David Howarth ! ......Greek barbarity as depicted in his book called the "Greek Adventure"
The truth which lies behind Greece's slanders against Turkey in the presence of the world is that they aim to plunder Aegean, Cypriot and Turkish lands. Yes! In the year 2000, Greece is still living with the "Megali Idea" dream.
Now let us take a look at GREEK BARBARITY.
The Greeks cannot endure books that show them in a bad light. One of the books that make them furious is the "Greek Adventure" written by the English author David Howarth. Howarth examined the 1821 revolution on the scene of the event and wrote this book after examining one by one the books, articles and journals written by British, Italian, French and German officers and journalists after returning to their respective countries.
The true events recorded in David Howarth's book "Greek Adventure" are disgraceful and loathsome.
Those who read below the several paragraphs extracted from the book in question, which divulges Greek barbarity to the world in the clearest terms, will acquire ample knowledge about what the Greeks are.
"In the summer of 1821, rebellion against the Turks erupted against the Turks. The conflagration spread so rapidly that no one can say where, why and by whom the first Turks were killed. According to official records, the rebellion was first led by the Church. The first cause of the war could be described as a religious and sacred war.
Bishop Germanos of Patras called the populace to arms by raising his cross. In those days, Patras was a prosperous and beautiful city. It was open to the outside world and a large number of Turks lived there along with the Greeks. On hearing that a crowd of people from the mountains was approaching, they withdrew to the city castle to defend themselves. Even before Bishop Germanos and the insurgents arrived in the city, Muslims and Greeks had begun killing each other in the streets. The Greeks welcomed Germanos as a saviour. The new arrivals had already begun looting the homes of the Turks. The insurgents erected a cross in the main square of the city with a ceremony. The words uttered by their leaders were: "Peace to Christians, respect to consuls and death to Turks!"
Events followed the same course in the Peloponnese. The Greeks had risen all over the peninsula and murdered their neighbours the Turks. They had done this perhaps in the name of Christianity or freedom, but above all else they had done it to despoil the Turks, to take revenge and because of the Church's jealousy and personal vengeance.
Once the massacres had begun they did not need to search for a reason. They were all thirsty for blood, that was why they were murdering. It was known that in the month of March of that year, 25 thousand Muslim families were living outside the cities in the Peloponnese and were occupied in farming. In April, as the Easter celebrations were continuing, not a single individual of these people was left alive. The corpses were left among the flowers in the fields, on soil warmed by the Spring sun. With the arrival of Summer heat, they rotted away.
This frenzied genocide perpetrated by Germanos and the other Church leaders had caused horror. Throughout the war, other leaders joined Germanos and were madly applauded.
Kolokotronis was also a leader sought by the peasants and the nobles. He had made his wealth selling horses to the British army. In return for his services, the British had awarded him the rank of major. When Kolokotronis joined the uprising he was fifty years old. He commanded a 6,000-strong special unit. His first battle ended in fiasco. His troops were routed by a Turkish cavalry force of 500. Kolokotronis ran along with his men, and he ran so fast that he left his weapons behind.
It was a tradition of the Greeks to run when the course of battle turned against them. The Greeks neither adopted a battle order like the European armies nor fought face to face with their enemy. The first thing they sought in order fight was someplace behind which they could defend themselves; this would generally be a boulder. And if they couldn't find one, they would build themselves a small wall of rocks, behind which they would seek safety, and then start firing. As they fought, they shouted obscenities at their enemy, uttered words of contempt at them and derided them. As they fired, they held their weapons at the hip and as they pulled the trigger they closed their eyes and averted their faces. They could therefore kill only a few of their enemies and when a random bullet killed someone, they forgot they were in a battle and ran to the dead person to rob him, emptied his pockets and then severed his head from his body. The economic resources of the revolutionaries were the robberies and plunders carried out by their chiefs.
The city of Monenvasia fell five months after the outbreak of the rebellion. This city and its castle were built on sharps cliffs rising from the sea. The Turks living in the city; the soldiers, state officials and traders and their families, and the other Turks from the nearby villages, had sought refuge in the castle. There was terrible starvation. Their only food was sea moss and plants. They even sallied forth desperately from the castle at night to capture and bring back a corpse. They knew the tragedy awaiting them if they surrendered to the Greeks. The Greek bandits were waiting patiently to slaughter and rape the Turks and plunder their properties. The Greeks declared to the Turks besieged in the castle that if they surrendered their lives would be spared. The priests even promised them that if they surrendered they would be put on boats and sent to the Turkish coast. Only 500 Turks were put on the boats. These 500 Turks never set foot on any land and nothing has been heard of their fate. As for the thousands of Turks left in the castle, as soon as the gate was opened, they were set on by the Greeks, were slaughtered and their possessions plundered.
This is the truth about the victory announced in Europe as "The Greek Miracle." It was not the triumph of Greek arms and Christianity in the sense understood by the Europeans.
The second fortress to fall was that of Navarone. The Turks had been promised that if they surrendered they would be taken to the North African coast and set free. The Greek who made the agreement boasted to an English colonel that: "The agreement had a single copy and I have torn it up. No one can claim any rights now." The Turks opened the castle gates, either because they believed this promise or because they had no other way out.
The Greeks immediately rushed in and massacred all the inhabitants of the city numbering some two thousand. A priest who witnessed the event later recounted how the women were undressed, taken to the seashore where they were raped then drowned; how children were beaten to death or killed by knocking them against rocks. Greeks greatly enjoyed cutting off the arms and legs of their victims. Foreigners who visited Navarone months later found it hard to endure the stench of corpses that permeated the whole city and saw dogs, rats and crows feed on corpses along the castle walls whose arms and legs had been cut off. As for the Greeks, in order to demonstrate their power to the visiting foreigners, they told them the numbers of the Turks they had killed and how they had killed them; they also presented the visitors with the Turkish boys and girls they were keeping in the ruins. They had spared the lives of these children, naked and mad with fear, to satisfy their sexual appetites.
Some twenty Europeans witnessed the barbarity of the Greeks as they attacked the fortress of Tripolitsa. One of them was Colonel Thomas Gordon from Scotland. The Colonel was a sensible, experienced and honest soldier and knew Greek well. He found the events he witnessed at Tripolitsa so horrifying that he wanted these disgraceful events to be remembered to eternity. Even today, it would be better if the stories the witnesses have recounted were not repeated. I think saying this much should be sufficient. Within two days not a soul was left alive in the city where ten thousand Turks had been living. Most of them had been murdered by cutting off their heads, arms and legs. Following this massacre, thousands of Greeks returned to their villages to hide the plunder which had by their standards made them rich. The price of slaves had dropped so low that no one wanted to own them. Because no one had buried the dead, an unbearable stench permeated the whole city, the drinking water was contaminated and a cholera epidemic broke out.
"PHILOTIMO" is a Greek word. It means "Honourable" and it is an ethnic title for the Greeks. The Greeks have, until the recent past in any event, conducted their lives on two levels: one of them being the normal world where we all live, and the other the dream world of ideals they themselves created. The first of them is the life of reality they lived in, the other the world of dreams created by themselves. A Greek may reject the facts and events known, seen and believed by everyone and may insist that they had never been or occurred. For example, it is this characteristic of the Greeks which make them exalt and praise bandits and raise them to the level of courageous knights, the defenders of noble Greek traditions. In fact, they all know by experience that the bandits and pirates they have presented as national heroes were in reality mangy, filthy, insatiable and hardened thieves. But the fact is that for the Greek, these two aspects are of equal value.
When a Greek's "Philotimo" is in question, he can never accept the facts as they are. As Lord Byron has said, "The Greeks lack the capacity to comprehend reality. Every Greek has an exaggerated opinion about Greeks."
A traveller like me who has an open mind cannot help but feel admiration for them. This may be a result of sensitivity. In the face of their amenability I felt myself indebted to the Greeks. I thought about what the cause might have been that had all of a sudden turned their ancestors into monsters one hundred and fifty years ago. The general explanation for this was the hatred they felt for the Turks after living for centuries under Turkish oppression. They had avenged themselves. But I think something else lies behind the event. Turkish rule, as is known, was not bad. Hatred cannot be an excuse for turning into monsters. I think the cause is just the opposite of what it is thought to be. Once the Greeks loved the Turks very much. They had been under the influence of the Turks for 350 years. The only thing that separated them from the Turks was the Church. In spite of being Christians, the Greeks had remained more oriental than western in their traditions and behaviour . I don't think that even today they have rid themselves of the influence of the Turks.
Only a handful of foreigners lived in Greece at the time of the 1821 revolution. Therefore Europe did not know what was happening in Greece. Because the reports sent outside Greece were written by enlightened romantics who had not taken part in the war, they were penned to reflect the Greeks' ideals. Therefore as the Europeans condemned the Turks, they were unaware that it was the Greeks who were perpetrating barbarities and had started the slaughter. While all foreign countries recognised the Greeks as citizens of the Ottoman Empire, the European public applauded them as Christians heroically waging war against Muslims.
The reason for the European's siding with the Greeks was not only their being Christian; it was also their history. In those days, education was classically orientated. Language, philosophy and ancient Greek arts were the foundation of this education. Meanwhile, a group of people known as the "Philhellenes" was guiding the Europeans' beliefs about Greeks onto a wrong path. These Philhellenes comprised scholars of classical literature, idealists, poets and conservative and romantic politicians who had spread all over Europe. They were spreading all around them a new ethnic concept the Greeks had never even thought of. According to them, the Greeks were the progeny of ancient Greeks and maintained invisibly the intelligence and heroism of the ancients.
For five whole years, the Philhellenes not only died for this delusion, they also spent vast amounts of money. This idea championed by the Philhellenes has never been correct. The present day Greeks are as close to the ancient Greeks as are the present day English to the Saxons. The blood of both nations has been mixed and adulterated by migrations and invasions over thousands of years. The ancestors of the modern Greeks, even if we discount the Turks, were the Romans, Albanians, Goths, Venetians and Slavs.
There is no doubt that the genius of ancient Greek forms the foundation of European culture, but this genius was virtually forgotten in Greece. The Greeks did not want to remember it. When they looked back, they only saw the Byzantine Empire and prided themselves on that.
The Greek revolutionaries' capture of the Turkish garrison in Corinth is also a black stain on Greek history. The fortress rose on the hills behind the city. The siege of the fortress lasted a long time. The Turkish families who had gathered in the castle were suffering horribly from hunger and thirst. As in Navarone and Tripolitsa, the Greeks had promised the Turks that if they surrendered the fortress, they would be ferried across to the Anatolian coast. The Turks, having no other option, accepted the offer and when they left the castle to go to the coast, a new chapter was added to the book of horrors. The Greeks, setting upon the defenceless people, slaughtered everyone except the young boys and girls. They did not harm the young ones because of their evil lust and their intention of selling them.
This cruel, bloodthirsty genocide by the Greeks was also extremely idiotic. As an Italian by the name of Brengeri wrote in his memoirs, "One incident is sufficient to make one understand a lot of things..." On his way to Corinth, Brengeri comes across a murdered Turk. A little further on are the man's wife and baby in a wretched condition. To help the starving woman and her baby Brengeri collects a few pennies from his companions and hands them to the woman. Brengeri leaves the woman and he has not gone a hundred meters along the road when he hears two gunshots. When he looks back, he sees that Greek rowdies who had seen him hand the money to the woman have murdered the woman and her baby to rob her of the money.
Brengeri is one of several foreigners who witnessed the genocide in Corinth. Brengeri watched with disgust as a Turkish family of a man, his wife, two children and their servants, who had been cornered, were murdered by the Greeks in his presence. Before killing the children's mother, the Greeks tore the veil off the woman's face to see what she looked like. When Brengeri pled with the Greeks to release the woman, he was told: "Give us fifty piastres and we'll release her." Leaving his companions with the Greeks and the woman, Brengeri went to a grocer he knew and borrowed the fifty piastres to give to the Greeks. Then the Greeks said: "We'll hand her to you but naked," and stripped the woman naked before releasing her. Hundreds more Turkish women were thus sold to foreigners by the Greek bandits.
The Acropolis in Athens was the most renowned of the citadels in Greece. For more than a year, 1150 Turks had been forgotten and left to their fate among the ruins of this sacred temple. No one bothered these wretched people but for the "Greek Admirers" force set up by Europeans who admired the Greeks. The "Philhellenes", who wanted to capture the Temple of Acropolis, the treasure house of Greek civilisation, from the Turks and hand it to the Greeks, attacked the citadel one night but were routed. When the Turks looked below from the Acropolis, they could see people prepared to cut their throats with pleasure.
It was lack of water that defeated this handful of Turks whom no siege or orderly assault had been able to vanquish. The winter of 1821 had been unusually dry. The cisterns cut out of rocks had dried up. By June, the Turks did not have a drop of water to drink. Taking advantage of this, the Greeks set down their conditions for the capitulation of the citadel. What they demanded was that the Turks leave their arms and half of their money to the Greeks; in return they would be allowed to board ships and go to Turkey.
When on 22 June 1822 the gates of castle opened, those who came out were not warriors but wretched people begging, "A drop of water...a drop of water.." and trying to crawl. Only 180 of them were men of an arms-bearing age. The rest were made up of the elderly, the crippled and women and children from neighbouring villages who had sought refuge in the castle. There were no ships waiting to take them away. The Turkish captives were put in the courtyard of Hadrian's Temple on the slope of the Acropolis. No one bothered them there for two days. Then the attack of Greek rowdies began. They threw the Turks out of the places where they had hidden and began to chase them in the streets. 400 people, most of them made up of ill and weak women, were murdered. Those who survived were taken under protection by the foreign consuls in Athens.
In the ten-year period from 1821 to 1832, events continued to occur at the same speed. Much Turkish blood was shed on the Greek peninsula. The events might have been viewed from a different perspective if the blood shed was the blood of only the Turkish soldier. A soldier fights and he either kills or dies, that is his duty. But if the shed blood belongs to helpless people such as women, children and the elderly, then it is called a "massacre" or "butchery" We learn from foreign sources that the Greeks carried out not just butcheries but mass butcheries. And again the same sources write how the Greeks deceived world public opinion into swallowing their butcheries as a triumph of Greece and Christianity.
As Greece accuses the Macedonians, Albanians, Bulgarians and Turks of barbarity, it should not forget that it owes them a debt of blood.
The Greeks ruthlessly murdered tens of thousands of Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians and Macedonians with the aim of adding the Balkans and Anatolia to their borders. They may have forgotten these murders that they committed, but cannot delete the fact from the pages of history.
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01-11-2007, 05:14 PM
Who is David Howarth? 
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