"Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922)" Topic

"The Greco-Turkish War was a conflict fought in Anatolia between the Kingdom of Greece and the new Turkish Republic in the wake of World War I. The war represented both the final stage of disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the culmination of the Greek "Megali [Great] Idea" of uniting all Greeks in the eastern Mediterranean under a single Greek state. Early Greek successes seemed to offer the prospect of a pan-Hellenic Greek state on both sides of the Aegean, but the Turkish revolutionaries' military successes of 1921-1922 turned victory into catastrophe, resulting in the collapse of Greek irredentist dreams, large refugee flows, and the destruction of both the Greek communities in Anatolia and Turkish communities in Greece. For the Turkish national movement, on the other hand, the war represented a crucial phase of their war of independence. The negotiations that ended the war also mandated state-organized population exchanges which profoundly changed the cultural and ethnic composition of the region.

Greek politics had been incredibly divided about entering World War I, and Greece only officially joined the Entente near the war's conclusion. It had been party to discussions among the Allies about the division of the post-war Ottoman Empire, as the Entente powers sought to balance their various and competing claims to Ottoman territory. Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, the Megali Idea's best-known advocate and the primary architect of Greece's joining the Entente, pushed very hard at the Paris Peace Conference for a Greek military occupation of western Anatolia, particularly of the city of Smyrna. The British soon came to view this as a preferable outcome to the region falling under Italian control, as Lloyd George and other British officials feared that the Italians, who had originally been promised Smyrna, were more likely to reach an agreement with the Turks. The British and French both hoped to contain or defeat the Turkish nationalists, and they hoped to impose some version of the zonal agreements reached between themselves, Italy, and Greece. Britain in particular hoped to impose a harsh settlement on the Ottomans and prevent the victory of the nationalists without directly committing its own forces (Bloxham 2005: 154-155). The Entente's "Anglo-Greek policy" aimed to use the Greeks as a proxy army to enforce their will in Anatolia. Entente interest in maintaining a presence in Asia Minor therefore dovetailed with irredentist Greek demands to "liberate" the areas of Anatolia with large Greek minorities, and a Greek expeditionary force landed at Smyrna on May 15, 1919…"

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Amicalement
Armand

It is worthy of note that in 1919, the city of Smyrna (current day Izmir), despite its location within Ottoman Turkey, was the largest ethnically Greek/Hellenic city in the world by population (600,000 compared to Athens (400,000). There was a huge Hellenic presence in Asia Minor, dating back to classical times.

Thanks to the French Navy, my father's parents managed to escape from Smyrna with their lives a day or two before the Turks overran the city, burned the Greek quarter to the ground and killed about 120,000 Hellenic Greeks.

That episode of history is sad, complicated and arguably the result of some unseemly international power politics among the Entente powers.

B

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan.

Thanks!

Amicalement
Armand

Thanks, Wackmole9.
I will look into this book.

B