Greco-Turkish War Research Articles

Soviet military assistance to Turkey in 1920–1922

In the article, the author examines the supply of arms from the Soviet republics to Turkey between 1920 and 1922. He primarily draws on documents from the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA) to elucidate the scope and dynamics of the arms supplies, which were instrumental in enabling Turkey to defend its independence and territorial integrity in the challenging struggle with the Entente states. The available evidence indicates that, with the exception of a brief period in late 1920, Russia consistently supplied arms to the best of its capabilities, even during the cooling of relations in early March 1921. While Soviet-made weapons played a pivotal role in the Turkish Army’s operations against Armenia, they were particularly instrumental in its victory at Sakarya. As the Greco-Turkish War drew to a close, the Soviet contribution to the conflict diminished as French weapons began to arrive. However, Soviet gold also became a means of financing this military aid. By comparing the data from the RGVA documents with the estimates previously published in Russia that referenced Turkish sources, the author concludes that the materials preserved in the Russian archive provide a more accurate assessment of the scale, quality, and dynamics of the supplies provided. The quality of weapons provided was sufficiently high to enable effective resistance to the Greek invasion of Anatolia.

The Real and the Ideal: The Field of the Asia Minor Expedition as Memoryscape and the Politics of Collective Memory

Abstract: In the summer of 1921, the Greek armies had succeeded in occupying part of Greece's claimed territories in Asia Minor. Although the outcome of the Greco-Turkish war had yet to be decided, the Greek minister of military affairs proposed that a public war memorial park be constructed in Athens, a park-monument where the Asia Minor locations under Greek control would be presented metonymically. The project, visualized on a detailed map, foresaw the transport of ancient Greek antiquities from Asia Minor and their selective positioning in the park so as to create a spatio-temporal miscellany. In the proposed memorial park, space, time, and Greek antiquity were to produce a new locus, a memoryscape, that went beyond existing frontiers and outside experienced time. The plan to create a cultural mnemonic marker monumentalizing the Asia Minor Campaign sought not only to shape the national identity but also to proclaim and promote Greece's demand for annexation of the Asia Minor territories.

Exchanging Holiness for Harmony, Bringing Pontus to Patria: The Refugee Panagia on the Move

Abstract İsmet Pasha’s visit to Athens in 1931 was a highlight of the diplomatic revolution between Turkey and Greece in the early 1930s. Thanks to press coverage of the visit, the Turkish public had the opportunity to observe Greece’s social landscape as shaken by the refugee issue for the first time since the Greco-Turkish war and population exchange. Whether Greek refugees could return to their former homelands was the focal point of the visit. A month later, the Turkish government granted Greek exchangees the freedom to travel. Prior to this decision, the cabinet had handled authorization requests individually and issued special permits as a palliative solution. The case of the appeal made by an exchangee monk for a mission to unearth hidden relics at Sumela Monastery is especially intriguing. This article focuses on the story of this mission and the historical context that facilitated its realization.

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922: Causes, Course, Effects

The Greco-Turkish war, in its strictest sense, was a multifaceted conflict characterized by the varied actions of the combatants. Even though there were not any coalitions comprising military contingents, joint command structures, or coordinated military forces between the Greek, Armenian, and French nationalist factions, one can argue that each theatre of warfare – Armenian, Cilician, and Greek (Anatolian) – operated as a cohesive strategic unit. For many Greeks and Armenians, this conflict represented an extension of their national liberation effort, driven by territorial aspirations, a quest to realize their national vision, and an ambition to humble a longstanding adversary. On the other hand, the inhabitants of Anatolia and the Muslim refugees who had sought sanctuary in the region – individuals who increasingly identified as Turks rather than Ottomans – were motivated by their pursuit of national sovereignty and independence.

Soloùp’s graphic memoir Aivali: Reconstructing a deconstructed community

In 2014, the graphic memoir Aivali created by the prolific comics artist with the pen name Soloùp was published in Greece with great success. His book constitutes a mosaic of personal experiences relating mainly to the cities of Aivali, Chania and the island of Lesbos. More precisely, Soloùp’s sequential art recounts his own personal experiences and reminiscences from a day trip in Aivali sometime in the 2000s, the autobiographical memories of three Greek authors that refer to their lives in the same city before and during the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor and the story of a Turkish young man, a family member of the Turkish writer Ahmet Yorulmaz, who resided in Chania until his settlement in Aivali in 1923. The purpose of this article is to examine the way in which the spirit of community is revived, how the city of Aivali is socially reconstructed and finally, the manner in which community and space are connected with each other and also with social memory. The notions of community, space and social memory will be approached through the lens of classical sociology theories formulated by Ferdinand Tönnies, Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs.

Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary by Kristina Gedgaudaité

Reviewed by: Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary by Kristina Gedgaudaité Aimilia (Emilia) Salvanou (bio) Kristina Gedgaudaité, Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture: An Itinerary. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. xvi + 252. Hardcover $109.99. The first thing one notices when taking Kristina’s Gedgaudaité’s book in one’s hands is the cover image: a cartoon, showing a suitcase lying all by itself behind barbed wire. The suitcase is made of people, tightly woven together and indistinguishable from one another, all dressed in the same clothes, clearly in despair. [End Page 151] A small self-made bag that one of them carries gives a hint that they are refugees. At one of the suitcase’s corners, a child lends a helping hand to one of the refugees. By doing so it starts to untangle the human skein. People are about to be seen and their voices heard. The cartoon is actually named “Suitcase: Refugees” and was drawn by Oleksiy Kustovsky in 2016 at the peak of the refugee crisis in Europe. The cover image prepares the reader for an engaging experience: Gedgaudaité’s book is not another study about the past, about what happened in 1922 and the Greek-Turkish exchange of populations, but rather a book about memory, meaning-making, and the understandings of the past in contemporary culture. It is also a book about the way experience becomes intertwined with memory and finds its way in post-memory, cultural memory, and historical culture. The book consists of seven chapters, each of which covers a different aspect of the contemporary cultural memory of 1922 in Greece. The first chapter, “Memory Work and History in the Making,” serves as an introduction and sets the scene for what will be discussed later. It historicizes the emergence of the relevant cultural memory, focusing on the 1930s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2010s, and it emphasizes that it was only after the 1980s, and especially after the 1990s, that this memory was infused with the voices of the refugees’ experience. The second chapter, “An Introduction to the Histories and Legacies of the Greco-Turkish War and the Memory Studies Toolbox,” discusses the historical framework of 1922 and its special place in contemporary historical culture in Greece. It also sets out the theoretical and methodological framework of memory studies upon which subsequent analysis is based, drawing from, among others, the work of Caruth (1996), Hirsch (1997), and Erll and Rigney (2009). The third chapter, “Affective Alliances in the Greek History Wars,” is dedicated to the analysis and interpretation of the history wars that broke out in Greece in 2006–2007 over how historians approached aspects of the Asia Minor Catastrophe. Gedgaudaité states that this controversy was so important that it became engraved in public memory and in many ways shaped the conceptualization of 1922 in the years that followed. On the basis of this observation, Gedgaudaité proceeds to her fourth chapter, “Fragmented Pasts, Postmemory and the ‘Grandchildren of Lausanne’,” which focuses on the aesthetics and practices of family memory, especially that related to the third generation. Here, the author fleshes out her argument that a traumatic conception of the past has reached most of the refugees’ grandchildren through narratives and recollections of everyday life. Gedgaudaité proves her point through a discussion of Soloup’s graphic novel Aivali, in which Antonis Nikolopoulos (Soloup) reflects on the way that the cultural memory of 1922 (on both the Greek and [End Page 152] on Turkish sides) shaped his experience of a journey he made between Lesvos and Aivali. He shows, as Gedgaudaité explains, how fragments of memory can be assembled to give voice to a self-reflective history. The two subsequent chapters, the fifth and the sixth, are respectively titled “Smyrna in Your Pocket” and “Framing the Futures of Memory.” They articulate and are structured around the notion of “portable memory,” and they provide, in many ways, the book’s most original contribution. Their main argument is that the Smyrna Catastrophe has become the lens through which Greeks approach the uprooting of their co-ethnics from Asia Minor in the framework of contemporary historical culture and that the cultural memory of...

Thessaloniki: A City in Transition, 1912–2012 ed. by Dimitris Keridis and John Brady Kiesling

Reviewed by: Thessaloniki: A City in Transition, 1912–2012 ed. by Dimitris Keridis and John Brady Kiesling Iakovos D. Michailidis (bio) Dimitris Keridis and John Brady Kiesling, eds., Thessaloniki: A City in Transition, 1912–2012. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. xvii + 390. 54 illustrations. Paper £29.59. The history of Thessaloniki attracts many researchers from various countries, not only Greeks—and not without good reason. Thessaloniki has some features [End Page 145] which set it apart from most other cities of the Balkans and the southeastern Mediterranean. Among recent synthetic studies, Mark Mazower’s Salonica, City of Ghosts (2004) undoubtedly stands out, because Mazower introduced Thessaloniki to international historiography in an inspired and narratively unique way. Now, a new edited volume includes contributions delivered at an international conference held in Thessaloniki in October 2012 on the occasion of the centennial of the city’s liberation from Ottoman rule and its incorporation in the modern Greek state. The volume contains twenty-three articles and an extensive introduction written by the editors. It may be pointed out that a corresponding Greek version of this volume includes more articles than the English one—yet nowhere is it explained by what criteria some articles have been included here while others have been left out. According to the editors, the involvement of the then-mayor of Thessaloniki, Giannis Boutaris, was decisive in the organization/direction of the conference. For example, the original plan to focus on the Greek presence in the city was revised and replaced by an attempt to enrich its history with new perspectives and to confirm its position in international literature (2–3). The twenty-three articles in this volume are organized into three sections: “Searching for Identity,” “A City in Transition,” and “Mapping the Future of Thessaloniki.” The editors have tried to summarize and evaluate the city's centenary history through these three general themes, and the volume features contributions by renowned historians, including, among others, Mark Mazower, Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Philip Mansel, Eyal Ginio, Evangelos Hekimoglou, and Basil Gounaris. Still, the list of renowned researchers, whose papers are undoubtedly of high quality, does not automatically imply a thematic completeness and balance that would justify the ambitious title of the international conference and the corresponding volume. This is why both the introduction and the conclusions to the volume are often disconnected from the other articles. The editors correctly declare that their purpose was not to record the entirety of Thessaloniki's historical past. The first main axis of their approach is to “search for identity” in the city and to understand “the debates over the identity before and immediately after 1912” (7). The second axis relates to “the transition from an imperial to a national system and how that affected the city and its residents,” while the third involves discussion of how to “foster debate on what future the city deserves” (6–7). Properly studying all three axes—and especially the first two—requires a tightly structured theoretical approach. However, the topic of “identities” has been largely limited here to the study of national and religious minorities, with an emphasis on Jews, Muslims, and Bulgarians. Other identities—e.g., the Greeks—seem to be absent or are featured [End Page 146] only in a rather distorted manner (for instance through the arrival of Greek refugees) and mainly as a result of the Greco-Turkish War. In their introduction the editors focus, very aptly, on the Young Turk movement of 1908 as a pivotal point not only for the Muslim community of Thessaloniki but also for the whole region and for the personality of Mustafa Kemal, who was born in the city. With regard to Kemal, the editors note that he was “raised in a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan imperial city gradually encircled by the hostile nationalisms of the bordering Christian states,” and they admit that he “distilled the ideas but also the contradictions of Young Turk nationalism” (3–4). But what are the contradictions of Young Turk nationalism? The reader will never know. And this might not have been of great importance if not for the connection to two other seminal events Thessaloniki’s history. The first of these...

“A Productive Asset for the Country:” Refugees, the League of Nations, and the Greco-Turkish Exchange, 1924-1930

In 1924, the League of Nations authorized a special commission to resettle the hundreds of thousands of refugees created by the Greco-Turkish War. The Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC) would be responsible for rehousing Greek refugees expelled from former Ottoman territories and resettling them in Greece. The RSC had a unique commission. In an attempt to effect a “permanent solution” to ethnic violence in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations had helped broker the Treaty of Lausanne between the warring nations of Greece and Turkey that ended the conflict and authorized each nation to denaturalize and expel any Greeks in Turkey and any Turks in Greece, over one and a half million civilians in total from both countries. With the League's approval, the RSC carried out the task of resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees who had been created by international accord, forced out of their ancestral homelands, and expelled to Greece with the vague promise of citizenship, housing, and welfare. This paper follows how the Refugee Settlement Commission, a supranational organization created and legitimized by the League of Nations, sought to enact their visions of modernity and civilization through the resettlement of these refugees.

Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora

Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora

Borders, Belonging, and Refugee Memory since the Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange

What cultural, historical, institutional, and legal paradigms have the Greco- Turkish War and Population Exchange bequeathed to national and trans-national practices of border-making, border-crossing, and heritage-claiming over the past century, and how have subsequent experiences reshaped the original paradigm? We approach this question through four distinct categories: namely, the historical trajectory of refugee identity and its different political and cultural legacies in Greece and Turkey; the racialization of religion, which has helped to rewrite the boundaries of citizenship and belonging over the past century; the paradigm of peacekeeping by partition that the Population Exchange handed down to the international diplomatic norms of subsequent decades, along with the widespread regime of unseeing on which it depends; and, finally, memory practices that establish templates for remembering refugee pasts as well as making sense of contemporary crises.

Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey by Huw Halstead, and: The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe by Erik Sjöberg, and: Με το Διωγμό στην ψυχή: Το τραύμα της μικρασιατικής καταστροφής σε τρεις γενιές [Persecution in the soul: The trauma of the Asia Minor disaster across three

Reviewed by: Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey by Huw Halstead, and: The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe by Erik Sjöberg, and: Με το Διωγμό στην ψυχή: Το τραύμα της μικρασιατικής καταστροφής σε τρεις γενιές [Persecution in the soul: The trauma of the Asia Minor disaster across three generations] by Libby Tata Arcel (Λίμπυ Τατά Αρσέλ) Marilena Anastasopoulou (bio) Huw Halstead, Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey. Routledge Studies in Modern European History. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019. Pp. xiii + 255. Cloth $48.95. Erik Sjöberg, The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe. War and Genocide 23. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Pp. viii + 255. Cloth $34.95. Libby Tata Arcel (Λίμπυ Τατά Αρσέλ), Με το Διωγμό στην ψυχή: Το τραύμα της μικρασιατικής καταστροφής σε τρεις γενιές [Persecution in the soul: The trauma of the Asia Minor disaster across three generations]. Athens: Kedros, 2014. Pp. 11 + 528. Cloth €18.61. A century ago, after the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 and the compulsory exchange of populations in 1923, Greece experienced the arrival of about 1.2 million refugees. Specifically, under the Lausanne Convention of 30 January 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed on the population transfer of their respective religious minorities: Greek Orthodox Turkish nationals living in Turkish territory and Muslim Greek nationals living in Greek territory. The Greek inhabitants of Istanbul and the islands of Imbros and Tenedos, as well as the Muslims of western Thrace, were exempted from the exchange. However, in the Cold War period, between 1955 and 1964–1965, persecutions of the Greek Orthodox population of Istanbul led to yet another violent expulsion. In light of the centenary of the end of the Greco-Turkish War, ideas of memory, identity, and national belonging come to our attention through three books written between the mid- and late 2010s: Persecution in the Soul: The Trauma of Asia Minor Disaster across Three Generations by the clinical psychologist Libby Tata Arcel, The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe by the historian Erik Sjöberg, and Greeks without Greece: Homelands, Belonging, and Memory amongst the Expatriated Greeks of Turkey by the historian Huw Halstead. Drawing on various disciplines, methods, and approaches, the authors offer new insights concerning the understanding [End Page 456] of forced displacements that are relevant for historiography. Although the aforementioned displacements have attracted a great deal of attention from various studies throughout the years, it is only since the mid-2010s that the ideas of memory, identity, and belonging have been revisited as ways in which to understand the present. Working through an autobiographical lens, Libby Tata Arcel has produced an extremely thoughtful and in-depth account of the intergenerational Asia Minor trauma that she defines as the “Cultural Trauma of the Asia Minor Catastrophe” (31). In her book, Tata Arcel—the daughter of a refugee from Pergamos in Asia Minor who was born in Mytilene and lived in Denmark— addresses questions of intergenerational trauma and the interplay among individual, collective, and national remembrance and identity. To unpack these questions, Tata Arcel uses a biographical approach: she conducted ten in-depth interviews with members of her family belonging to the first, second, and third generations of Asia Minor refugees. The book comprises three main parts. Part 1 is devoted to the psychological trauma of refugeehood, elucidating both the individual and the collective dimension of the Asia Minor trauma. In Part 2, the trauma of the first generation of Asia Minor refugees is illuminated through her mother Tasitsa’s narration of her life in Asia Minor and her subsequent expulsion and relocation to Greece. Part 3 focuses on Tasitsa’s children’s and grandchildren’s stories, analyzing the trauma of second- and third-generation descendants of Asia Minor refugees and the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission. The journey of her family members’ return to their ancestral homelands acts as a frame for the whole book: starting with Tasitsa’s expulsion in the preface, the book concludes with a journey into memory and the author’s and her family members’ quest to discover their roots. Bringing together the various elements of the Asia Minor trauma, the author concludes that “what matters is not that we remember the history...

Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945

Italy’s Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean, 1895–1945

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922: the formation of new Turkey and the collapse of the idea of Great Greece

The paper deals with the history of the Greco-Turkish War of 19191922. As a result of the defeat in the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the country became the object of the division of the Entente countries and their satellites. The Turkish sultan became a puppet of the leadership of the British Empire. In May 1919, a large-scale Greek intervention in Anatolia began. In 1920, the Sultans government recognized the imposed humiliating Treaty of Sevres, which divided the territory of Turkey between neighboring states and great powers. However, a powerful patriotic movement arose in Anatolia, led by Mustafa Kemal. Playing on the contradictions between the Entente countries and at the same time on their confrontation with Soviet Russia, M. Kemal led Armenia out of the war, deprived the Greeks of support from France and Italy, re-equipped the Turkish army and gained time to prepare for the defeat of the Greek military forces. The successive victories of the Turks in 19211922 near the village of Inonu, the Sakarya River and the town of Dumlupinar caused the final collapse of the idea of Great Greece. The results of the national liberation struggle of the Turkish people were fixed by the Lausanne Treaty of 1923. The final results of the Greco-Turkish War of 19191922 determined the geographical boundaries and political system of the modern Turkish Republic.

People in Motion: Introduction to Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in the Anthropological and Genetic Study of Human Populations

People in Motion: Introduction to Transnational Movements and Transwar Connections in the Anthropological and Genetic Study of Human Populations

Beyond the Ballot box: Rethinking Greek Communism Between the Wars

The assimilation of more than one million Anatolian Greek refugees into the social, economic and political life of Greece following its defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) accounts for much of the conflict that defined the period of the Second Hellenic Republic (1924–1935). The impact of the refugees on the traditional balance of mass politics at the electoral level, is well documented; their contribution to the electoral gains of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in the 1930s gave legitimacy to the communist threat and ultimately served as a pretext for the suppression of competitive politics and the end of republican governance. The nature and extent of refugee identification with communism is not well understood in the historiography, however, and remains largely based on the male refugee vote, even though the adult male refugee population accounted for a minority of the refugee population. The census of 1928 reported an ‘abnormally high’ number of widows and girls, especially among the refugees of Asia Minor, as all the males of military age (18–50) had been retained by the Turks as hostages during the evacuation of Smyrna in 1922, and many of them had perished before their release. This paper begins an overdue examination of generational radicalization outside the ballot box, among the ranks of refugee youth, and young women in particular, the group regarded by contemporaries as most vulnerable to the excesses of liberal cosmopolitanism in the new ‘motherland’.

Greek Decision-Making and the Battle of the Sakarya River, 1921: Towards a New Assessment?

The article seeks to reassess certain key decisions by the leadership of the Greek Field Army of Asia Minor (FAAM) in connection with the battle of the Sakarya River (23 August to 14 September 1921), at which the FAAM reached the high water mark of its campaign against the Turkish Nationalist forces during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919 –1922. The articlefocuses on the Greek decisions (i) to exploit their victory at Eskişehir in July 1921 by crossing the Sakarya river and attempting to capture the Nationalist capital of Ankara, (ii) to attack the Nationalist forces arrayed behind the Sakarya river by way of an envelopment of their southern flank rather than a direct assault and (iii) to abandon the offensive and withdraw on 11-13 September 1921. The articleargues that the historiography of the campaign, particularly in English, has tended to be overly critical of the first of the above decisions and insufficiently critical of the latter two. It concludes that (i) there were compelling reasons for the FAAM to make a determined attempt to capture Ankara despite the challenges and risks of doing so, (ii) the plan of battle was overly complex and risky from a tactical and a logistical standpoint whilst a direct assault across the river might have been more effective and involved less risk, and (iii) the withdrawal may have been premature. While it has been argued that the Sakarya river campaign is a classic illustration of Clausewitz’s concept of a ‘culminating point’, at which an offensive pushed too faryields the advantage to the defender, the articleargues that it has just as much to teach about Clausewitz’s countervailing principle of ‘continuity’, which holds that an insufficiently aggressive follow up of an initial victory can lead to unnecessary defeat.

K voprosu o gumanitarnoj deyatel'nosti F. Nansena (k 160-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya)

The article is prepared for the 160th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Norwegian scientist and humanist F. Nansen. The main directions of his humanitarian activities are considered: repatriation of prisoners of war after the First World War; assistance to refugees in Europe, including in determining their legal status abroad and granting them rights ensuring freedom of movement and legal employment; introduction of the “Nansen passport” as an official document; participation in the resolution of the refugee-related crisis as a result of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, evacuation of Christians and Muslims and assistance in settling in a new place; organization of assistance to the starving population of Russia, etc.

The Anglican Church Affair: A New Window on the Brief Rise and Fall of the Late Ottoman Islamists

The Anglican Church Affair:A New Window on the Brief Rise and Fall of the Late Ottoman Islamists Andrew Hammond (bio) KEYWORDS Occupied Istanbul, Ottoman caliphate, Said Nursi, political Islam, Turkish war of independence On 21 December 1918, several weeks after the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, a letter from a civil servant of the British government's Charity Commission arrived at the office of the Grand Mufti in Istanbul with a special request: an authoritative book explaining Islam to the West, to be authored by a prominent personage, and placed in a special collection of the Anglican Church library. This book should address four questions: what is the religion of the Prophet, what is this religion's contribution to thought and life (fikir ve hayat), what is its solution to the various troubles of our times (zamanımızın mezahimi), and what does it have to say about the political and spiritual forces currently transforming the world for good or bad?1 No copy of the original English letter has been found in the Müftülük archives in Istanbul, in the Church of England archives, or among the private papers of the man who sent the letter, an English public intellectual by the name of Arthur Boutwood (1864–1924). Previously we only knew of Boutwood's name through Ottoman translations published separately in 1919 and 1923 by two members of the Darü'l-Hikmeti'l-İslamiye, the Islamic research academy that then Grand Mufti Haydarizade Ibrahim charged with providing a reply. Boutwood's book request was taken seriously by the Ottoman religious establishment for two reasons: it was misunderstood to have come from the head of the Anglican Church himself, and it came at the onset of the British occupation of Istanbul. After long deliberations over who should author the response, the Mufti chose the devout intellectual İzmirli İsmail Hakkı (1869–1946) [End Page 443] and from Boutwood's private papers held at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, we now know that sometime in 1920 Boutwood received a first section of Hakkı's planned book.2 However, not all members of the research academy were happy with acceding to the British request. Said Nursi (1877–1960), the religious scholar who was to become a seminal figure of Turkish republican Islam, saw it as an attempt by the occupying power to co-opt Muslim authorities. Though Nursi later stated in his Risale-i Nur compendium that he had refused any involvement from the outset, he provided a retort of sorts in a section of his 1920 pamphlet Rumuz (Signs) titled Bir Papaza Cevap (Response to a Priest). "A man tries to kill you, throwing you to the ground and putting his foot on your throat. Then he asks you contemptuously about your religion. The way to silence him is to go quiet in anger then spit in his face. 1. What is the religion of Muhammad? The Qur'an. 2. What did it give to thought and life? The unicity of God and guidance. 3. What is its cure for the troubles (mezahim)? Prevention of usury and obligatory alms (zekat). 4. What does it say about this turmoil (şu zelzele)? That man will be judged by his efforts, as will those who amass wealth [laysa li-l-insan illa ma saʿa wa-lladhina yaknizun al-dhahab]."3 There is some evidence in Boutwood's papers that appears to justify Nursi's concerns. In separate correspondence with academy member Eşref Efendizade Şevketi (1877–1934) in 1921, Boutwood seemed worried about how Istanbul would react to communist Russia. As working-class consciousness rises in the West, "Lenin has friends in every land" (Lenin'in her memlekette dostları var), he states.4 In letters to acquaintances in Britain, written in January and May 1921, Boutwood also hoped the Islam book would help change the views of Prime Minister Lloyd George, who was strongly pro-Greek in the divided British government during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922. Boutwood wanted him to realize that the caliph was not a pope with authority in matters of faith, and thus Turkey's retention of the caliphate as well...

Atene, 1940-1943: italiani e greci nei Quaderni di Ghiorgos Theotokàs

Born and raised in Constantinople, in 1922 Ghiorgos Theotokàs moves to Athens to study Law. After his graduation, he spends two years between Paris and London to complete his education. Afterwards, he returns to Greece and leads a group of young intellectuals who try to renovate the cultural environment in Greece during the years after the Asia Minor campaign and the defeat of Greece after the Greco-Turkish war (1922). Theotokàs writes essays, articles and novels, but his diaries are very important sources not only about Theotokàs’ personal life, but also about the political and cultural climate of those times. Reading through the Τετράδια Ημερολογίου (1939-1953) we can learn a lot of information about the social, political, and cultural aspects of Greece and about the relations between Greeks and Italians after the fascist invasion.

Some interesting points of competition of x-ray using during the greco-ottoman war in 1897 and development of neurosurgical radiology: a reminiscence

To investigate the competition of radiologic development between Turkey and Greece during the Greco-Ottoman War when the first application of X-Ray took place. A literature review was conducted, and we searched the published papers about X-Ray using during the Greco-Turkish War in 1897. The use of X-Rays in the military dates to the Greco-Ottoman War in 1897, which is an important issue because X-ray was first specifically used in this war. The radiographic images were used to show the evidence of pieces of bullets and shrapnel inside the bodies of soldiers. The experience of the Ottoman Empire and Greece is important for the development of neurosurgical radiology. Both Greek and Turkish parts used the X-Ray technology before any of the risks and adverse effects were unknown. More studies are required.