Greco-Turkish War
| date | 1919 - 1922 |
|---|---|
| location | Western Anatolia |
| exit | Turkish victory |
| follow |
Revolution of September 11, 1922 in Greece Agreement between the two governments on the exchange of populations , land ceding from Greece to Turkey |
| Peace agreement | Treaty of Lausanne |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
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supported by: |
supported by: |
| Commander | |
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| Troop strength | |
| 1920: 15,000-35,000
1921: 90,000–96,000 1922: 208,000 men
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1920: 15,000, later up to 50,000
1921: 123,000 215,000 men
2,500 Armenian volunteers |
| losses | |
|
9,167 dead |
19,362 dead |
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Smyrna I - Aydın - İnönü I - İnönü II - Eskişehir - Sakarya - Great Offensive ( Dumlupınar - Smyrna II )
The Greco-Turkish War refers to armed conflicts between the Kingdom of Greece and the Anatolian part of the Ottoman Empire , which was destroyed in World War I, in the years 1919–1922.
This war immediately followed on from the First World War , in which Greece had joined the Entente since the change of government in 1917 , while the Ottoman Empire entered the war as an ally of the Central Powers shortly after the start of the World War . However, there was no significant military confrontation between the two states during the war. When it became clear the final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the winter of 1918-19, appeared for the Greek government the time has come, the " Megali Idea " ( Greek Μεγάλη Ιδέα , Big Idea ' ) to put into action: To parts of Asia Minor , where Greeks also lived, and the remaining European areas of Turkey, some of which were inhabited by Greek people, were won over to Greece . Winning the capital Istanbul also seemed possible after Russia , which had become communist as a result of the October Revolution and to which the city would have been granted based on the original inter-allied agreement, had left the circle of the Allies and was fought militarily as an enemy. In return, the Greek government promised to militarily break the emerging Turkish resistance to the Allied plans for a post-war order that provided for a quasi-colonial status for the rest of the Ottoman state.
In Greece, the defeat against the Turks was perceived as a "Asia Minor catastrophe", but from the Turkish point of view it is a victory in the Turkish Liberation War .
overview
In the wake of the armistice of Moudros ( Mondros in Turkish literature), the signing of which on October 30, 1918 ended the hostilities of the First World War with the Ottoman Empire, many places in the Ottoman Empire were occupied by Allied troops. Against the occupation of Izmir , which began on May 15, 1919 with the arrival of Greek troops in Izmir , the Turkish resistance soon stirred. Lively partisan activity developed, which consistently included attacks by members of the Kuvayı Milliye , in which members of the gangs that had been active in Western Anatolia for centuries ( see the articles Celali uprisings and Zeybek ), and other war-like acts against Greek troops got involved included. In return, the Greek army undertook punitive expeditions. The aim of these actions with the destruction of settlements were mostly civilians, which increased the bitterness on both the Greek and Turkish sides. After it began to appear that the Allies intended to divide the Ottoman Empire and eliminate it as an independent state, the Turkish resistance in Anatolia, which was organized by Mustafa Kemal after landing in Samsun on May 19, 1919 , intensified .
From the summer of 1920 extensive military operations were carried out on the basis of an agreement between the Greek and British governments, with the aim of forcing the now established national government in Ankara to accept the Allied partition plans. With the formal occupation of Istanbul and taking over the administration on March 16, 1920, the Allies had brought the Sultan's government under their control and forced the dissolution of the opposition Ottoman Parliament, but the Kuva-yi İnzibatiye had eliminated the opposing government and the National Assembly failed. On the one hand, the war-weary allies, who were surprised by the Turkish resistance, did not want to carry out military operations with their own soldiers after the costly First World War; on the other hand, the Entente powers disagreed due to their different, sometimes incompatible interests. While the British strengthened the Greek government and raised hopes for the realization of the Megali Idea , the ally Italy, who did not find its interests sufficiently taken into account by the presence of the Greeks in Izmir and the Sèvres treaty, which had meanwhile been concluded, did a lot to get this treaty torpedo by delivering weapons and war material to the Young Turks and Mustafa Kemal.
After the electoral defeat of the Entente-friendly Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos in November 1920 and the victory of the so-called United Opposition, among others. around Dimitrios Gounaris , who also brought about the return of King Constantine , who is considered to be friendly to Germany, to the Greek throne, the partisanship of the Western powers for Greece also increasingly cooled down.
While the opposition around Gounaris had advertised with the slogan homeward (Greek οἴκαδε, oikade) during the election campaign in 1920 and promised the war-weary Greek people to withdraw the army from all trouble spots, after taking over government they did the exact opposite and expanded military operations with initial successes further into the hinterland of Asia Minor. Despite the comparatively superior Greek logistics troops, the supply of troops far away from the coast soon turned out to be the decisive strategic Achilles' heel of the Greek army. After a Greek advance on Ankara was repulsed by Turkish troops in the Battle of Sakarya in the summer of 1921 , the Turkish counterattack resulted in a total of just a few days after about a year without major military undertakings on the Greek-Turkish front The front collapsed at the end of August 1922. The then Prime Ministers Gounaris and Nikolaos Stratos and four other politicians who were primarily responsible for the defeat were sentenced to death in Athens a few months later.
Important cities in Asia Minor saw the end of the war as a total downfall, caused by ethnic hatred on both sides. The relentless war and the trauma associated with it, together with the subsequent reconquest, have influenced generations of Turkish poets and writers in their works. The novel Şu Çilgin Türkler (German These crazy Turks ), written by Turgut Özakman , was sold millions of times in Turkey. On the Greek side, the novel by Dido Sotiriou Ματωμένα χώματα (German greet me the earth that gave birth to both of us ) and the play by Mimi Denisi Σμύρνη μου αγαπημένη ("My beloved Smyrna!") Are to be highlighted as literary adaptations .
prehistory
With the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans under Mehmed II , the Ottomans ruled over the Greeks from 1453 to 1830. Many Greek populated regions only came under Ottoman rule during this period. With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and the strengthening of the Greek national consciousness, there was an independence movement at the beginning of the 19th century in the area that has been inhabited by Greeks for thousands of years. The uprisings of the Greeks for freedom and independence from Ottoman rule could only partially be suppressed by the Sublime Porte . In 1830 the great European powers achieved an independent Greece against the Ottoman Empire. It was not until the Balkan War of 1912/13 that Greece was able to record large land gains against the Ottoman Empire. Young Greece had partly lost the previous wars.
First World War and occupation of the Ottoman Empire
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Territories of the Ottoman Empire promised to Greece
Western Thrace (from Bulgaria)
Dodecanese (occupied by Italy since 1912)
Greece joined the Entente very late on June 27, 1917 - under the impression of the occupation of large parts of the country by Allied troops since 1915 and after the forced abdication of the German-friendly King Constantine I - on June 27, 1917 of the Venizelos government in the fighting on the Salonika Front . The return of the Allied governments for entering the war included the promise to participate in the territorial division of the Ottoman Empire after the war. The prospects for Greece included Eastern Thrace , the islands of Imbros and Tenedos and the important port city of Smyrna (Turkish: Izmir ) and the surrounding area. At that time, the idea of the Megali Idea was very popular among the nationally minded Greeks . According to this, all Greek-populated areas in Anatolia and the Balkans should be united in a large nation-state. The aim was the annexation of areas in Western Anatolia and Thrace with high Greek populations. But Constantinople (now İstanbul) should also be won and then made the new capital.
Due to the extensive military collapse of the Central Powers in autumn 1918, the Ottoman Empire was forced to conclude the Moudros armistice on October 30, 1918 with the Entente powers represented by Great Britain . This granted the Allied powers, among other things, the right to station troops at almost any point in Asia Minor in order to maintain public order. Under the terms of the armistice, Istanbul was occupied in November 1918 .
According to the secret agreements concluded by the Entente powers during the war , large areas of the Ottoman Empire were "divided" into zones of influence among the victorious powers. The Arab possessions of the empire were placed under France and Great Britain. Italy was assigned an occupation zone in the southwest of what is now Turkey, which, according to the original agreements, should also include the Smyrna area. Ultimately, the Turkish state should be limited to a small region in Central Anatolia. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 , which did not reach a final settlement for what is now Turkey, Venizelos obtained the approval of the main victorious powers to occupy Smyrna, which led to a subliminal conflict with Italy.
The occupation of Izmir by Greek troops began on May 15, 1919. Initially, the Greek soldiers, who were supported by Great Britain with weapons and materials, were victorious. Immediately upon arrival, the Greek troops massacred Turkish civilians. Greece later undertook in the Treaties of Lausanne to make reparations to Turkey for "damage caused by acts of the army that violated martial law". However, in view of the circumstances of the war and Greece's financial situation, Turkey undertook to waive these payments. At the effort of Mustafa Kemal, the invasion and massacre sparked protests across the country. (Mustafa Kemal, then inspector for Anatolia, had sent letters to all governors and army commanders to start actions across the country and to send letters of protest to the Allies and the government in Constantinople.)
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Between May 20 and 23, 1919, there were mass demonstrations in Constantinople. The idea of storming the Bekirağa military prison, where Ottomans were suspected of suspected war crimes during the First World War, was considered. Grand Vizier Damat Ferid , who resigned after the invasion of İzmir but was reappointed Grand Vizier a few days later - for fear of this danger - released several people from custody and agreed to the plan, long desired by the British, to banish the prisoners to Malta to. On May 28, 1919, the British took 67 prisoners from Bekirağa prison and transferred them to Malta.
In the meantime, the core of a future Turkish government had been formed in Ankara under Mustafa Kemal. According to the Amasya Agreement between Mustafa Kemal and Salih Pascha, a representative of the Sultan's government of October 20, 1919, after elections on January 12, 1920, the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul met for the last time, in which the supporters of the national movement held the majority. After a submission by the committee in Ankara, the parliament passed the National Pact ( Misak-ı Millî ) on January 28, 1920 , the content of which ran counter to the ideas of the Allies. Faced with this opposition stance, the Allies formally occupied Istanbul on March 16, 1920 and began to arrest nationalist politicians who, however, had been warned by the Italians and fled to Ankara in large numbers. On April 11, 1920, the Sultan formally dissolved parliament and left a Fetwa through Şeyhülislam , which threatened the nationalists as apostates with death. Mustafa Kemal countered by having the Mufti of Ankara proclaim an anti-fetwa that portrayed the Sultan Caliph as a prisoner of the infidels. Military measures of the Sultan's government against the nationalists also failed, be it through the government-established Kuvva-yı İnzibatiye (disciplining forces) or Hilâfet Ordusu (army of the caliphate), be it through Circassian freemen under the command of Anzavur. Rather, the first Turkish National Assembly was convened on April 24, 1920 amid pompous religious ceremonies , which in a long-term effect led to the progressive erosion of the authority and reputation of the Sultan's government and ultimately of the Sultan himself. Eventually, nationalist irregulars began to threaten the Allied presence in Istanbul.
When none of the Allied powers agreed to provide the 27 divisions that the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch considered necessary to defeat the Turkish nationalists, Venizelos, who sensed a chance here to realize the great Greek plans, declared himself ready for Greece . At the Sanremo Conference from April 19-26, 1920, the Allies agreed to partition Turkey, with Venizelos winning the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George on his side. The French government, which was dependent on British aid in its German policy, followed. The Smyrna area has now not been awarded to Italy. As a result, Italy began to sabotage the Allied plans against Turkey. First, however, on June 20, 1920, Lloyd George and the French Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand allowed Greek troops to be stationed on the Izmit Peninsula (to protect Istanbul) as part of a "concerted action", the Milne Line, in exchange for a Greek division who were allowed to cross the border of the zone of occupation around Izmir, which was granted to Greece. Immediately afterwards Venizelos let the Greek troops advance.
The Greek troops initially advanced quickly in Anatolia. On June 30, 1920 they conquered Balıkesir , shortly afterwards Bursa . The intended goal of forcing the Turkish side under Mustafa Kemal to give way was not achieved by the offensive. Rather, the Turkish resistance increased while the logistical problems of the Greek army increased and its reputation began to suffer for the treatment of the civilian population.
According to the Treaty of Sèvres of August 10, 1920, Greece received Eastern Thrace and administrative sovereignty over Smyrna / İzmir. According to the plans of the treaty, an independent Armenian state in the north-east and possibly later a Kurdish state in the south-east should also emerge.
This treaty was only signed under protest by the nominal Ottoman government of Sultan Mehmed VI. signed, which in Istanbul was in the de facto power of the victorious powers. The emerging opposition movement under General Mustafa Kemal rejected the terms of the treaty. Mustafa Kemal's aim was to found a modern nation-state that was limited to the “core regions” of the Turkish-settled areas in the Ottoman Empire, thereby giving up all imperial territorial claims in Arabia , the Caucasus and the Balkans .
In October 1920, the Greek king Alexander suddenly succumbed to blood poisoning. In the subsequent parliamentary elections of November 1920, the Liberal Party of Venizelos suffered a defeat against the conservative opposition, which had campaigned for an end to the war. Constantine, living in exile, was recalled to the throne in a referendum the following month , which, contrary to election promises, continued the war.
In a battle near the town of İnönü on January 10, 1921, the Turkish commander-in-chief İsmet Pascha (who later became Turkish prime minister and state president İsmet İnönü ) temporarily halted the advance of the Greeks. A peace conference in London in February 1921 yielded no results. The Turks under İsmet Pascha in the second battle of İnönü from March 23, 1921 to April 1, 1921 were able to stop a renewed advance of the Greek troops in the direction of Eskişehir and to push the Greeks back onto a line from Kütahya to Afyonkarahisar .
On their retreat, the Greek troops destroyed towns and villages and drove their residents away. Greek irregular units called Mavri Mira (black fate) also killed uninvolved villagers in their battles with Turkish irregulars. An Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry stated: “ There is a systematic plan of destruction of Turkish villages and extinction of the Muslim population ” (Eng .: There is a systematic plan for the destruction of Turkish villages and the extermination of the Muslim population).
Before the renewed offensive by the Greeks in July 1921, the Turkish troops then withdrew behind the Sakarya after the battles of Kütahya and Eskişehir . Because of the critical situation, Mustafa Kemal, at that time already President of the National Assembly in Ankara, took over command of the Turkish troops. On August 23, 1921, the Battle of Sakarya began near the present-day city of Polatlı , about 70 km from Ankara , with a Greek attack . The Greeks first advanced up to a distance of 50 km on Ankara, so that the cannon thunder could already be heard there, but the Turks succeeded in many smaller skirmishes in stopping the Greek advance after three weeks and then with a counter-offensive to throw the Greeks back to their starting positions. With the signing of the Ankara Convention on October 20, 1921, France left the circle of opponents of the Turkish national government in Ankara.
After a year without any major undertakings on the Western Front, the Turks began their counter-offensive on August 26, 1922, the Great Attack ( Büyük Taarruz ). The Greek lines were broken through on the second day of the offensive and Afyonkarahisar was recaptured. In the bitter battle of Dumlupınar , 80 km south of Kütahya, the Turks, under General Mustafa Kemal, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Greeks on August 30, 1922. As a result of this defeat, all Greek troops had to withdraw from Anatolia. Since then, August 30th has been celebrated every year in Turkey as “Zafer Bayramı” (“Victory Day”).
As a result of the lost war, a coup took place in Greece . King Constantine had to abdicate. Prince Andrew of Greece was demoted and exiled on December 2, 1922 for insubordination and treason during the Turkey campaign. Prime Minister Dimitrios Gounaris , together with senior officers of treason accused and in Goudi at the 28 November 1922 Athens executed .
"Asia Minor Catastrophe"
On September 9, 1922, what the Greeks call the "Asia Minor catastrophe" ( Greek Μικρασιατική καταστροφή ) happened . Mustafa Kemal Ataturk , born in Thessaloniki , conquered İzmir with his troops. In the first days after the conquest, 40,000 inhabitants were killed and the Armenian and Greek quarters of the city were destroyed in a large fire ( fire of Izmir ) that lasted several days . Now the Greek population and also the part of the Armenian population that had escaped the genocide during the First World War in Asia Minor - through the intervention of the German general Liman von Sanders - was expelled. Shortly before, part of the Greek population had been evacuated from the city by English ships; Writers such as the Nobel Prize winner for literature Giorgos Seferis and Jeffrey Eugenides made these events the subject of their poetry.
The Greek troops destroyed numerous Turkish cities and villages on their retreat. In Alaşehir , ancient Philadelphia, 4,300 of 4,500 houses were destroyed, killing 3,000. In Manisa , the ancient magnesia, only 1,400 of 14,000 houses remained intact.
The consequences of the lost war were severe, with forced resettlements and large-scale expulsions on both sides. Thousands of Pontus Greeks had to flee their homeland, tens of thousands died while fleeing. Hellenism in Asia Minor, with a history over 2,500 years old, came to an end. Arnold J. Toynbee , who covered the war for the Manchester Guardian , concluded that
"... (Greece had proved) as incapable as Turkey (or for that matter any western country) of governing well a mixed population containing an alien majority and a minority of her own nationality."
"Greece turned out to be just as incapable as Turkey or any western country in this regard to govern a mixed population made up of a foreign majority and a minority of their own nation."
Thousands of Turks had to flee Greece, and tens of thousands died there too. It should be noted that the distinction between "Turks" and "Greeks" at that time was almost exclusively based on religious affiliation.
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne, by mutual agreement of both governments, decided on an exchange of populations . The forced relocation affected around 1.25 million Greeks and 500,000 Turks. Religion (orthodox = Greek, Muslim = Turkish), which did not always correspond to ethnicity, was determined as the decisive criterion for ethnicity. With the arrival of Greeks from the Anatolian mainland and the Pontos, Greece had to cope with a refugee quota of approx. H. every fourth Greek was a refugee.
Most of the 500,000 Turks who were forcibly resettled previously settled in Northern Greece, Macedonia and the Aegean Islands, around a third of the forcibly resettled Greeks in the city of İzmir. Exceptions were only made for the Turks in western Thrace and the Greeks in Constantinople and on the offshore islands of Imbros (Gökçeada) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). However, many of the Greeks exempted from resettlement later followed their expelled compatriots, especially after the pogroms against Greeks in the night of September 6th to 7th, 1955 and because of the state's policy of discrimination and expropriations, so that the Greek community in Istanbul is now valued 2,500 members has shrunk. The population of the Turkish community in Greek Thrace has also decreased or increased slightly, depending on the estimated value, despite the state's policy of discrimination, expropriations and the withdrawal of the right of residence, which violates the Treaty of Lausanne, and mass riots against this minority. Depending on the source, their number is estimated at 80,000 to 120,000 today. Foreign estimates tend to be on the downside, whereas paradoxically both the representatives of the Turkish minority and the Greek government speak of up to 120,000.
The events of that time mean a trauma for many Turks and Greeks to this day and are a main cause of the resentment between the two peoples, for example in Cyprus, which is still smoldering to this day . The bloody attacks on the Turkish Cypriots were followed by the bloody pogrom on 6/7. September 1955 against the Greeks of Istanbul and as a result a policy of discrimination against the Greeks there, on which the Greek state in turn initiated its policy of discrimination against the Turks in Thrace from 1955.
The football clubs AEK Athens and PAOK Saloniki are living memorials to the evictions of yore . At PAOK, the K in the club name stands for “Konstantinoupoliton”, ie for “the Constantinople ( genitive )” and at AEK for “Konstantinoupoleos”, ie “the (city) Constantinople”. Other associations from Greek Asia Minor are the "GS Apollon Smyrni" association founded in Smyrna in 1890 and the Panionios association, which was also originally from Smyrna .
literature
- Philip S. Jowett: Armies of the Greek-Turkish War 1919-22 (= Men at Arms 501). Osprey Publishing, 2015, ISBN 1-4728-0684-0 .
- Louis de Bernières : dream made of stone and feathers. Novel. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-10-007125-5 .
- Marjorie Housepian Dobkin: Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City . New York (Kent State University Press), 1988 (new edition). ISBN 0-571-10108-9 .
- Garabed Hatscherian: Smyrna 1922 , ed. v. Dora Sakayan, Klagenfurt-Wien, Kitab, 2006, ISBN 3-902005-87-4 .
- Turgut Özakman: Şu Çılgın Türkler (German: These crazy Turks ), ISBN 975-22-0127-X .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Görgülü İsmet: Büyük Taarruz: 70 nci yıl armağanı . Genelkurmay basımevi, 1992, p. 1,4,10,360 .
- ↑ Klaus Kreiser, Christoph K. Neumann: Small history of Turkey. Verlag Reclam, 2003, ISBN 3-15-010540-4 , p. 403.
- ↑ General Staff of Army: History of the Asia Minor Campaign, General Staff of the Army . Directorate of Army History, Athens 1967, p. 140 .
- ↑ Alexander Anastasius Pallis: Greece's Anatolian Venture - and After: A Survey of the Diplomatic and Political Aspects of the Greek Expedition to Asia Minor (1915-1922) . Methuen, 1937, p. 56 , footnote 5 (English).
- ↑ Greek General Staff, Directorate for Military History: Supply and Transport in the Asia Minor Campaign , Ανεφοδιασμοί και Μεταφοραί κατά την Μικρασιατικήν Εκστρατείαν (1919–1922) . ΓΕΣ / ΔΙΣ, 1969.
- ↑ Taner Akcam : Armenia and the Genocide. The Istanbul Trials and the Turkish National Movement , Hamburg 2004, p. 108; Paul C. Helmreich From Paris to Sèvres. The Partition of the Ottoman Empire at the Peace Conference of 1919-1920. Ohio 1974, pp. 169 ff .; Cemil Bilsel Lozan. Volume I, pp. 261-272.
- ^ Treaty of Lausanne. In: World War I Document Archive. July 24, 1923, accessed May 23, 2008 (English, Article 59).
- ↑ Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: Nutuk (de: Die Rede ) Volume I, 1919–1920, Istanbul 1934, p. 16 ff.
- ↑ Report in the newspaper Spectateur d'Orient of May 21, 1919, from: Vahakn N. Dadrian Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and its Contemporary Legal Ramifications. In: The Yale Journal of International Law. Volume 14, 1989 p. 284 f.
- ^ Andrew Mango: Ataturk , John Murray, London 1999, ISBN 978-0-7195-6592-2 , pp. 271-281.
- ^ Andrew Mango: Ataturk , John Murray, London 1999, ISBN 978-0-7195-6592-2 , pp. 271-281.
- ↑ a b Andrew Mango : Ataturk . London 1999, ISBN 0-7195-5612-0 , p. 329.
- ↑ Speros Vryonis: Greek Labor Battalions Asia Minor . In Richard Hovannisian: The Armenian Genocide. Cultural and Ethical Legacies . New Jersey 2007
- ↑ Andrew Mango : Ataturk . London 1999, ISBN 0-7195-5612-0 , p. 343.
- ↑ Destroying Ethnic Identity - The Turks of Greece . Human Rights Watch, 1990, ISBN 0-929692-70-5 , pp. 1 (English, hrw.org [accessed September 10, 2019]).
- ↑ a b c Greece - The Turks of Western Thrace. (PDF; 342 KB) In: hrw.org. January 1999, p. 2 , accessed September 5, 2019 .
- ↑ Destroying Ethnic Identity - The Turks of Greece . Human Rights Watch, 1990, ISBN 0-929692-70-5 , pp. 20th f . (English, hrw.org [accessed on May 18, 2019]).
- ↑ Greece - The Turks of Western Thrace. (PDF; 342 KB) In: hrw.org. January 1999, p. 2, footnote , accessed April 13, 2019 .