So much.
Welcome to Session two of the symposium.
Today, the three co convenors decided that there were three sort of key stories coming out of the the period run up to the First World War,
the war itself and the peace conference. One, of course, was the creation of Yugoslavia, which, thanks to Ivo, we've looked at in some detail.
The second story, big story, is of Turkey arising from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
And the third story, the third big storyline is the vicissitudes of Greece, and in particular the what led up to the Greek disaster.
So session one covered the first of these stories, and we've already lost one of our empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In this session, we're going to look at the other two stories, and we're going to lose another of our empires, the Ottoman Empire.
But I mustn't steal using thunder.
Turning to our speakers, Eugene Rogan is university lecturer in the modern history of the Middle East under fellow St Antony's.
He's author of The Arabs A History and his forthcoming book,
The Fall of the Ottomans The Great War in the Middle East 1914 to 1920 is scheduled for publication in 2015, so you can order your copy now.
But then there's Vasily or Basil. Gunner is Professor of Modern History of the Department of History and Archaeology,
Aristotle University and the Dean of Humanities at the Hellenic International University.
Both of those institutions being Thessaloniki. He's also for many years been director of the Centre for Macedonian History and Documentation.
So we have two really excellent speakers to talk to us.
Each will speak for about 30 minutes, which means we will then have about 45 minutes available for question and answer discussion.
And I think it's very important that we have the full 45 minutes because just looking at the audience,
I can see that there are many distinguished experts present in the audience
today and we'd love to hear from you also mentioned a few in his introduction,
but there are others as well. Indeed, just looking around the room,
I see we could have put together another two or three panels on the basis of just present here today, but I think probably we won't.
Perhaps another time, perhaps another time.
I mean, after all, the First World War lasted for four years, so there's plenty of opportunities for more symposium.
Right. Eugene, you have the floor.
David, thank you so much and I'd like to thank the organisers for the honour of the invitation.
I feel as though I should be saying thank you to the organisers on behalf of the Ottoman Empire for inviting us back to the Balkans.
That's it. I do also feel a bit of an interloper because I really am far much more a stranger to Balkan history than most of you in the audience.
But having been flattered by the invitation, I couldn't say no.
And so what I'd like to do is discuss the issues that before,
during and after the war really shaped the impact of the fall of the Ottoman Empire on the Balkan states.
If we were to look at the big issues that divided the Ottoman Empire from the Balkan states, they all had to do with demography and territory.
But before, during and after the Great War, Thrace,
Macedonia and the Aegean Islands wetlands heatedly contested between the Ottomans and their Balkan neighbours.
To some extent, those disputes were violently resolved through the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913.
And Balkan nationalist movements had impressed on both Turkey and its neighbours a false sense of incompatibility between
Muslims and Christians that led implacably towards a homogenous Christian Balkans and a homogenous Muslim Anatolia.
The means used were called population transfers at that time.
Today, of course, we would refer to them as ethnic cleansing. Whatever the rhetoric,
the devastating consequences for the populations involved have left enduring scars that by
far transcended the period of the Great War and paved the way for a Greco Turkish antagonism.
That was really to be one of the enduring feature of the international relations of the Mediterranean world right through the 20th century.
In the early months of 1914, just before the outbreak of war,
the European powers tried to broker peace negotiations to resolve the outstanding differences between the Ottoman Empire and its Balkan neighbours.
To some degree, the injection of foreign capital helped and France's loan of $100 million to assist in economic
reconstruction in the Ottoman Empire went a long way to dust the Ottomans to accept their losses in Albania,
Macedonia and Thrace by promising through this for an injection of capital.
Real economic growth after two terrible wars.
But even after the peace agreements had been signed and the terms of the loan concluded,
there remain very significant issues outstanding between Istanbul and Athens.
The peace agreements left Greece in possession of three key Aegean islands seized from Turkey in the Balkan wars.
Chios and Mytilene, dominating the entry to smear no of modern Izmir, were within sight of the Turkish mainland.
So these are not islands. It seemed remote from Turkey. They seemed very much on the horizon when viewed from the mainland.
Lemnos, with the strategic harbour of Budrus, was less than 80 kilometres from the Strategic Straits of the Dardanelles.
The port never accepted the loss of these islands and was unwilling to live with Greece dominating its coastal waters through these islands.
While Ottoman diplomats sought European support.
For the Government's claims for the restoration of the Aegean Islands,
Ottoman War planners worked to shift the balance of naval power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean instead.
The Ottoman government. Commission to state of the art dreadnoughts as their solution to the naval imbalance in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The British shipbuilders, Vickers and Armstrong, took the commission in August 1911 for delivery three years later.
The orders were placed as part of a British naval mission to help modernise the Ottoman fleet.
The two ships, the Sultan Osman and the Irish are due name for the first and the last or latest.
Ottoman sultans were a tremendous drain on the Ottoman Treasury.
These were very expensive state of the art warships appealing to Ottoman patriotism.
The government funded the ships in large part through public subscription.
Turkish schoolchildren were encouraged to contribute their pocket money,
and fundraising stands were opened across Ottoman cities in which if you made a contribution, you should have five passengers.
You allowed to drive a great big name into a very large block of wood and somehow the sea to capture
what it meant to be getting these dreadnoughts from the Ottoman Empire at the individual level.
While the ships became a focus of Ottoman pride redressing the Empire's naval
forces after the defeats of both the Libyan War of 1911 and the two Balkan wars,
Greece and Russia were much less enthusiastic about these developments.
The massive battleships that give the Turkish Navy the advantage over the Russian Black Sea fleet,
but would also dramatically shift the balance of power in the region.
The Aegean Islands dispute and the impending delivery of British Dreadnoughts to the Ottoman
Navy raised a real prospect of war between Greece and Turkey in the first half of 1914.
Officials in Greece were calling for pre-emptive strikes against the Ottoman Navy before
they took delivery of these two dreadnoughts that would change the balance of power.
And the Ottomans, for their part, prepare their citizens once again for war by sending around through sealed envelopes.
The mobilisation posters, which village headmen were told to keep sealed until further notice.
As it turned out, those mobilisation posters would not be used for war against Greece.
That, of course, would be torn open when the Ottomans mobilised for the Great War in August that year.
On August 2nd, 1914, the Ottoman Empire concluded a secret mutual defence pact with Germany, which was, for all intents and purposes, a war pact.
Given the circumstances, the Turks presented the Germans with their war aims four days later,
when the Germans desperately sought entry for two of their naval vessels into the neutral and sealed Straits of the Dardanelles.
In a pre-dawn meeting with Ambassador Wang and Heim on the 6th of August,
Prime Minister Syed Haleem Pasha laid out his government's conditions for allowing the Govern and Breslau to enter the straits.
Syed Haleem presented six demands of Germany that represent, in a sense, the earliest statement of the Ottoman War aims of the Great War.
Two of St Helen's conditions addressed recent Ottoman losses in the Balkans.
First, the Ottomans were determined to secure agreements with Romania and Bulgaria
before entering into any hostilities with the triple against the triple entente.
To ensure that his Balkan neighbours would not threaten Turkish Thrace or Istanbul.
So they needed to have Germany give iron packed guarantees of good behaviour by Romania and Bulgaria.
As we all know, Bulgaria, after much wavering, ultimately does join with the central powers.
In October of 1915, Romania, which ultimately sided with the entente,
was the only country in the First World War that the Ottomans actually declared war on the
Ottomans on the receiving end of many declarations of war without ever reciprocating.
But the one country that the Ottomans actively declared war on was Romania.
On the 30th of August 1916, footnote back to St Helen's conditions of Ambassador Vang and Heim to allow these two fugitive vessels into the straits.
The second well, second part of the first condition.
The Grand Vizier sought German assistance both in concluding indispensable understandings with Romania and
Bulgaria and in negotiating a fair agreement with Bulgaria for an equitable division of possible spoils of war.
So what Saint Halim Pasha was doing was laying out the possibility that if a war went particularly well for the Ottoman Empire and his German allies,
that they might actually be able to recover some lost territory in the Balkans. Thinking back to 1912, 1913.
Secondly, should Greece enter the war on the side of the entente powers and be defeated?
Germany would assure the return of the three Aegean Islands girls Mytilene, Lesbos and Lemnos to Turkish sovereignty.
Okay, so much for the geographical issues.
Equally serious were the demographic divides between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans and Anatolia in their short time in power.
The Young Turks had overseen extensive population transfers.
Territorial losses in the Balkans drove waves of destitute Muslims to seek refuge
in Ottoman domains without the resources to address this humanitarian crisis.
The Turkish leadership created space for these Balkan refugees by deporting thousands of Ottoman Christians to Greece.
A government committee then oversaw the reallocation of the houses and fields and workshops.
Of deported Ottoman Christians to help with the resettlement of Muslims coming from the Balkans.
These quote unquote population exchanges were regulated by formal agreements concluded between the ports and the Balkan states.
So you had, in this sense, ethnic cleansing with an official seal of approval.
The deportation of ethnic Greeks from the Ottoman Empire served several purposes.
Deportation not only freed up homes and workplaces for the resettlement of Balkan Muslims,
but it also allowed the Ottomans to expel thousands of citizens that they saw as being of questionable loyalty to the Ottoman state.
So there is a political motive behind the kind of human resettlement motive,
tensions over the Aegean island that threatened renewed war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire.
In the first six months of 1914 had left Ottoman Greeks vulnerable and exposed.
So the population exchanges initiated after the Balkan wars had provided the
kind of internationally sanctioned solution to the Empire's Greek problem.
So what started as a controlled exchange of border populations between belligerents
evolved into a systematic expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Ottoman lands.
Generally, though, there are no precise figures for these deportations.
Several hundred thousand Christians and Muslims were forcibly relocated before and during the First World War.
The deep of the deportations were applied within Asia minor.
The more the government had to rely on violence and intimidation to achieve their ends.
Ottoman Christian villagers in Anatolia, very far from the troubled Balkans, resisted the state's efforts to uproot them.
These were their homes and villages, the feel that they and the generations before them it formed.
Gendarmes rounded up. Villagers beat up. The men threatened to kidnap women.
Even killed Ottoman Greeks who resisted deportation. Foreign consuls appalled by the violence against Christians.
Civilians reported dozens killed. In some villages,
you see an exchange of very alarmed reports between the different European and American consular agents working in Anatolia at the time.
But the thing is this. The expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia could be carried out with a relatively low level of violence against individuals,
precisely because there was a Greece to which you could deport these people.
And this, I would argue, is the primary difference between the fate of the Ottoman Greeks uprooted, deported, but not subjected to mass murder.
And the Armenians who because they did not have a country to which they could be deposited,
of course, faced genocide with the defeat of the Ottomans in October 1918.
These issues were only exacerbated by the terms of the peace treaty.
As Margaret Macmillan has so eloquently written in her earlier work, Peacemakers.
Greek Prime Minister Venizelos had, from the very start of the Paris peace conference,
pressed Greece's claims to Anatolia, but arguably with mixed success.
He gave dodgy statistics to try and argue that the demography of the coastline
of Turkey was overwhelmingly Greek and that if you took the area around Smyrna,
that basically Turks were an absolute minority in their own land.
Venizelos was particularly adamant in making a claim to the port of Smyrna,
Izmir to the Turks, one of the Mediterranean boomtowns of the 19th century.
The pre-war population of Izmir was 250,000.
And more Greeks lived there than in Athens itself.
But his bid for Izmir and its hinterlands reaching deep into western Anatolia, created the Greek province with a huge number of non Greeks,
as well as a very long line to defend for anybody who might choose to attack it from the Anatolian hinterlands.
But Venizelos reinforced his claims to Smyrna and its hinterlands by reporting that Turks were massacring Greeks
and in this way got an authorisation from the Big Three to send a Greek cruiser off the coast of Smyrna.
This was followed by the decision taken fatefully on the 6th of May 1919 to
dispatch Greek troops to protect the civilians of Smyrna and its hinterlands.
As we know, the landing of Greek soldiers on the 15th of May.
Far from calming, a tense situation inflamed it.
And there were riots, shooting and violence on that day that left three between three and 400 Turks dead and certainly no less than 100 Greeks dead.
However, destabilising to the peace of Western Anatolia. The Greek claim to Izmir was formalised in the treaty itself,
imposed by the victorious allied powers on the defeated Ottoman Empire and was signed on the 10th of August 1920.
It, section four of the treaty has said that treats the issues surrounding the future of Smyrna.
It creates a kind of Greek condominium written in a diplomatic doublespeak that the
great powers seem to have mastered to make the unpalatable seem positively reasonable.
In a. New formula. Smyrna was to remain under Turkish sovereignty, but Turkey was to transfer to the Greek government.
The exercise of her rights of sovereignty over Smyrna and its influence to sovereignty is still Turkish.
But Turkey cedes its right of sovereignty to Greece. The Greek government was made responsible for the administration of Smyrna and
would name its own officials to oversee the port and the territories behind it.
The Greeks were allowed to garrison soldiers in this manner for the maintenance of order and public security as many soldiers as they saw fit.
They would oversee the creation of a local parliament. To be filled by people elected.
From the local population in a process that was to be approved by the League of Nations.
And relations between the Greek administration. So the oversight of the port, an area would be under a Greek appointed administration.
Their relations with the local parliament would be regulated within the terms of the Greek constitution in five years time.
The local parliament could petition the League of Nations for the incorporation of Smyrna into the Kingdom of Greece.
At which point Turkish sovereignty would cease. Well,
you didn't have to be a radical Turkish nationalist to see in the formula of the Treaty of Sevilla everything it took
within a five year period to formalise a transfer of a central part of Asia minor from Turkish to Greek control.
The terms of the treaty duly signed by the powerless Ottoman government, set in motion the Kemalist rejection that would lead to war.
The creation of the Turkish Republic. And the expulsions of the remaining Greek population from Anatolia.
They took until the 10th of September 1922, before Ataturk entered Smyrna and declared it Izmir once and for all.
The city was sacked and burned and those who survived dispersed as refugees towards Greece.
The war had created such antagonisms between Turks and Greeks in Anatolia that villages
across the and Asia minor abandoned their homes to join this exodus from Turkish territory.
This population transfer was formalised by an agreement concluded between the governments of Greece and Turkey.
Which arranged for a compulsory exchange of populations involving some 1.3 million.
Greeks from Anatolia and Thrace.
The only exception to this expulsion were those Greek residents of Istanbul or Constantinople who had been living in the city since before 1918.
Otherwise, every Greek,
from every village and every town in Anatolia was to be forcibly deported and about a half million Turks to be expelled from Greece.
Except for those living in Western Thrace.
So you had, by formal agreement, the forced displacement of nearly 2 million people as a consequence of these actions.
Thus, the demographic differences were bridged by ethnic cleansing and the territorial differences.
By war, Turkey achieved statehood in all of Anatolia.
But to this day, Greece still holds those three disputed islands in the Aegean immediately off the coast of Turkey.
Lesbos. Joe's sending us.
And the enduring legacy. One need only point to the typical Greek antagonism,
which had at so many points provoked crisis in the eastern Mediterranean, not least around places like Cyprus,
to see that the false emotions of peace had left an enduring legacy of trouble from the fall of the Ottomans in the First World War.
Thank you. Down with the empire.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me thank the organisers for inviting me.
Bringing me back home to St Anthony's, where so many things have changed by the spirit.
This is the same. I was really honoured because I'm not a specialist in World War One unlike all the other speakers.
So I it took me some time to, to decide which was going to be my point of view in this presentation.
And considering that it was going to be presented, I thought,
to do something different and explain why what all one is and the unwanted legacy for Greece.
And through that, to make certain arguments about Greece.
And as a modern nation, I have very vivid memories from my school days and they hold it against me.
But the past has always been for me to be last topic of discussion.
This preference, however, had nothing to do with my school classes,
but my my grandfather fought in three different was his first experience was in the Great War.
Another one supporter of Felicitas Venizelos, he left Greek, eastern Macedonia and his unit on a boat in early September 1916 to escape captivity.
And thus he missed the opportunity to flirt to German girls and go together with the rest of the fourth Greek Army Corp.
But instead, he was injured at the Battle of RAF in there fighting with the French and the British.
My grandmother also had very vivid memories dating back to 1908 when Greek and
Bulgarian armed bands were still clashing throughout Ottoman held in Macedonia.
She also kept telling me about the Bulgarian invasion of 1916.
Her village was captured by the Bulgarian army. Her father and brother were deported to Bulgaria and spent some time doing hard labour.
She was 12 years old at the time and her strong anti Bulgarian sentiments marked my childhood.
One of her favourite stories was about the glorious lion statue of Amphipolis,
parts of which were discovered by English soldiers digging trenches along the south, the flow of the stream river in 1916.
And to be honest, archaeology was my first choice. But history one me.
Eventually, I apologise for having bothered you with my family stories.
I just wanted to make clear that what war one at least for me, was not a vaguely known or ill digested historical event.
I grew up not only with fairy tales, but also with lower doses of history, and I became addicted to my surprise.
However, at school I was taught nothing about the Great War until I was in the third grade of high school.
And my case, I think, often mentioned that as well.
We're talking to the same age it looks so.
My case is not exceptional, considering that at the time the history of Greece after 1821,
after the War of Independence, was not a compulsory part of any history course.
There was never enough time to allow us to go beyond independence to much history.
More important, though, was the absence of World War One from public history.
There were impressive celebrations for the declaration of the Greek Italian war in
1940 and for the defence against the Germans at the Metaxa line in April 1941.
We knew a lot about the heroic death of Pavlos Milan's, the pioneer of the struggle for Macedonia against the Bulgarians 1904.
We could see the monuments. There were films on all these topics with well-known cinema stars.
We also knew about the crash of the Communists in 1949 that ended the Greek civil war.
Although we learned little about communism itself. So let me start by reminding you very crudely of some milestones of the crucial decade 1912, 1922.
Some of them already mentioned in 1913, following the Balkan wars.
Greece had expanded to create the June Islands, Epirus and Macedonia.
But the outbreak of World War One, it was still debateable, whether she could defend her new positions on her own.
As we all know, territorial promises were crucial for the formation of alliances in the Balkans.
But by 1915,
the course of the war and the multifaceted diplomacy render it impossible to decide which side or neutrality was the obvious choice for Greece.
There were convincing arguments for any choice, but none without a very big risk.
Yet there was no time for contemplation.
Inability to decide and reluctance to take a unanimous risk resulted in a heated political debate and a constitutional crisis.
King Constantine and Premier League theatres. Many sailors drifted irrevocably apart after two elections in 1915.
The political season and the pressing necessities of the war,
the Gallipoli campaign and the collapse of of Serbia led the entente powers to occupy parts of Greek, Macedonian, Epirus and some islands.
Greece was divided not only politically, but also geographically.
Just two years after she had received those lands. On top of this, in 1916, Venizelos established the provisional government in the.
That was a full scale national scheme. Reunification of the two Greek parts, the so-called old Greece and the new lands was violent.
It was accomplished under tremendous allied military pressure. And the king was forced to abdicate.
Greece joined the entente in time to fight some big battles.
But the officers scope was divided and the army's morale did not fully recover.
The deficit in war effort was balanced by participating in the Ukrainian campaign against the Bolsheviks.
Eventually, Venizelos, rather than Greece, was awarded with spoils such as eastern and western freys and the the region as was destined as a minor.
In any case, too big and too fragile to handle. Eastern three since many were lost after the disaster as a minor catastrophe.
And what constituted the essence? The essence of the national catastrophe was not the military disaster, but what was mentioned,
the approaching of 1.3 or 1.5 million Greek Orthodox civilians in one decade.
Greece march from the absolute triumph to absolute disaster.
It is a series of historical events that went wrong. They could not and should not be analysed separately, I think.
But if we are to see the period as a whole, the whole debate at this point, one could reasonably ask,
given the course of European diplomacy before, during and after the Great War, undecided until the American entry.
Was the outcome of the decade an unmitigated disaster for Greece?
Was the king right and should have stayed neutral? Did we turn at the wrong turning point?
Definitely not. In addition to Western phrase, all the territorial gains of the Balkan wars were confirmed,
while hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Bulgarians populations,
which Greece could hardly ever absorb, were evacuated or forced to flee,
never to return north in Greece after the influx of the Asia minor, refugees looked impressively homogenous.
This was not a negligible development. All Asia minor had been sacrificed not in vain,
considering that preserving Macedonian face on behalf of Greece was not the priority of any great power until then.
Why then has this significant outcome of the Balkan and the Great Wars combined
been eradicated from our collective memory since I left school in the late 1970s?
Things have not changed much, although eventually the history of the 20th century got the attention of Greek educational planners.
The legacy of World War One is regarded as a complicated academic topic that has remained the exclusive preserve of specialists.
Why? Some reasons are more obvious than others.
Tracing them down, I hope, will facilitate to understand the long term repercussions of the Great War for Greece.
The key person in the 19 tens and 1920s was Venizelos from 1909 through his death in 1936.
To be exact, he was involved in whatever happened during this 25 years in his presence or in his absence.
Although he had resisted the Constitutional Assembly in 1911, which might have led to a Republican regime,
it was only after his clash with King Constantine that he developed into a leading figure of the Republican regime,
eventually established in 1924, and certainly into an emblem for the Greek Democrats ever after.
Greece, however, was a kingdom under the same dynasty of Constantine sons George and Paul.
From 1935 to 1974, the dynasty was aware that the popular support that they had accumulated during World War two,
the Civil War and the Cold War, had not neutralised the provincial feelings.
It was only out of fraud and necessity rather than love that George.
The second could have been restored in 1935 and in 1946, respectively.
The king was the head of state, but Venizelos was the true leader of the nation, if not his.
Glorifying his achievements was impossible before World War Two and undesirable after the war.
The two emblems, the Royal Crown and Venezuela's famous silk sidecar were incompatible.
To give you an example, the 50th anniversary of the First Balkan War in the 50th.
In 1962, an impressive volume was published presenting the evolution of Salonika as a Greek city after 1912.
It is amazing by all means that there were no chapters in this book for the post 1912 political events,
only presentations by subject education after 1912, Urban Planning, Health Care, Boy Scouts, Santamaria,
etc. The 20th century history of Salonika, the capital of Venizelos Provisional Government,
the headquarters of the front and Greece was an embarrassment for the king, whose large scale portrait covered the first page of that huge volume.
The story of the Great War could not be reassessed by academic historians without offending him.
In the second edition of The Great Greek Encyclopaedia, which is 28 Volume Encyclopaedia.
The Book of Reference in Greece and the second edition was in the early 1950s
under the subject illustrators Venizelos once director of his political office.
What is to move out of presenting his contribution to the great and dear the unification of Hellenism, but not his clash with the king?
Absolutely not. Not a word about that loss.
Nor was the memory of Venizelos diplomatic initiatives and confrontation useful in terms of post-World War Two politics?
To start with, in the 1940 and 1950s and early 1960s, many of the interwar protagonists were still politically active.
Among them, Venizelos, youngest son, Sophocles. But were not always in good terms with each other.
The Liberal Party of Venizelos split not the first time in 1946 and was reunited in 1947.
It is impossible to analyse here the party politics of the Liberals until they were defeated by Marshall election was papyrus in 1952.
But I could argue that although the legacy of Venizelos was extremely important for them,
reference to World War One was counterproductive during the Civil War and mindless afterwards.
Since a commonly accepted prerequisite of being national minded, less incoherent, was to be loyal to the king.
Apart from being a fervent anti-communist, even the Asia minor refugees,
the four excellent supporters of the Liberal Party scattered in the Greek Macedonian
hinterland that turned pro royalists under the threat of communist guerillas and brigands.
The example of Venizelos Protective Premiership from 1928 to 1932 was still inspiring politicians,
even, of course, some time Karamanlis in the late 1950s and the 1960s.
He had been impressed by the work produced by Venizelos,
but this did not imply any wish to steer out of the passions which World War One had
introduced in Greek politics at a time when the nation suffered a new version of Squeeze,
this time between the left and the right wings. To sum up, the legacy of World War One constituted a major political trauma.
Healing could be achieved more effectively and conveniently through amnesia.
In fact, healing this political blood felt was meaningless for the Greek society.
Since then, Greeks had learned and were used to seeing in glad.
At this point, one could possibly ask whether and why the Army itself,
a powerful factor in post World War Two events was also indifference to the memory of significant military events.
For example, the memory of the victorious World War One battles of spaghetti legend or a ravine that, as I mentioned.
Was it not a political capital to be treasured? The Army history section published its version of World War One military events in 1958.
In the face of this two volume edition, general conglomerate confessed that 40 years after the event,
the major challenge they had to face as historians was how to be objective in the study of military events,
which could not be separated from the dramatic political background.
To achieve this, he said, he wrote, they had relied on objective sources,
but also on the assumption that time had dissolved the haze created by hatred.
However, the first page of this book was also covered, surprisingly by King Constantine's portrait, thus living my few chances of objectivity.
I am not saying that that this book is a liberal against the Venizelos,
but the deliberate plan of the office is obvious to focus on the achievements of the soldiers and to
leave aside or to be critical of the politics which have brought this war effort to victorious end.
Two additional points should be made here. First, World War One was not the type of war that produces great heroes.
Our pattern of war heroes includes only those who fought irregular wars on the mountains as volunteers in the service of some great idea,
not the reservists or the professional soldiers bound by legal obligations, no matter how heroically they fought.
So the Great War produced no heroes, because great heroes are not to be found in trenches, and they are not dressed in uniforms, but in kilts.
Not to mention that the abovementioned Army history publication made clear that the
reservists had been dragged to this war and many of the deserters had been executed.
My second point has to do with the role of the Entente powers.
I will return to the international relation factor later on,
but here it must be stressed that when the Army history of World War One was written in the late 1950s,
heroes of the traditional type were being produced in Cyprus,
where the struggle for a union with Greece was in full swing, surely attached to Washington.
Sorry, securely attached to Washington. And not always in best terms with Paris.
Greece had not any particular reason to cover up the violent way in which French and British forces that
imposed their military presence in 1915 and how they had established Venizelos regime in Athens in 1916.
Nor could this respect for the sneaky Italians be hidden.
As far as Greece was concerned in the 1950s, and Tant was no longer cordial and no longer treasured the such, especially the Cyprus question,
the small idea which replaced the great one undermined seriously Greek British relations,
not to mention the decisive role the British had played in December 1944, which the Greek left never forgot.
The legacy of the grant or medallion was unwanted by all.
Which brings me to another reason for believing.
As I said, the special role Salonika had played in the national season was an embarrassment for my city.
Otherwise conservative, royalist and national minded. But it was more than that.
The memory of World War One, Salonika,
and that of the Macedonian front was related to some non-conventional historical events which did not fit well in the post-war national narrative.
Salonika, before the Great Fire of 1917, was not a predominantly Greek city in terms of demography.
Muslims and Jews formed a majority of the population. And it was exactly this colourful picture and multilingual environment that have captured
the attention of European soldiery and was presented in their diaries and written memories.
Post World War Two, Salonika was a different city, no longer the Jerusalem of the Balkans, but the mother of the refugees.
This unwritten refugees had competed bitterly with the Jews, suspected this probable Gharyan had moved into the Muslim quarters,
had and still have no particular interest in this multicultural past.
If they had one recollection, it was in 1920 and eventually a vote of this minorities,
which brought the Christian Premier down at the peak of his triumph.
After the Treaty of Seven, the Jews had stopped in the back.
That's what they thought anyway. There was nothing else for them to recall from Ottoman Cellar Nick, which had been purified by the 1917 fire.
And it might have come to your attention that recently this costly bust created many tensions between our mayor and our bishop.
So it's it's the cleavage.
No more interesting for the national narrative were developments in the Macedonian hinterland.
After World War One, Greece's allies committed themselves to the territorial integrity of Athens,
northern provinces where the majority of the refugees had been settled.
Bulgarian revisionism was a threat.
Serbian Greek relations could have been seriously injured during the war, and Greece was a defeated and exhausted state.
May I say here that now that you talked about the issue of the Aegean Islands, that's the reason that Greece did not support Serbia,
was that Serbia did not back up when there was the war was imminent with Turkey in 1914 before the war.
The future of Greek Macedonia was debateable.
Even Venizelos participated in this unholy diplomatic bargain, which included the return of eastern Macedonia to Sofia.
The task to assimilate a predominantly Slav speaking population,
in addition to half a million Muslim peasants and officially recognised remaining minority,
was a challenge to tough to be handled by a state which had not accomplished yet its own modernisation.
In any case, in 1915, when war fell upon Greece, the process of integration had not started yet.
The Greek state was an alien and a predator, more often coming to ask God to give.
All minorities were tempted and flirted with propaganda promoted by friends and foes alike.
Armbands had reappeared. Crimes committed during World War One were added to a very long list of massacres dating back to 1900s.
These were not pleasant episodes. Fortunately, the mutual exchange of minorities between Greece and Bulgaria to some degree alleviated the distress.
Yet it created two long lasting effects.
The first was the Bulgarian desire to retaliate and then murder the Japanese.
I wish there would be no peace as long as the threat of an EU stance,
a wish which undermined the inter-war plan for a Balkan Federation and was fulfilled in in bloodbath during World War Two.
The second was the dominant role of the refugees from Asia minor.
Sometimes Turkish speakers were called to play in Greek Macedonian.
They became the national gods of the north, a frontier in a new homeland.
They could not afford to lose again. And this fear of yet another uprooting made them even more sensitive to the threat of an alleged internal enemy.
The local Slav speakers who had opted to stay rather than flee to Bulgaria.
The same could be argued for, by the way, for Yugoslavia, Macedonia, the present Republic of Macedonia.
World War One events also caused some confusion.
The region was annexed by the Bulgarian army, who was welcomed as a liberator, and after the Bulgarian defeat,
defeated was colonised by the Serbs and suffered the same grievances of integration experienced in the big part.
In my view, it was this cleavage between locals and refugees, combined with the elimination of the Imre Federalist leaders in 1924,
which supported and accelerated the formation of Macedonian ethnic identity that you mentioned before.
Conflict. Macedonia was strengthened by the World War One treaties and tormented Greece for decades,
combined with the threat of communism, especially during German occupation,
during the Greek civil war, an ideology which bore fruit in socialist because Latvia after World War Two and as we all know,
this is not the most popular story in Greece. Nevertheless, in my view, it is connected directly, though not exclusively, with World War One.
The importance of expatriated Slav Macedonians vision of of Greater Macedonia.
The lost homeland could be compared with the extremely popular Greek public history legacy of the Asia minor catastrophe.
The catastrophic memory overshadowed World War One achievements, even the importance of territorial acquisitions.
Apparently, the scale of the disaster was paramount by NATO military, social, demographic, or ideological.
The final death of the great idea, which had nourished the modern Greek state since 1844,
left a vacuum which the antagonistic vision of modernisation could not replace.
This blow was so heavy and so clear that it became an integral part of domestic politics determine to a great extent by the refugee vote,
especially in northern Greece.
What had been lost following the Great War was for them more important than what had been gained through the war efforts.
The disparity between spoils and losses was the measure of judging the opponents of the liberals and find them guilty and incompetent beyond doubt.
It was also the measure to evaluate and to prioritise the effort needed to alleviate the distress of this destitute newcomers.
Needless to say, the refugees drama was real and their needs are immense.
But even when the process of settlement was accomplished, even after World War Two was over, or even today,
the manipulation of that drama, the drama of the ancestors, the decimation of the pontic creeks,
the burning of the infidel as minor are heavily exploited in terms of Greek politics,
the pressure for an officially recognised genocide which renders impossible and impious.
Any reconciliation with the Turkey is the best example of this practice.
What happened in 1922 has created a long lasting moral debt, as if the great idea must live in the sacred memory of its sudden death,
so sacred that can sanctify any demand or petition, no matter how relevant in the name of the lost homelands.
This is a tool that has been and is still being used extremely effectively by the third generation refugee
associations to recall and rest on their famous pilgrimage to the Monastery of Punishment Line 1983,
the strongest transplanted symbol of Pontic tradition in Greece.
In other words, the memory of World War One games.
Games is less functional than that of the losses which followed simply because bitterness creates more cohesive and lasting bonds.
Comparing gains and losses,
reducing the symbolic size of the catastrophe and therefore is redundant since I have already made reference to unrest through Pontic connection.
I must now expound a bit on the selective reprisal of Venizelos memory.
In the 1980s, in what was a plot fiasco, the population decayed.
To my knowledge, this is a question that has not been thoroughly researched, if touched at all.
In any case, PASOK promoted the idea that it was a revival of the Vangelis tradition, and this was widely believed, at least in Crete.
Judging from the rhetoric and the electoral campaigns and the amazing results for decades, roughly speaking for Andreas Papandreou,
Lasseter's zealous legacy was of paramount importance in order eight to engulf what was left of the centre in the 1970s,
beat to defeat the Conservatives, who were conveniently projected by PASOK as descendants of the Royalists.
Education planners were encouraged accordingly to incorporate more 20th century in the curriculum of all great issues like the October revolution,
World War Two resistance, the labour movement, the capitalist system in order to make the new generations more sensitive to
class struggle and thus to undermine the national minded history of war events.
In the first history book of this kind, published in 1982. Greece's participation in World War One featured as a 40 page long chapter where Venizelos
choice of side is analysed extensively and fully justified compared to Constantine,
who appears to be motivated only by his pro-German feelings and German marriage.
What is also interesting is that the politics of the entente powers towards Greece
during and after the war are presented in a manner which promotes a critical,
if not negative, stance. My point is that Venizelos in the 1980s was useful for PASOK without his Western allies,
and that was also in line with Andreas, anti-NATO and Anti E.C. policy.
It was exactly the opposite for new democracies conservatives.
As the party was shrinking and the centre had been absorbed by the Socialists,
Karamanlis himself and his successors who attempted and gradually claimed a part of Venizelos, liberal and pro-European tradition.
It was the key to an important pool of votes which had to be repatriated to New Democracy,
then featuring as a centre wing party, centre, right wing party.
But again, as in the case of PASOK, the image of being zealous was a vague symbol of Greece's fundamental Western orientation.
A symbol purified from his involvement in military coups.
Purified from his risky politics. Disconnect.
From his responsibility in the 1930 to bankruptcy, or for having been an admirer of so many things like that,
never mentioned this purification would be unattainable without the paramount assistance of public
history and the manipulation of education with the consent and joint action of both major parties.
His canonisation, of course, made imperative the exclusion of the most influential diaspora Greek ever,
a vessel to have from all Greek history textbooks.
There is no reason to talk about him right now. No,
he was a major financier of the Liberals and of the anti royal royalist campaigns and the
broker of deals between Venizelos and Lloyd George and of the Roman Damnatio Memoria.
So he does not mention his I mean, even my colleagues in the department don't know him.
Before I reach my final argument and in order to make it more credible, I should stress that even during the days of the present financial crisis,
the example of Venizelos attachment and commitment to his Western allies in World War One is constantly
used to encourage the Greeks to stick to the European Union or even to the Balkan friends and neighbours.
We must never walk alone again because another catastrophe will follow.
It may sound simplistic or even naive, but the argument is in line with the tendency of respectable modern Greek historians
to consider Venizelos as part of a pedigree dating back to election dismal record.
That was the leader of the English Party in the 1930s, followed by having lost recouping the reform of Constantine Karamanlis,
the other being the last branch in this three of the Greek nations liberal modernisers.
Here, the final question must be pressed. Is there a deeper meaning in our willingness as a nation either to forget all about World
War One or to use selectively whatever is appropriate to cover our current needs socially,
ethically, that the entire national excuse becomes incomprehensible.
Since the constitutional dilemma has been removed for good.
Greece will not be a kingdom again. We must now look deeper into the nature of our national psyche in terms of public history and school history.
As I said before, this history is regarded as a clash between a pro-German king carried away by his wife and the premier,
who acknowledged the common interests of Greece and Britain in the Near East.
More elaborate analysis like the school textbooks of the socialist period made popular.
The oldest interwar Marxist approach that a further expansion to the East suited
best the interests of the capitalist urban class which supported Venizelos.
In any case, the drama lies in the fact that the alleged united body of the nation was cut into two parts.
If we shift from public history to academic history,
we must focus on the works of writers and reporters who have given us all the necessary evidence for an in-depth analysis.
Let me state here that the making of this year's clash between evangelists and anti-federalists
stretches beyond the end of World War One and beyond the catastrophic and includes,
for example, the attempt against Venizelos in 1920. The execution of the six 1922 attempted assassination of Venizelos in 1933.
The execution of three evangelist officers, 1935. Plot of events.
Such events contributed heavily to the alienation of the two parts of the nation.
But the regional cleavage, all agreed, was a product of World War One.
Or was it not? I'm not implying simply the construction of party mechanisms in the 19th century which were in place before World War One,
and they were ready to be mobilised and support partition. Others has referred to various considers by Poland confrontations.
Greek Orthodox versus minorities, refugees versus locals.
Old Greece versus New Greece, traders versus manufacturers.
He pointed out that the overlapping of these bowls, to the extent it happened,
increase the intensity of the confrontation by creating wider camps in the place of parties.
The same could be argued in terms of clash analysis.
The two camps did not overlap with clashes. The cleavage cut through the urban class, the bourgeoisie, the labour class and peasantry.
Professor, of course Athos argued convincingly that the nationalism could and should be studied as a crisis in the process of national integration.
Greece was not in a position to integrate, administer the three expanded territories, nor to assimilate numerous minorities.
When war fell upon her. Greece was reluctant to accept the challenge of further expansion and insecure of her positions.
The tension increased when refugees were added to the minorities as the mismatch between the people,
the nation and the state became too apparent to be neglected.
When you referred to a nation, including all the new Greece,
as well as the unredeemed the state of two continents and five seas, his opponents to a small but honourable state.
In theory, both camps were adherents of irredentism.
But in matters of practice, they were antagonists in the same course.
This antagonism as to which was the best way to get to something noble was deeply rooted.
Bavarians trying to modernise Greece by using outsiders, educated Greeks of the Ottoman Empire and the Diaspora.
But in 1844, after the constitutional revolt, the local notables, the popular Russian party, won the parliament and ousted the newcomers or outsiders,
Bavarians and Greeks alike, who had disregarded the natural route and derailed the Greek nation.
As in 1850s and 1960s, the supporters of an Eastern Orthodox Federation blamed the Western allies for deliberately undermining
the unity of the Orient through the use of nationalism and the infiltration of an alien culture.
European culture.
In the 1980s, the group's opponents supported the view that the King, if necessary, should be able to resist the majority of the parliament.
To temper the growing tendency for democracy, especially if democratisation was in favour of the plutocrats of the diaspora or of the bourgeoisie.
They maintained that the emphasis on material goods and the development of mechanisms assisting the accumulation of capital,
destabilised social cohesion and widened injustice for their ostentatious consumerism.
Such plutocrats were called caviar eaters and golden flies the Golden Boys.
Such novelties were not compatible with Greek values and morals.
Not that the opponents of the cookies had an alternative economic plan to a state driven expansion.
By 1915, after some decades of intensive modernisation with fewer apps and more downs, discontent was mounting.
Nobles from the Seven Islands staffs, officers, university professors and judges.
The crown itself were all threatened by the rise of a Western oriented liberal business class.
Capitalist growth also threatened or had expelled a part of the petty rosey from the labour market, the public sector or trade.
In the same was true for the dependent workers.
Farmers of some standing who had depended on the export trade of carrots were gradually losing the financial and social privileges to small farmers,
growing grain for local consumption. There were many Greeks in old Greece relaxing to sustain twins and modernisation,
which required more taxes for armaments and for the growing public sector and longer military service of the front.
The rising pressure of the army against the non-evangelical parties after the 1909 military coup,
which escalated into a dictatorship of the Liberals in 1916 with the support of the armed forces and was bound to bring down the dynasty,
was sufficient reason for the social tension to explode violently.
If this outward or bellicose policy bringing wealth to their opponents and
misery to them was to suggest that the road was moved out of Constantinople,
then there were many who had absolutely no interest in this great war of Venizelos.
It was not their war, not their great idea.
Regardless of all the complicated motives behind the scheme,
what is particularly interesting is the specific rhetoric used by the Athenian press to present and make
comprehensible or digestible the objection or the support to Greece's participation in World War One.
For the events, at least, the state of Athens had been transformed into an ally of the nation's most despised and traditional enemies,
the Turks and the Bulgarians, guilty of high treason. Beyond any doubt, this constituted an internal aggression.
A full the composition of the modern Hellenic body to describe best what was the real essence of Vangelis policy in the eyes of their opponents.
Let me translate to a very brief but revealing passage from a newspaper in December 1916.
Venice. Elisabeth was not, but the imitation of the Franks.
The Franks being in general, the Western as the Catholics, the Protestant, the imitation of the Franks in politics.
Under a healthy surface, it was the most lethal disease.
Under the pretence of realism, it bargained Greece's.
It bargained Greece like a load of onions under the title of progress.
Individual and group atavism was excited.
Under the facade of Renaissance,
Venizelos tried to achieve the negation of all traditions under the pretext of an alliance such to settle the front in the head of Greece,
in fact wanted another general edited by the rumours.
When he was himself did not look like a manly Greek, but like a Jew of a special kind with a feminine intellect.
This gross and blatant propaganda was disseminated nationwide and infiltrated.
The Army rooms, as we all know, was executed in 1920 by Vangelis, having served as a diplomat in Macedonia,
offered many works and a flagrant nationalism, and declared openly his anti-Semitism.
The rooms have developed into a major symbol of pure Hellenism, deeply rooted in the Byzantine Orient,
and was acknowledged as the ideal Greek hero by many ultranationalist fascist and neo nazi Greek organisations and parties,
including the notorious Golden Dawn heresy of him.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I have tried to answer the question why the Greek war as a whole has been eradicated from Greek collective memory after World War Two,
although selective parts of it are come in handy from time to time.
In my presentation, I referred to the whole 19 1222 war case in order to make my arguments more plausible.
Although I risk distancing myself from our main topic, The Great War, the presented reasons for believing and the misuse vary from time to time.
Before 1974, one could points to the regular regime, which could not claim a single share in World War One achievement,
but many of the making of the ugly national excuse and says post-war Greece was thrown ended by another scheme between left and right.
Talking about the first one was not the wise, since not even the army was very proud of its deeds.
The fluctuating relations between Greece and its Western European allies was also part of the nation's memory problem.
And this is true for today as well. The dubious impact of World War One on the Macedonian question also complicates the narrative.
It looks that it helped to eradicate minorities, but in the same manner strengthened the memories and determination to vanish.
This is more than true for Pontic and Asia minor refugees, especially the former,
who have turned the catastrophe into a powerful tool in the politics of memory, not only of memory of which the preceding war is an important detail.
My last argument focussed on the nature of the national history and event of paramount importance,
which will endlessly overshadow Greek participation in World War One.
I argued that in spite of the complexity in the formation and composition of the two camps,
one can clearly see the perpetual struggle between two competing political and ideological cultures a pro-Western and oppressed them.
They are unable to realise or to recall that they are the two sides of the same coin, two virgins of the same self, alas, and Greece.
To make the difference meaningful, the two camps demonise each other by neutrally projecting images of our outside enemies the France,
the Turks, the Bulgarians, the Jews, the Slavs, the Americans, the Germans.
And if I am not wrong, then the national excuse me,
of 1916 was just another episode of a birth trauma that Greece had decided to bury and to pretend to amnesia,
rather than to talk about it, frankly, and be cured. And if you follow Greek news, then you know that this tale of dualism still goes on.
Think of.