Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (2 page)

All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated.

The Greeks consider themselves to have been ruled by Turks rather than by Ottomans, so ‘Turks’ is used throughout unless the reference is to the wider Ottoman Empire, as for example in Chapter 14. Strictly speaking, Turks were originally only the Turkish-speaking people of Anatolia, often despised as uncouth, and Turkey did not become the official name of the country until 1923.

Similarly the Greeks continued to refer to Constantinople rather than Istanbul, so ‘Constantinople’ is used throughout, even for the centuries after 1453. Istanbul was not formally adopted as the city’s name until 1930.

Until about 1800 the Balkans meant only a range of mountains in Bulgaria, but is used here in its modern sense of the whole Balkan peninsula. That peninsula was formerly known as the Ottoman province of Roumeli, but ‘Roumeli’ is here restricted, as in Greek usage, to Greece north of the Gulf of Corinth.

Prologue

The Greek View of Turkish Rule

I
n the spring of 1705 a Turkish official arrived in the northern Greek town of Náousa, sent by the governor of Thessalonika. The official’s duty was to collect 50 Greek youths for service at the Sultan’s court or in the elite Ottoman army units, the janissaries. The youths were to be under twenty years old and, said the official’s orders, to be ‘graceful and well-bodied’. This was the procedure called devshirme by the Turks and
pedhomázoma
or child-collection by the Greeks. Sometimes youths volunteered for this service or were put forward by their families, but most were simply selected and marched away, conscripted rather than recruited.

On this occasion there were violent protests. The Greeks of Náousa murdered the Turkish official and his two aides, shouting that they were not going to surrender their sons. A gang of over 100 Greeks was formed, partly of brigands and partly of the Greek militia appointed by the Turks to control the brigands, and this gang proceeded to rob and murder Turks. Náousa was an ideal area for mountain-based brigands, as the town sits below Mt Vérmion, and within a few miles the ground has risen to over 1,500 feet, with the 6,500-foot summit only six miles away.

It took a force of 800 Turks to surround the rebels and defeat them in ‘a mighty and furious battle’. The leader of the rebels was killed in the fighting and eight others were captured and brought in chains before a special court. Defiant to the last, they were sentenced to death by hanging, and their severed heads were paraded through Náousa and then taken to the governor’s palace in Thessalonika.
¹

This devshirme was one of the last in Greece, perhaps the very last, but for Greeks the memory of the devshirme has never died. The events of 1705 contain all the elements that for centuries to come made Greeks hate Turkish rule and hate the Turks: the forcible removal of Greek boys who were the best of their generation, the heroic Greek resistance and the brutal Turkish retribution.

The Greeks found many other reasons to condemn their 400 years or so of Turkish rule, the
Tourkokratía
, which is commonly reckoned to have lasted from the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453 until the formal recognition of Greek independence in 1833. In many Greek histories of the period the Greeks under Turkish rule are described as enslaved –
ipódhouli
, or
en dhoulía
. According to such accounts the Greeks were under constant pressure to abandon their Christian Orthodox religion and convert to Islam, and were not allowed to build churches. To keep the Greek language alive they had to educate their children secretly. Any protest or revolt was ruthlessly suppressed. Heavy taxation made their lives miserable. It is claimed that the
Tourkokratía
cut Greece off from the artistic developments of the Renaissance and the intellectual developments of the Enlightenment. Furthermore the Turks in 400 years failed to bring any improvements to Greece and left nothing of value behind them. By the last years of the
Tourkokratía
the people of the former or remaining Turkish possessions blamed the Turks for all their country’s ills. As a nineteenth-century traveller in the Balkans wrote: ‘Every misfortune is attributable to the Turks, and we hear so often that they are tyrants and oppressors that the people generally believe they are so.’
²
On this view, the centuries of Turkish rule were indeed dark as well as largely hidden.

However, this picture is far from being completely accurate. For instance, there was no pressure on Greeks to convert to Islam. The Greeks, like other Christians in the Ottoman Empire, were left completely free to practise their religion, and such conversions as happened were for some personal advantage. Church building was in fact allowed, provided that the Turkish government gave permission; this permission was generally granted if the new church was to be in a mainly Christian area and not close to a Muslim mosque. Thus by the eighteenth century there were some 40 Greek churches in Constantinople itself, only three of which had been built before the Turkish conquest of the city. And since the Greek Church was given complete responsibility for Greek education there was no need for it to be clandestine. Secret schools are a myth.

The Turks were not the only foreign rulers in Greece during the so-called
Tourkokratía
. Until the mid-sixteenth century – a century after the fall of Constantinople – the Venetians ruled Cyprus, the Genoese held Chíos, and the crusading order of the Knights of St John occupied Rhodes, each in turn giving way to Turkish rule. It was another century still before Venice lost Crete to the Turks, a possession it had originally acquired in 1204 in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.

In Crete, therefore, Venetian rule or
Enetokratía
lasted as long as
Tourkokratía
elsewhere. How did the two regimes differ? The Venetians
were as harsh as the Turks in suppressing revolts, which punctuated the early period of Venetian rule: by one reckoning, there were 27 different uprisings in two centuries. Though the Catholic Venetians were generally tolerant of the Greek Church, they were more interventionist than the Turks, banning Orthodox bishops. Venetian taxation was at least as heavy as Turkish, and as much resented. In the final struggle for control of Crete many Cretans supported the Turks as preferable to the Venetians. One might expect that the
Enetokratía
would be remembered with as much bitterness as the
Tourkokratía
. But it is not.

The reasons are fairly obvious. After its loss of Crete in 1669, Venice briefly acquired control of the Peloponnese, but in 1715 the Turks drove the Venetians out of mainland Greece. Venice’s only remaining Greek possessions were the Ionian islands, until she lost those too, and her own autonomy, to Napoleon in 1797. So when Greek independence was established in 1833 Venice, in terminal decline, had not been a threat to Greece for over a century.

With Turkey, Greece’s relations were very different. In 1833 the territory of the new Greek state extended to a line only 100 miles or so north of the Gulf of Corinth, giving it a long land border with the old enemy. As Greece expanded northwards this dangerous trip-wire of conflict remained, and is there to this day along the 100-mile Greek–Turkish border in eastern Thrace. In the Aegean too a wavy and sometimes disputed line separates Greek from Turkish territory, and Greece’s most eastern islands of Lésvos, Chíos, Sámos and Kos are only a few miles from the Turkish mainland. Unlike Venice, Turkey remained an ever-present shadow over Greece and a major force in Greek and indeed European affairs.

If Turkey threatened Greece, Greece in turn threatened Turkey, through the promulgation, only a few years after Greek independence, of the so-called
Megáli Idhéa
or Great Idea. This was the proposal that the Greek state should be extended to include all Greeks, not just the minority who lived in the Greek kingdom, and that its capital should again be Constantinople once the Turks were driven out. In 1844 the Great Idea was articulated in the Greek parliament by the leading politician of the day Iánnis Koléttis. ‘The Kingdom of Greece’, said Koléttis, ‘is not Greece. Greece constitutes only one part, the smallest and poorest. A Greek is not only a man who lives within this kingdom but also one who lives in any land associated with Greek history or the Greek race. There are two main centres of Hellenism: Athens, the capital of the Greek kingdom, and Constantinople, the dream and hope of all Greeks.’

His meaning was clear. As Palmerston commented, Koléttis’ leading objective was obviously ‘aggression towards Turkey’. The Great Idea became practically an article of faith with Greek politicians and to hate the Turks became an important part of being a Greek, an attitude fostered in education from primary school to university. In 1922 the attempt to realise the Great Idea by invading Turkey and perhaps eventually seizing Constantinople led to disaster – but no lessening of the antagonism. From 1974, when Turkey occupied northern Cyprus, Greece’s annual defence review regularly named Turkey as the foremost threat – to be replaced only in 2005 by international terrorism.

All this suggests that Greek bitterness about past rulers largely depends upon what happened after that rule ended, and has rather less to do with the nature of the rule itself. On what basis then can one make judgements about Turkish and about Venetian rule as they actually were?

It might seem that there is only one judgement to be made, and that is condemnation. As we have seen, Greek historians often equate Turkish rule with slavery. Slavery, they imply, is ipso facto totally pernicious, so if foreign rule is the same as slavery all foreign rule is equally bad, and there is no more to be said.

The Greeks are not, of course, the only people to characterise foreign occupation as slavery. The British have been singing ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’ from its first appearance in a masque in 1740 to the lusty performances nowadays at the Albert Hall in September every year. These ringing words and their enthusiastic reception were not originally prompted by any immediate danger of invasion. By 1740 it was over 70 years since the Dutch attack on Chatham in 1667, and nearly 50 since the French attempt to restore the exiled James II in 1692, while the Napoleonic threat was 50 years in the future. The resolute refrain declared resistance to foreign intervention from any quarter at any time. For the British, as for the Greeks, to be ruled by foreigners would be slavery.

But the Greeks under the Turks were not literally slaves. Nobody pretends that all Greeks were the property of Turkish masters who could buy and sell them. Slavery is being used metaphorically to mean restriction of liberty. So the way is open for an examination of how far the rulers in fact restricted liberty, what other impositions they made, and on the other side what can be counted as benefit to the ruled. That examination is the purpose of this book.

To reassess a long-cherished national belief can be a painful business. We can all perhaps imagine how we would react to the thesis that one of our own nation’s finest hours was not fine at all, or that one of our darker
eras had its compensations: an angry refusal to look at the evidence, and an immediate assumption, not just that the thesis is not true, but that it could not possibly be true.