities, homophobia and
authoritarian regimes.
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