Thrace and Cyprus

From "The Greeks; The Land and People Since the War" by James Pettifer, published in 1994. 

The relationship between Greece and Turkey comes down to us through historic images of overpowering strength, whether in the Homeric material of Greek forces leaving home to fight at Troy or in the bitter and entrenched anti-Ottoman prejudice of most of British opinion in the nineteenth century. Operation Attila in Cyprus in 1974, when the Turkish army invaded the island and murdered and dispossessed thousands of Greek Cypriots, seems to many as just the latest in a long tradition of outrages.

A colleague once started his newspaper story with the sentence: 'When the Turkish Consulate at Komotini becomes a factor in international politics, we can be sure the Balkans are the Balkans again' - and he was right. Komotini is a one-horse town in Thrace that might make a good setting for a dark deed in an early Eric Ambler thriller, but it is also home to the Turkish diplomatic official whose job is to look after the interests of the Turkish-speaking Moslem minority, some 104,000 people, who live thereabouts. In the exchange of populations that followed the Treaty of Lausanne in 1922, it was decided to exempt these people, along with the Greeks of Istanbul, and the largely Greek-inhabited islands of Imbros and Tenedos, from the imperative to move national borders, In some people's view in Greece this was an example of the tolerance the modern Greek state has shown towards minorities, while others would probably go along with the English Victorian Prime Minister Gladstone in seeing the Moslems as a relic from 'the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity'. He was writing about the Ottoman Turks, of course, and without the Ottomans there would certainly not be Turkish-speaking minority in Thrace. Gladstone went on to call the Turks 'a tremendous incarnation of military power, an advancing curse that menaced the whole of Europe, leaving a broad line of blood marking the track behind them', representing government by force as opposed to the Hellenic concept of government by law.

These sentiments show as well as anything how, behind all Greek-Turkish disputes, there is a ball and chain of old symbolism and iconography in which Greece is seen to represent law, decency, rationalism, Christianity and European civilization, while Turkey represents anti-democratic principles, Islam, totalitarianism, and so on.

In the down-at-heel world of rural Thrace, all universalist political rhetoric seems remote. Contrary to Gladstone's view the Moslems of Thrace are not homogenous mass. About half are fully Turkish, about 35,000 are Pomaks of Thracian origin (Bulgarian Moslems who speak their own language, which has never had a written form), and there are about 14,000 Athingani, descendants of Christian heretics who were expelled from Asia Minor during Byzantine times and later converted to Islam. There are also several thousand gypsies who have their own quarters in the larger towns, and who also speak their own language. Thrace is the most deeply Balkan part of Greece in the sense that here several ethnic groups compete for cultural precedence and authority, with an intertwined pattern of different religious and political identities, apart from the very proximate Bulgarians, Macedonians and Turks within their nation states.

The Thracian villages where this minority live look like any other Greek villages except that they have minarets on the horizon. But some villages have church domes too, and storks have been known to nest indiscriminately on either. Most of the time life goes in slow motion in this economically depressed area which borders Turkey and Bulgaria, with poor agriculture, the main product, tobacco, in decline and substantial areas of the countryside still taken over by the Greek military.

But Thrace is none the less a very important place. Before the First World War the territory was Turkish in culture and it wan known as Turkey in Europe. Poor as it was, it has always been of considerable strategic importance. - the doorstep of the great neighbor on the other side of the Bosporus, far into Asia. In the turmoil in the region after the collapse of Greek power in Asia Minor, the rise of Kemal Ataturk as founder of the new Turkey, and the victory of Turkish arms against the Greeks in Entente Powers after the Smyrna disaster in 1922, there were considerable exchanges of population between Greece and Turkey. Over a million Greek refugees left their old homes in Asia Minor, some of them Turkish-speaking and barely able to understand their mother tongue but regarded as 'Greeks' because they were Christians. But the Moslems of Thrace were allowed to stay on as Greek citizens. They numbered about 86,000, according to the 1924 census figures. Similarly, Greek communities remained in Turkey, principally the Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul, then about 65,000 people but now reduced to a pitiful remnant of about 5,000. This is at the heart of a long-lasting and bitter contention between Greece and Turkey, for the Greeks claim that the Moslem minority in Thrace has been well treated and has maintained  itself, whereas the few thousand Greeks in Turkey have been a continually persecuted minority.

Whatever might be said about the Greek treatment of minorities generally, on this issue the demographic and other important material facts support the Greek case. Although Thrace has been starved of public investment and the economy is primitive - acutely so in the remote mountain villages - the numbers of the Turkish minority have increased and there are no restrictions against the Turkish language in schools or mosques, or in any sphere of social life, except those relating to government and employment. But Turkish militancy is growing, although most Greeks claim that this is because of manipulation from Turkey rather than any problems emanating from the minority itself. It seems doubtful if this is true as the minority does have genuine grievances, especially economic ones. Recent elections have seen candidates from Thrace elected to parliament in Athens running on an open 'Turkish' ticket, much to the chagrin of the Athens establishment which has attempted to enforce the old law which says that to call yourself a Turk is illegal. There were quite serious disturbances in Komotini and other parts of Thrace over this issue in 1990 and 1991 which led local minority leaders being gaoled. The election of a new Patriarch in Istanbul in 1992 also led to various rows and conflicts. Accusations of Greek discrimination against the Thracian Moslems were made in Istanbul in what appears to have been an anti-Greek press campaign instigated by the Turkish government.