Turkey's Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955

[Ptolemy]

Turkey's Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955


Britain's Role, the U.S. Response and Lessons for Today


By Gene Rossides

September 13, 2005

Britain opposed freedom and democracy for Cyprus following World War II and bears the original and primary responsibility for the post-World War II tragedies that have befallen Cyprus. While other colonies were gaining their freedom, Cyprus was told by the British Minister of State for Colonial Affairs Harry Hopkinson, during a House of Commons debate in 1954, that "[t]here can be no question of any change ofsovereignty in Cyprus" and that "there are certain territories in the Commonwealth which, owing to their particular circumstances, can never expect to be fully independent."

Following the Hopkinson "never" statement, Greece decided to bring an application for self-determination to the 1954 UN General Assembly session on behalf of the people of Cyprus. Britain opposed the application. Although Turkey had renounced all rights to Cyprus in the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, Britain claimed that the presence of an eighteen percent Turkish Cypriot minority was an obstacle to a solution. Britain called for a tripartite conference among Britain, Greece and Turkey which was held in London in late August and early September 1955 to discuss the situation in Cyprus. The conference ended in failure. Britain, however, accomplished her objective: greater Turkish involvement in the matter to blunt the Greek Government's efforts on behalf of self-determination for the people of Cyprus.

The Turkish government, to demonstrate its interest in Cyprus at the time of the tripartite conference, planned and organized riots against its Greek citizens and residents in Istanbul and Izmir. It exploded a bomb in the Turkish Consulate in Salonika, Greece, and a false report was spread that Kemal Ataturk's birthplace had been bombed and destroyed. The following account from an article by John Phillips in Harper's Magazine in June 1956 describes the carnage:

"On the fifth of September 1955, a bomb exploded under singular circumstances inside the Turkish Consulate at Salonika in Northern Greece.
The Turkish press and radio, over which the government is influential, blared out the incendiary and false report that the nearby birthplace of Kemal Ataturk, a sort of Turkish Mount Vernon on foreign soil, had also been destroyed. The events of the following day (September 6, 1955) in Turkey were planned and executed with the same discipline the Nazis used in their onslaughts on the Jews. Squads of marauders were driven to the shopping area in trucks and taxis, waving picks and crowbars, consulting lists of addresses, and the police stood by smiling. Greek priests were reported circumcised, scalped, burned in bed; Greek women raped. The Greek Consulate was destroyed in Izmir. Just nine out of eighty Greek Orthodox churches in Istanbul were left undesecrated; twenty-nine were demolished. Ghouls invaded the huge Greek cemetery where Patriarchs of Constantinople are buried, opened mausoleums, dug up graves, and flung bones into the streets; corpses
waiting burial were lanced with knives. There had been no comparable destruction of Greek sanctuaries since the fall of Constantinople.

The Turkish government did its best to keep the world from knowing. A familiar heavy hand fell upon the press, and editors who criticized Premier Menderes were jailed again."

The New York Times on September 7, 1955 reported the riots in a front page story but did not do an adequate follow-up of the events nor any investigative reporting.

On September 13, 1955 the New York Times stated that "The amount of damage has been assessed unofficially at $300,000,000." U.S. Senator Homer Capehart, who was in Ankara at the time, said the riots were "ghastly and unbelievable." He estimated the damage at $500 million. Turkey said it would pay compensation to the victims. It paid very little to a limited number of victims over a drawn-out period of years.

If you add interest at 5% compounded annually for the 50 years since 1955, the amount owed to the victims would be several billion dollars.

There was very little coverage in the rest of the American press and media and little has been written in the U.S. about this barbarism by the Turkish government since Mr. Phillips article.

Now, 50 years later, we have an exceptional account of the catastrophe by Dr. Speros Vryonis, Jr., one of the world's most eminent scholars of Ottoman and Byzantine history. His magesterial work: The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul, was published this year by greekworks.com of New York. It numbers over 700 pages.

Dr. Vryonis devoted many years to the research and writing of this extraordinary book. He dedicated the book to Demetrios Kaloumenos the
photographer for his two-fold contribution. First his copious photography, done under dangerous circumstances, and for his personal record of the events. He graciously acknowledged the financial assistance of the Michael and Mary Jaharis Family Foundation without which this monumental work would not have become a reality.

In the introductory chapter Dr. Vryonis describes the Greek community of Istanbul on the eve of September 6, 1955 who numbered about 100,000. Under the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne regarding the exchange of populations, the Greek population of Istanbul and the Muslim community residing in Western Thrace were exempted from the exchange process. From about 300,000 Greeks in Istanbul in 1922, the number in 1955 had fallen to about 100,000. They had achieved some limited success under exceptionally difficult circumstances and years of discrimination and harassment by the Turks who repeatedly violated the terms of the Lausanne Treaty.

In chapter one Dr. Vryonis describes in detail the existing and newly organized institutions that were the instruments of destruction used by the Menderes government in the pogrom of September 6-7, 1955.

In chapter two Dr. Vryonis depicts the events of the nine hours of the pogrom, from 5:30 p.m. on September 6, 1955 to 2:30 a.m. on September 7, 1955, which destroyed the Greek community of Istanbul. "Pogrom" is defined as government instigated and organized violence against an ethnic minority.

He writes: "the events were traced to the five geographical areas in which they transpired..The pogrom's intent was twofold: first it was a planned and successful effort to destroy the forty-five Greek communities spread out over the vast area of greater Istanbul and its environs; second, it served certain domestic and foreign policies of the Menderes regime."

The government brought many thousands of Turks from Asia Minor and Thrace to join the pogromists in Istanbul. They were "provided with the crowbars, acetylene torches, clubs, spades, pickaxes, dynamite, and gasoline (for the planned arson) that would be the tools" of the destruction. (p. 99) Approximately 100,000 Turkish citizens participated in the pogrom. (p. 68)

Dr. Vryonis describes the system of attack in three waves. The first wave broke down doors and windows and moved on to the next store, dwelling or church. The second wave fell upon the contents and the third wave finished the work of destruction both inside and outside a building but not before it had thoroughly looted the property. (p. 546)

Continued...

[Ptolemy]

The material damage to the Greek community was enormous:

1000 homes destroyed and 2500 partially destroyed and all were looted;
4000-4500 stores were looted and destroyed or damaged; Thirty Greek males were killed; and
200 Greek women raped.

The damage to the Greek Orthodox churches was enormous and is documented in detail by Dr. Vryonis in chapter five:

of the 83 Greek Orthodox Churches, 59 were burned and most others suffered serious damages to the icons and ancient paintings of great value; the tombs of Patriarchs were destroyed; Christian cemeteries were defiled.

In chapter three, Dr. Vryonis examines "the pogrom's damages, both moral and material," and in chapter four he details "the efforts of various
organizations or individuals to put a financial value on them." Turkey took actions to limit and reduce the claims for damages and paid only a small percentage of the reduced claims over a period of eleven years.

Menderes official version of what happened was broadcast by radio on the evening of September 7, 1955. It was replete with falsehoods and he tried to blame the communists.


British role and responsibility

Britain had made strenuous efforts in 1954 and 1955 to change Turkey's policy of being neutral towards Cyprus and to get Turkey on its side despite the terms of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 in which Turkey had renounced all rights to Cyprus. Britain successfully pressured Turkey to change its neutral position and support Britain in the UN and at the Tripartite conference in London. British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan led the effort. Dr. Vryonis states that "Macmillan prevailed upon Turkey to alter its policy on Cyprus and make vigorous representations as to its claims and rights on the island."

Prior to August 1955, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mehmet Fuat Koprulu had declared that Cyprus was a British concern and not a Turkish concern. On August 24, 1955, Prime Minister Menderes replaced Koprulu with Fatin Fustu Zorlu, a virulent anti-Greek and anti-minority zealot.

In a British Foreign Office memorandum of September 14, 1954, at a time when Greece was bringing its appeal for self determination for Cyprus to the UN and the British were courting Turkey to change its neutral stance on Cyprus, a British official stated: " A few riots in Ankara would do us nicely."

Dr.Vryonis writes: "[t]he facts that have come to light are sufficient to suggest that, by the early fall of 1954, the British government may have made vague, informal references on the desirability of some demonstrations in Istanbul as a political barometer of public, and violent, Turkish sentiment on the subject of Cyprus."


The American reaction

On September 18, 1955, 12 days after the devastating attacks against the Greek community of Istanbul and when there was sufficient evidence of the Turkish governments involvement, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wrote almost identical letters to Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Papagos and Turkish Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. These letters, in effect equating the victims with the victimizers will "live in infamy."

The British Foreign Office applauded Dulles' action in sending common letters to the Greek and Turkish governments. Mr. J. A. Thomson of the
Foreign Office Southern Department wrote on a Foreign Office copy of Dulles' letters the following:

"This message has produced a lively resentment among the Greeks. But it no doubt will do good in the long run. It is satisfactory that Mr. Dulles has reversed the earlier line of the State Department which blamed the Turks and favored the Greeks.

The [British] Secretary of State has sent a message to Mr. Dulles expressing his appreciation of his appeal.."



Lessons for today

The Turkish military made no objection to Prime Minister Menderes actions. The Chief of Staff of the Turkish military promised Menderes protection. On May 27, 1960 a military junta took over the government for a number of reasons in a basically bloodless coup. It then arrested and tried Prime Minister Menderes and his cohorts, found them guilty with a few exceptions and executed Menderes, Zorlu and others.

The military's direct intervention into the political life of Turkey tightened the government's grip on the Greek minority and the other minorities-- the Kurds, Armenians, Jews, Alawis, Assyrians, Christians and others. Dr. Vryonis writes that the military:

"intensified its suppression of the rights and freedoms of ethnic and religious minorities, as well as of the country's citizens as a whole" and
"proved itself to be a worthy successor to the oppressive regime of the Young Turks. The demographic decline of both the Greek and Jewish communities in Turkey during the latter half of the twentieth century was a direct result of the Menderes and post-Menderes policies and persecution of minorities..

Indeed, the entire history of the last fifty years of Turkish society is tied to the imperialism of the Turkish general staff, which has successfully utilized its forces to impose its territorial aggression and conquest. In effect, the spirit of the pogrom of 1955, whose motive force was the final destruction and expulsion of the Greeks from Istanbul, was continued and finally consummated by successive governments and the activities of the Turkish general staff.General Cemal Gursel proved to be a vigorous and willing heir to the pogrom's spirit.Furthermore, after the invasion of Cyprus in 1974.these policies were reconceived to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Greek Cypriot majority in the occupied north. This policy, intended to Turkify northern Cyprus, was attended by willful destruction that strongly resembled the acts perpetrated by the Menderes government against the Greeks of Istanbul. This ethnic cleansing was also applied later, with U.S. weapons, in the destruction of Kurdish villages of southeast Anatolia, which reduced the region to a semi-desolate landscape."
(pp 558-59)

Dr. Vryonis discusses the 198-page 1976 report of the Commission on Human Rights of the Council of Europe in which the commission found Turkey and its army guilty of repeated violations of the European Convention on Human Rights. He quotes the January 23, 1977 London Sunday Times statement on the report: "It amounts to a massive indictment of the Ankara government for the murder, rape and looting by its army in Cyprus during and after the Turkish invasion of summer 1974." The U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger aided and abetted Turkey's invasion of Cyprus.

Dr. Vryonis importantly points out that Turkish policy against the Greeks has added the Aegean. "In the last two decades, the policy of Turkish military aggrandizement has shifted to the Aegean Sea and the Greek islands there. The build-up of land, air and naval forces (including numerous landing craft) has been accompanied by various claims on Greek islands, demands for their demilitarization and increasing violation of Greek airspace, including civil-aviation corridors."

Dr. Vryonis concludes his study as follows:

"Although the pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, occurred half a century ago, its legacy is caught up, even today, in a larger web of regional and international interests. This web is, indeed, the key to understanding important parts of this ongoing history. The 'success' of the Turkish military behemoth during the last fifty years has, in fact, made the Turkish state a persistent violator, not only of the human and civil rights of its minorities, but also of those of its vast ethnic Turkish majority."

No book review can do justice to Dr. Vryonis' monumental study. It must be read in its entirety to obtain the full impact of the catastrophe that destroyed the Greek community of Istanbul and the lessons for today regarding Cyprus and the Aegean. Gene Rossides is President of the American Hellenic Institute and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury

© 2005 Hellenic News of America, Inc. - All Rights Reserved

[Orphic_Hymn]

What 'Princess Island' looked like once upon a time:


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And then.........




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September 6, 1955: A Turkish collage of false news. The extra edition of the newspaper Istanbul Express gives the signal for the pogrom against native Hellines in Constantinoupoli.

The news reads: "Our father Atatürk's house was destroyed by a bomb". A lie to ignite the fanaticism in the Turkish rabble.

The BBC transmitted the news at 1 p. m., 5 whole hours before the bomb exploded!!!.


Photographs from the destruction of Hellinic houses after the circulation of Istanbul Express. Victor Hugo's saying came true again: "Turks have passed this way..."



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The organized mob in action during the night of September 6, 1955 - another "Night of St. Bartholomew"



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The tombs of the Orthodox Patriarchs smashed, destroyed and defiled the night of September 6, 1955, at the Hellinic Orthodox Cemetery of Balukli, Constantinoupoli



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[Ptolemy]

SEPTEMBER 6th 1955, THE NIGHT OF TERROR IN CONSTANTINOPLE


Under the terms of the agreement regarding the exchange of populations in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the Greek population of Constantinople-a thriving community-and the muslim community residing in Western Thrace were exempted from the exchange process.

In the beginning of the 20th century there were over 300,000 Greeks residing in Constantinople. They had managed to survive there despite centuries of oppression and persecution under the Ottoman yoke. But the Turks were determined to expel all Greeks from their ancient home using all available means. Thus, the Turks systematically used the following measures in order to accomplish their objective :

In May 1941, large numbers of young men ranging in age from 18-38. were conscripted into the Turkish army from the Greek and Armenian communities The Turkish intention was to exterminate these young men through the well-known method of "forced-labour battalions". If this extermination plan was not successful it was due to protests from the Western allies and the defeat of the Germans in Stalingrad in December 1942. Seeing the tides of war shifting, the Turkish authorities permitted the discharge of these soldiers.

On 11 Noverriber 1942, the Turkish government passed a law regarding taxation of property of non-muslims, known as the VA RLIK VE RGISI. Through this !aw non-muslim citiizens had to submit, without the right to appeal, to the discretion and arbitrary judgment of the tax clerks. The tax clerks, in turn, were instructed to appraise property at amounts many times over the actual value of each property. Then, if the individual concerned was unable to make payments of the enormous tax share (quota), the property was seized and the unfortunate owners were exiled to ACKALE, in Anatolia. As a result (of the use) of these harsh and inhuman measures, by 1955 only 25,000 people were left, rather than the 450,000 that should have been their number given a normal rate of growth in 35 years.

On the night of the 6th September 1955, and using the Cyprus situation as a pretext, the Turks dealt the coupdegrace to the remaining inhabitants.

The whole story of this pogrom is as follows :

On Saturday the 3rd of September, 1955, the wife of the Turkish Consul in Thessaloniki asked for, and received, from a photographer in Thessaloniki supposedly for a keep-sake a series of photographs and films of the Turkish Consulate and the neighboring home where Kemal Ataturk was born. The very next day she and her family left for Turkey.

At ten past midnight on the 6th of September,1955, in the garden of the Consulate, between the two buildings, dynamite exploded resulting in broken windows in both buildings. The Greek authorities rushed immediately to the scene. They established that two more explosive devices had been positioned in the Consulate yard and that within the building there was only one Turkish guard. In the investigation that followed it was determined that the explosives were placed there by the guard and his accomplice, a Turkish student at the Law School of the University of Thessaloniki, Oktai Egin Faik, who had brought the dynamite from Turkey a few days earlier.

On the 6th of September, Turkish newspapers using forged versions of the photos of the Turkish consul's wife and even before the explosion took place in Greece, depicted Kemal's birthplace as totally destroyed. By the evening, newspapers all over Turkey knew of the alleged destruction of Kemal's home setting off waves of anger among the Turkish populace. The Turkish authorities then transported large groups of people in trains and military vehicles from Anatolia to Constantinople.

The attack by the angry mobs began at 5:50 P.M on the 6th of September 1955 and ended at 02:00 A.M on the 7th of September 1955. The police calmly assisted and even guided the mobs, in their relentless path of destruction.

At 00:20 A.M on the 7th of September 1955 martial law was finally declared, at 02:00 A.M curfew began and at 02 : 30 A.M the authorities had restored a semblance of order. Screaming slogans "Today your property, tomorrow your lives" the mobs had perpetrated terrible crimes. Those who guided them knew that by terrorizing the last Greek residents of Constantinople they would compel them to desert their homeland, once and for all. Simultaneously by destroying monuments which were proof of the glorious Greek past of Constantinople, they would eradicate even future reminders of the Greek presence.

The results of the vandalisms were :
the Theological School of Halki, the Marasleios School, The Monestary of Valoukli, the Zappeio School for Girls and many other sites, suffered great damage.
of the 83 Greek Orthodox churches in the <> 59 were burned and most others
suffered serious damage to the icons and ancient paintings of great value.
the tombs of Patriarchs were destroyed, Christian cemeteries and ossuaries were defiled ;
3,000 homes were looted and destroyed ;
4348 Greek stores were looted and destroyed ;
200 Greek women were raped ;
hundreds of Greeks were ill-treated or tortured, such as the old Bishop of Derkon Iakovos; the metropolitan of Ilioupolis Yennadios, whose beard was cut off and who was then dragged through the streets so that he would die shortly thereafter from ill-treatment; and Bishop Pamphilou Yennadios that was thrown into the burned ruins of Valoukli;
15 Greeks were murdered and among them a 90 year old monk at the Valoukli
Monastery, Chrys. Mantas, who was burned alive. Many others in the monastery were seriously wounded.

After the pogrom a great portion of the Greek population left Constantinople to save their lives.

On the 20th of September,1975, in a special 35 page Survey section of the influential English magazine, The Economist, it was written : "Turkish charges that the Moslem population in Western Thrace is harried by the Greek authorities are gross exaggerations. In 1923 there were 300,000 Greeks living in Constantinople and 110,000 Turks living in Thrace. Today, there are 15,000 Greeks living in Istanbul and 120,000 Turks in Thrace. The Greeks ask, with some justification, which country has been putting the pressure on which minority". (Survey-15).

It is important for us to realize that at the time tha this article was written (1982), only 4,000 Greeks still remain in Constantinople

[goldblood]

bastardoi!!

[akritas]

Some intresting Turkish posts as about the issue


N#1 POST
The shame of Sept. 6-7 is always with us


Wednesday, September 7, 2005

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=22723





Mehmet Ali BIRAND


I am one of the living witnesses of what happened in Istanbul 50 years ago. I was 14 years old. I did not know what it was all about. However, the passage of time made me understand the seriousness of the incidents, and I always carry the shame. Even though it was the only such incident in which the Turkish state officially admitted its culpability and tried to compensate its victims, it still continues to weigh on our conscience.

I can never forget.

I can still remember what I saw in Beyoğlu on the morning of Sept. 7, 1955.

I had to go to Galatasaray High School to register for their preliminary class. I reached Beyoğlu with great difficulty. When I went to Tunel from Karaköy, I just was flabbergasted.

The scene was shocking.

The huge street seemed like a war zone, with windows of the shops on both sides of the street shattered and all their goods strewn all over the street. Bunches of clothes, books, notebooks, chandeliers and much more. People were taking home whatever they could find. The scene was like judgment day.

I was a child, and I had no idea what had happened.

What I noticed immediately was that while some shops were plundered, others were not even touched. I had a look and saw that there was a Turkish flag hanging on the windows of the shops that were not looted. Those that were had Greek names.
People with long beards and those who were dressed very shabbily were walking around. I saw that some people who were dressed normally were hiding in the shops, looking outside.
The police and the soldiers seemed like they were saying: “Enough is enough. You did what you did, but now just leave.� They were both intervening and not intervening at the same time.

That scene has always remained with me.

Even though half a century has passed, I still shiver when I remember it.

When I read the newspapers a day later, I realized the extent of the matter.

Similar incidents had occurred also in Taksim and Şişli, where most of the citizens of Greek origin lived. Not only the shops, but also churches, even cemeteries were damaged and plundered. Jewish citizens also got their share of trouble, but the main targets were Greeks.
Newspapers were writing about people waving Turkish flags, pleading with the looters: “Please don't do it. I'm a Turk. I am a Turkish citizen.�
It was a disgusting, belittling and tragic affair.

My mother and other adults were criticizing what had happened, while officials were talking about “the placing of a bomb at the house in Thessaloniki where Atatürk was born, which had been turned into a museum, and the anger felt against what was happening in Cyprus,� explaining that the people had become enraged.

We were living on Ethem Efendi Street at the time. Our neighbors were mostly Greek. They were my best friends. All of a sudden, they shut themselves in their homes. They talked to no one. I can never forget Madam Eleni when she asked, “Can we seek refuge in your home if they attack us?
� The barbershop she managed with her husband was in ruins. They were in shock. My mother sent them food for a week. We let them live in one of our rooms.

I was too young to make sense of what had happened. Why should they attack Madam Eleni? What could they ask from them? Why were they different from me?

As I was seeking answers to these questions, the Greek families in our neighborhood started to move to other places or go to Greece. After 1963 none of them were left. They left Istanbul.

They took with them an important culture, a color and a different lifestyle.

They left us alone in Istanbul to live our colorless lives.

Later on we were full of regret, but by then it was too late.

Turkey admitted all culpability, accepted responsibility:
Much later, we learned the Sept. 6-7 incidents were the doing of the infamous “deep state.� It was planned with government approval in order to let diplomats say “The people are reacting� during the U.N. discussions on Cyprus. However, it later got out of control and turned into a shameful plunder. It became a crime that the deep state could not handle, and it shamed the Turkish nation.
What's interesting is that apart from a few injuries, no one was killed. It wasn't a massacre. It was a disgusting plunder aimed at frightening people.
What's even more interesting is the way Sept. 6-7 shamed us and hurt us and tainted us as a nation.
This was also recorded as the only such incident when the Republic of Turkey officially admitted its responsibility, apologized and compensated the victims.
At the Yassıada trials, after the May 21, 1960 military coup, the Sept. 6-7 incidents were investigated down to the smallest detail, and those held responsible were tried and punished.
As always, there was no mention as the deep state. It emerged entirely unscathed by the affair. A few thieves, civilians with no links to the planning or to the politicians, were punished.
In the later years, whenever the Sept. 6-7 incidents were mentioned, I felt an overwhelming shame and I always apologized to the victims I saw at international meetings.

During the Sept. 6-7 incidents our Turkishness was trampled underfoot. It was then I realized that if we don't criticize such incidents and apologize to the victims, we can never feel proud of ourselves.

Apologizing is enriching. It shows self-confidence.

Discriminating due to religion, language or culture or using force on the weak is belittling one's self.

I don't know you, but I apologize to our neighbor Madam Eleni from Erenköy.
_______________________________




Dear Mehmet Ali BIRAND




I can not speak for Madam Eleni. But I, on a person to person basis, I thank you, apologies are accepted. You are a god example to us all.

I wish you well.

Nikolas Ioannou


PS!



Regarding your comments of compesation and injuries, please note:

While the pogromists were not instructed to kill their targets, sections of the mob went much further than scaring or intimidating local Greeks. 30 Greeks and one Armenian (including two clerics) died as a result of the pogrom. 32 Greeks were severely wounded. 200 men and women were raped, and according to the account of the Turkish writer Aziz Nesin, men, mainly priests, were subjected to forced circumcision by frenzied members of the mob and an Armenian priest died after the procedure.

As private insurance did not exist in Turkey at the time, the only hope the pogrom’s victims had for compensation was from the Turkish state. Although Turkish President Mahmut Celal Bayar announced that "the victims of the destruction shall be compensated", there was little political will or financial means to carry out such a promise.

On September 13, 1955 the New York Times stated that "The amount of damage has been assessed unofficially at $300,000,000." U.S. Senator Homer Capehart, who was in Ankara at the time, said the riots were "ghastly and unbelievable." He estimated the damage at $500 million. Turkey said it would pay compensation to the victims. It paid very little to a limited number of victims over a drawn-out period of years.If you add interest at 5 percent compounded annually for the 50 years since 1955, the amount owed to the victims would be several billion dollars.

[akritas]

N#2 Turkish post



Past as present

Monday, September 12, 2005

Opinion by Doğu ERGİL


Dogu ERGIL

Humankind makes history. So, it is responsible for what has taken place in the past. These thoughts occupied my mind on the days when we sadly commemorated the destructive events that transpired in Istanbul exactly 50 years ago that is alluded to as the “Sept. 6-7 events.� What happened on those days half a century ago is of utmost importance for Turks to face their history and understand the ideological fabric of their political culture. There is enough data on hand to interpret the true nature of those events and sufficient liberties to discuss them.

An evening paper called Express, published in Istanbul, made two consecutive prints on Sept. 5, 1955, denouncing the sinister attack on the house where M.K. Atatürk was born in his hometown of Salonika, Greece. A newly created group called “Cyprus is Turkish� invited everyone to retaliate against the Greeks who wanted to annex the island and had not refrained from defiling Turkey's hero's sacred homestead.

Over the next two days and nights mobs raided the homes and workplaces of non-Muslim minorities in Istanbul and Izmir, leaving behind 16 dead and dozens of wounded citizens of Greek origin, 73 devastated Greek Orthodox churches and damaging one synagogue, eight chapels and two monasteries. Some 5,538 properties were sacked, burnt and destroyed, of which 3,584 belonged to Greek citizens of Turkey. Unfortunately, between 50-200 women (varying according to who has reported it) of the same extraction were physically violated. In Izmir, the Greek Consulate and the Greek pavilion at the Izmir International Fair were set on fire by arsonists; 14 homes and five shops were destroyed and ransacked. Some graves of Greek citizens were destroyed as well. The excuse was ready, “They started it and we paid them back.�

It took a few years to learn the truth concerning who had perpetrated a mock attempt to bomb Atatürk's home in Salonika. It was a Turkish student (Mr. Oktay Engin) who later served in the intelligence community and ended his official career as the governor of Nevşehir.

The whole thing was a fabricated provocation to prove that there was public support behind the government of the day (headed by Mr. Adnan Menderes, who was later hanged by a military-backed tribunal) whose Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Fatin Rüştü Zorlu was negotiating with Greece and Britain for a fair settlement on Cyprus in the post-British era. What went so wrong and got out of control where excited street demonstrations could serve the purpose of the government?

Two-and-a-half factors misled popular reaction.
1) What we call now the “deep state,â€� or covert organizations that see themselves as guardians of the country and protector of the nation, intervened and changed the course of events. One general (four-star Gen. Sabri Yirmibeşoğlu) admitted in an interview with Tempo magazine (24th edition, June 9-11, 1991) that “the events were the product of ‘special forces' and were an example of magnificent organization.â€� Indeed, the raging horde was not an ad hoc crowd that was spontaneously provoked. They were organized, equipped with thousands of clubs, axes, national flags and posters of Atatürk and were waiting for the news of the bombing to come out. They were also supplied with lists of names and addresses of non-Muslim minorities. Police just watched the devastation for two long days and did not help the victims, except a few personal exceptions.

2) The phenomenon was one of the concrete examples of a series of actions of the undeclared policy of weeding out non-Muslims and non-ethnic Turks from the nation and transferring capital from the minorities to the national (ethnically Turkish) bourgeoisie. The process had started during the last decade of the Ottoman Empire led by the Young Turks (or the government of the semi-clandestine organization of Union and Progress) and went on during the republican years, to be repeated in Thrace (European Turkey) by intimidating the Jews in 1934, creating and exacting an exorbitant income tax, called the Varlık Vergisi (Wealth Tax), from all non-Muslim minorities of the nation in 1942 and finally an orchestrated operation that squeezed away 12,000 Greek inhabitants from Istanbul. The combined result of these intimidations and deterrent policies has been departure of initially hundreds and later tens of thousands of non-Muslim citizens from the country.
2 ½) The 1950s were the last years when the last traces of Ottoman social and cultural heritage of Turkey had disappeared or were erased. The republican regime had chosen to legitimize itself as unique and matchless by denying its Ottoman past in all vestiges of life and built its educational system on this rift. What had remained of Turkey's multi-cultural social fabric was destroyed in the 1950s both by discouraging non-Muslim minorities to remain in the country and by massive migration from the countryside into towns, most of all into Istanbul. By 1955, new districts composed of ex-peasants had emerged like Taşlıtarla, Kağıthane and Alibeyköy. The rural inhabitants of these and other new districts were quite unfamiliar with the cosmopolitan atmosphere of urban life and had never experienced a lifestyle enriched by non-Muslim urban groups. They were hungry for power, respect and wealth. Provoked into doing something “goodâ€� for their nation, proving their worth as destroyers of “subversive elementsâ€� and enriching themselves through booty was a perfect combination to Turkify the nation. In other parts of the world such a deed may be called ethnic cleansing but such a term is unknown in our part of the world so no one is blamed for the act.
We Turks chose not to remember those unsavory days and suppress the assiduous nature of the political philosophy behind similar events. We did not dare to admit to ourselves that we have lost the multi-cultural richness of our society. We did not want to admit that the protection of the lives, properties and honor of the Ottoman peoples that we were a part of was the nobles oblige of the republic that we are also so proud of. We never admit that appropriation of the properties and wealth of the non-Muslim minorities has not made us any richer; on the contrary, their banishment depleted the entrepreneurial power of the nation and dwarfed economic development. Denial of pluralism and multi-culturalism has left us devoid of the culture of reconciliation and tolerance to differences. We are not more stable and peaceful within now that the non-Muslims are only a miniscule part of the national population. We are ready to hate anyone who may dare to say that our recent history may not be a good compass to show the way in the future that is in the making.

Ashamed of what he has read and seen, the military prosecutor at the time has saved the photos and documents of the Sept. 6-7 events to be shown to future generations as a mistake not to be repeated. He gave them to the Turkish Historical Association and demanded that they only be published 25 years after his death. That day has come and in sad commemoration of the events, the Turkish Historical Association has organized an exhibition of photos of those two fateful days.

The exhibition opened its doors to the public on the same day of the events. But what do we see? A bunch of thugs calling themselves “nationalists' raided the exhibition hall and destroyed some of the photos. It seems the scions of the original perpetrators are still alive and kicking. Or is it more than that? Is it an understanding that we have to get rid of if we do not want to be ashamed of similar deeds?

History is not a lot from which we can choose the best; it is a load we have to carry in whole whether we like it or not, for we have accumulated it.

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=23081

[pankration]

I am sorry to say that I was not familiar with this Turkish outrage. While reading the postings I could not help but compare them to a very similar event many years ago. Here's a short descriptor:

On the nights of November 9 and 10, gangs of Nazi youth roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burning synagogues and looting. In all 101 synagogues were destroyed and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed. 26,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, Jews were physically attacked and beaten and 91 died (Snyder, Louis L. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Paragon House, 1989:201).

The official German position on these events, which were clearly orchestrated by Goebbels, was that they were spontaneous outbursts. The Fuehrer, Goebbels reported to Party officials in Munich, "has decided that such demonstrations are not to be prepared or organized by the party, but so far as they originate spontaneously, they are not to be discouraged either." (Conot, Robert E. Justice at Nuremberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1983:165)

The above of course refers to the Night of Broken Glass or Kristallnacht. Although the Turks eventually assumed some sort of responsibility in effect they were as bad as the Nazis. They may not have gassed us but they gave us the boot from lands we had occupied peacefully for many centuries. As far as the English are concerned these imperialist bastards did to the middle east what they did to Africa and North America: basically screw the people over for "God and King". Please.

[akritas]

I just took the known book of Speros Vryonis (the mechanism of catastroph).

Here an intresting page of this work regarding the Turkish progrom against Greek community in Constantinople

http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/1039/bryonislz5.jpg

[Telly]

Let's gather as much as possible Turkish sources:

Gül’s serious mistake - Turkish Daily News Feb 13, 2007 (http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/editorial.php?ed=cuneyt_ulsever)

Gül’s serious mistake
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
print this page mail to a friend


CÃœNEYT ÃœLSEVER

One of the goals of Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül's visit to the United States was to prevent, to whatever extent possible, the seemingly inevitable passing of the Armenian genocide bill by Congress.

The minister's efforts in this cause, even if they prove to be in vain, are both a consequence of his rights and his responsibility. The passing of this bill in Congress will deal the biggest blow in history to U.S.-Turkey relations. It is the minister's responsibility to warn against such a situation.

However, I think that one of his remarks was unfortunate and very open to misinterpretation and use as provocation.

�…Gül said that, in the case that the [Armenian] bill is accepted at the House of Representatives, there will be �a real shock in Turkey' and that the Turkish government could not contain the demands by the public to halt cooperation with the United States…� (Hürriyet Web site, Feb. 08).

This remark is truly unfortunate at a time when Turkish public opinion has been divided over the Hrant Dink murder, the concepts of good and evil have been mixed, the public is on edge, ethnic nationalism is gaining pace, and a general climate of pessimism prevails.

The bill will most probably pass in Congress, which will vote on it before Apr. 24. Around this date Turkey will be choosing its 11th president; perhaps preparing for Abdullah Gül's term as prime minister.



Remember the dark days of September:

I would like to remind Gül of the recent past: The events of Sept. 6-7, 1955. As Wikipedia reports, on Sept. 6, 1955, while officials of Foreign Ministry were conducting their meetings in London over the Cyprus issue, news was broadcast over Turkish radios that a bomb had exploded in Atatürk's house in Thessalonica. The news stories were false. However, during the subsequent events between 13 and 16 Greeks and one Armenian died and 32 Greeks were seriously injured. The material damage amounted to 4,348 shops and more than 1,000 homes owned by Greeks, 110 hotels, 27 pharmacies, 23 schools, 21 factories and 73 churches.

The economic damage was calculated at 69.5 million Turkish lira, according to the Turkish government; 100 million pounds, according to English diplomatic sources; $150 million, according to the World Church Association; and $500 million according to the Greek Government. The Democratic Party (DP) government paid 60 million Turkish lira in compensation to those who registered their losses. After the attack the Greek predominance in the Turkish economy started to dissolve and Turkish dominance in the capital accelerated. As a result of the emigration in the aftermath of these events the Greek minority in Turkey has dwindles to almost nothing. The number of Greeks in Istanbul was 200,000 in 1924 and 1,500 in 2005.

One of my readers informed me that, on Sept. 6, 1955, the then-Foreign Minister Fatin Rüştü Zorlu uttered in London similar words to Gül's.

The words Gül has pronounced only to alert the United States can be manipulated in an anti-American or anti-Armenian a provocation in the future, claiming they are �the orders of the minister.� The goal of this article is to prevent such a provocation with an �early warning� system and save the minister from such accusations.

I expect there to be all sorts of provocations in the time leading up to the presidential elections. I think that political figures in particular need to pay a lot of attention to their remarks.

I wrote this article thinking that the politicians' competition of late about �who is more nationalist?� is generating an environment and creating an excuse for these troubled times.

[akritas]

THE NIGHT OF TERROR IN CONSTANTINOPLE


Under the terms of the agreement regarding the exchange of populations in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the Greek population of Constantinople-a thriving community-and the Muslim community residing in Western Thrace were exempted from the exchange process.

In the beginning of the 20th century there were 300,000 Greeks residing in Constantinople.

They had managed to survive there despite centuries of oppression and persecution under the Ottoman yoke. But the Turks were determined to expel all Greeks from their ancient home using all available means.

Thus, the Turks systematically used the following measures in order to accomplish their objective:


In May 1941, large numbers of young men ranging in age from 18-38. Were conscripted into the Turkish army from the Greek and Armenian communities The Turkish intention was to exterminate these young men through the well-known method of <<forced-labor battalions>>. If this extermination plan was not successful it was due to protests from the Western allies and the defeat of the Germans in Stalingrad in December 1942. Seeing the tides of war shifting, the Turkish authorities permitted the discharge of these soldiers.
On 11 November 1942, the Turkish government passed a law regarding taxation of property of non-Muslims, known as the VA RLIK VE RGISI. Through this! Non-Muslim citizens had to submit, without the right to appeal, to the discretion and arbitrary judgment of the tax clerks. The tax clerks, in turn, were instructed to appraise property at amounts many times over the actual value of each property. Then, if the individual concerned was unable to make payments of the enormous tax share (quota), the property was seized and the unfortunate owners were exiled to ACKALE, in Anatolia.
As a result (of the use) of these harsh and inhuman measures, by 1955 only 25,000 people were left, rather than the 450,000 that should have been their number given a normal rate of growth in 35 years.

On the night of the 6th September 1955, and using the Cyprus situation as a pretext, the Turks dealt the coupdegrace to the remaining inhabitants. The whole story of this pogrom is as follows:
On Saturday the 3rd of September 1955, the wife of the Turkish Consul in Thessaloniki asked for, and received, from a photographer in Thessaloniki supposedly for a keepsake a series of photographs and films of the Turkish Consulate and the neighboring home where Kemal Ataturk was born. The very next day she and her family left for Turkey.

At ten past midnight on the 6th of September 1955, in the garden of the Consulate, between the two buildings, dynamite exploded resulting in broken windows in both buildings. The Greek authorities rushed immediately to the scene. They established that two more explosive devices had been positioned in the Consulate yard and that within the building there was only one Turkish guard. In the investigation that followed it was determined that the explosives were placed there by the guard and his accomplice, a Turkish student at the Law School of the University of Thessaloniki, Oktai Egin Faik, who had brought the dynamite from Turkey a few days earlier.

On the 6th of September, Turkish newspapers using forged versions of the photos of the Turkish consul's wife and even before the explosion took place in Greece, depicted Kemal's birthplace as totally destroyed. By the evening, newspapers all over Turkey knew of the alleged destruction of Kemal's home setting off waves of anger among the Turkish populace.
The Turkish authorities then transported large groups of people in trains and military vehicles from Anatolia to Constantinople.

The attack by the angry mobs began at 5: 50 P.M on the 6th of September 1955 and ended at 02: 00 A.M on the 7th of September 1955. The police calmly assisted and even guided the mobs, in their relentless path of destruction.

At 00: 20 A.M on the 7th of September 1955 martial law was finally declared, at 02: 00 A.M curfew began and at 02: 30 A.M the authorities had restored a semblance of order.

Screaming slogans <<Today your property, tomorrow your lives>> the mobs had perpetrated terrible crimes. Those who guided them knew that by terrorizing the last Greek residents of Constantinople they would compel them to desert their homeland, once and for all. Simultaneously by destroying monuments, which were proof of the glorious Greek past of Constantinople, they would eradicate even future reminders of the Greek presence.

The results of the vandalisms were:

The Theological School of Halki, the Marasleios School, The Monestary of Valoukli, the Zappeio School for Girls and many other sites, suffered great damage.
Of the 83 Greek Orthodox churches in the <<Polis>> 59 were burned and most others suffered serious damage to the icons and ancient paintings of great value.
The tombs of Patriarchs were destroyed, Christian cemeteries and ossuaries were defiled;
3,000 homes were looted and destroyed;
4348 Greek stores were looted and destroyed;
200 Greek women were raped;
Hundreds of Greeks were ill-treated or tortured, such as the old Bishop of Derkon Iakovos; the metropolitan of Ilioupolis Yennadios, whose beard was cut off and who was then dragged through the streets so that he would die shortly thereafter from ill-treatment; and Bishop Pamphilou Yennadios that was thrown into the burned ruins of Valoukli;
15 Greeks were murdered and among them a 90 year old monk at the Valoukli Monastery, Chrys. Mantas, who was burned alive. Many others in the monastery were seriously wounded.

After the pogrom a great portion of the Greek population left Constantinople to save their lives.

On the 20th of September, 1975, in a special 35 page Survey section of the influential English magazine, The Economist, it was written: <<Turkish charges that the Moslem population in Western Thrace is harried by the Greek authorities are gross exaggerations. In 1923 there were 300,000 Greeks living in Constantinople and 110,000 Turks living in Thrace. Today, there are 15,000 Greeks living in Istanbul and 120,000 Turks in Thrace. The Greeks ask, with some justification, which country has been putting the pressure on which minority>>. (Survey-15).

It is important for us to realize that today, 1982; only 4,000 Greeks still remain in Constantinople.

In the pages to follow you will find irrefutable photographic evidence of a typical sample of Turkish cruelty, which managed to destroy the Hellenic population of Constantinople.

Turkish Ottoman Empire, Turkish Government, Victims (http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Turkish.php#constantinople)

[HellenicPride]

I actually have a few of those turkish creatures posting on greekrealm.net. One of them brought that September 7 thing up as the Greeks being the aggresors here. (http://www.greekrealm.com/forum/turkey-vs-greece-t705/index.html?p=8368)

[akritas]

Speros Vryonis in the mechanism of catastroph, page 163


http://img162.imageshack.us/img162/1429/scan10071kl7.jpg

[Nikephoros]

Some notes I took(not verbatim) from:
The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom Of September 6-7, 1955, And The Destruction Of The Greek Community Of Istanbul. Greekworks.com (New York, 2005).

page 530
The iddianame(Turkish legal jargon) of the Yassiada trials never convicted anyone for crimes against the personages of Greeks, only for crimes against their property. The military junta mainly used the trials to dismantle the upper echelons of the Demokrat Parti and legitimize its hold to power.

page 551-555
Turkey reduced damage assessments from 1.05 billion Turkish liras to less than 60 million Turkish liras an amount which was still further reduced from the procedures of the Istanbul Aid Comittee and tax commissions from which no appeal was allowed.

page 559
Today the exact numbers of the Greeks of Istanbul are unknown but they number somewhere from 1,000 to 2,500.

Acknowledgements page xviii
Vryonis thanks Wing Commander Panagiotes Skouteles of the Greek air force for providing him a copy of the uncirculated Black Book which was thought to have been completely destroyed.

pages 553-554
Greece's principal weapon used in the compensations dispute was the detailed information and systematic exposure of details regarding the pogrom and Turkish government responsibility for it. The ammo for these attacks by the various Greek diplomatic mission was the Greek government's detailed anaylsis of the pogrom and the Black Book. Turkish authorities knew the Black Book was pending publication since the Greek officials purposely made it known to them. The Turkish Foreign Minister Zorlu during the NATO flag ceremony in Izmir unilaterally called off the Turkish diplomatic offensives against Greece and asked for Greece to do the same. This led to the suspension of publication of the Black Book and its subsequent suppression to this day.

I also have some pictures I took with a digital camera of select pages(not very good quality sadly), but I cannot post links yet. Has the mentioned Black Book ever been published in Greece since Vryonis made it known again more widely? That is very cowardly of the Greek government to suppress that book for so long just in the name of a "Greek-Turkish" friendship that does not exist. Now even if it is published the information it contains will in no way be more accurate than Vryonis's study.

[Nikephoros]

I have now OCR'd pages 324-6 which I feel are important for Greeks to know.

324
The Mechanism of Catastrophe
fact that the Greek Orthodox archdiocese of North and South America was spiritually and canonically under the administrative jurisdiction of the ecumenical patriarchate, which gave the Turkish foreign ministry a weapon in its diplomatic battles with Greece. (Turkey has utilized this fact of Greek Orthodox ecclesiology with considerable success over the decades. It has often applied the same tactic in its relations with the Armenian and Jewish communities abroad and in these communities' relations with their coreligionists in Istanbul.)
The mechanics and modus operandi of the Greek embassy in Washington, the Greek American communities, and the Greek foreign ministry were developed in the period between September 10 and October 3, 1955, and these would annoy the Turkish government for some time. On September 7, Kavallieratos, obviously responding to an inquiry from his ministry in Athens, replied: "The Archbishop of America, with whom I have communicated, is prepared to have the World Gouncil of Churches protest against the religious desecration in Constantinople and Smyrna. But before he does so he desires instructions from the Patriarch and the approval of the Greek Government. I ask therefore.. .that if you approve [to] ask for instructions from the Patriarch for the Archbishop."52 This indicates that the Greek government sought to inform the archbishop as well as the Greek American community of what had occurred on September 6-7, and to seek their help in disseminating this knowledge appropriately throughout the United States.
On September 8, Kanellopoulos replied to the embassy that in case the archbishop could not proceed with what had been suggested, the ambassador should do so, which was to say, to activate a response to the pogrom by Greek Americans and all Greek organizations in the United States, as "manifestations of protest are needed immediately."53 On the same day, the embassy informed the ministry that, while the archbishop could not in fact, for obvious reasons, assume the leadership of such protests, he could inform his clergy to support this effort quietly. He was also willing to intercede with the World Council of Churches. On the other hand, the ambassador continued, having spoken with the general secretary of ahepa, the latter undertook to use all of the organization's chapters in the United States to send letters of protest to Dulles, to local representatives in the House and Senate, and to the local press, to support the patriarch and the Orthodox Christians of Turkey, and, especially; to deplore the destruction of Istanbul's churches.54 The ambassador had received a draft copy of the circular that ahepa would send to its numerous
52 Greek Embassy, Washington, No. 3687/B/29, September 7, 1955.
53 Greek Embassy, Athens to Washington, Dispatch No. 3716, September 8, 1955.
54 Greek Embassy, Washington to Athens, No. 3716/B/29, September 8, 1955.
From Papagos to Karamanles
325
chapters, and included it in his cable to Athens. Although coming from a secular organization, the ahepa draft focused exclusively on the acts of violence and attacks on the patriarch and the Orthodox faithful, and protested "against the unprecedented acts of religious intolerance which caused centuries-old and venerated shrines of Orthodoxy to be outrageously desecrated and brutally destroyed."55 It ended by asking the United States government to protect the Orthodox minority and ensure that such outbreaks did not recur.
The Greek foreign ministry sent its mission in Washington whatever information it had managed to gather regarding the destruction and acts of violence so that the embassy could update the archbishop, ahepa, and the public more widely.56 In his instructions to the ambassador on September 18, Stefanopoulos asked that, in agreement with Archbishop Michael, a meeting be held among the ambassador, the archbishop, Eugene Carson Blake, president of the National Council of Churches, and Bishop Merrill of the Episcopal Church in order to prepare a protest of the destruction of the churches through the National Council. Stefanopoulos told the ambassador that the patriarch was not opposed to this, as it was an ecclesiastical matter. Nevertheless, Archbishop Michael's participation did not need to be publicized. At the same time, Stefanopoulos indicated, the archbishop should arrange with the other churches of the wcc for prayers and services to be held on the three following Sundays on behalf of the Orthodox Christians of Istanbul, since the latter could not "carry out their religious obligations by reason of the destruction of their churches and their cemeteries...."57 Stefanopoulos also reported in his telegram that, out of eighty Orthodox churches in Istanbul, only ten had been saved. Meanwhile, the Greek Americans of Chicago had convinced Mayor Richard Daley to designate a Sunday of prayer on behalf of Istanbul's Orthodox Christians.
Finally, on September 19, Kavallieratos reported that Archbishop Michael had sent an encyclical to all the Greek Orthodox communities of the United States urging them to send telegrams to the us government protesting the recent harsh persecution of Orthodox Christians in Turkey. Kavallieratos sent the foreign minister a copy of the encyclical, which read:
Dear Communicants,
I ask that you send, immediately, to the State Department and to your representatives in the Congress, telegrams of protest against the desecration by the Turkish mob of Churches, Monasteries,
55 Ibid.
56 Greek Embassy, Athens to Washington, No. 38683, September 10, 1955. 57 Greek Embassy, Athens to Washington, No. 39812, September 18, 1955, and No. 39813, September 18, 1955; there is no further information on Bishop Merrill in these dispatches.
326 The Mechanism of Catastrophe
Schools and Cemeteries.
Please, also urge that [the other] pious Christians send as many telegrams as possible.58
Michael also added a note that the State Department and representatives of Congress be urged to recognize officially the Greek Orthodox Church in the armed services.
The Greek American community's involvement in the issue of the pogrom brought additional headaches both to the State Department and, especially, the Turkish government, whose response was not long in coming. On September 27, Palamas, Greece's representative to the United Nations, had a rather sharp exchange with his colleague and Turkey's representative, Selim Sarper. The latter informed Palamas that his government sought information on the activities organized under the leadership of Archbishop Michael to inform us official and public opinion about the anti-Greek violence in Turkey and the need to defend the patriarchate. He asked Palamas if this was correct, and then, according to the Greek official:
.. .he asked me if the Greek Government thinks that these efforts and manifestations will serve any useful end save to increase the agitation instead of the calming of passions. If, however, he said, Greece is looking forward to the dissolution of the Greek community and a shattering of the Patriarchate's position by the further incitement of nationalist tempers in Turkey, then the above manifestations could be justified. It is fated that Turkish public opinion shall consider the Greek minority [in Turkey] and the Patriarchate responsible—even though and in fact they are not responsible—for anti-Turkish efforts abroad. In politics, he said, the innocent pay for the mistakes of those who are really responsible.59
Although Palamas's reply to his colleague was brusque, he told the ministry that it was a serious matter. Kanellopoulos then replied to both Palamas and to the Greek ambassador in Washington that initially the government's general line on Greek-Turkish relations was that the archbishop should not appear to be involved in anti-Turkish mobilizations. Thus, he asked the embassy to indicate the exact form of the archbishop's involvement. Both Kavallieratos and Palamas responded, respectively, that the archbishop had not had a role in any attempts to mobilize American public opinion on Cyprus.60
58 Greek Embassy, Washington, No. 3875/B/29, September 21, 1955, which also contains the text of the archbishop's encyclical.
59 Greek Embassy, Washington, No. 2334, September 27, 1955; on Turkish threats to the Greeks of Istanbul, see also Ypourgeion Exoterikon, No. 4020, October 1, 1955.
60 Greek Embassy, Athens to Washington, No. 41606, September 28, 1955.

[Nikephoros]

If someone does the OCRing for me which takes time, but not much, we could get alot more OCR'd in. If you feel this is interesting, then PM me with your email and I can send you GIF images of the pages I scan.

I could stick to just scanning this way. Division of labor.

[Nikephoros]

http://www.datafilehost.com/download.php?file=9e4c0a5e
File: pgs80-88_Vryonis1955.zip
Size: 1.22 MB

Pages 80-88 zipped above in rather large GIF files.


http://www.turkishembassy.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=55&Itemid=234
The Greek Cypriots resorted to violence in December 1963 and expelling their Turkish Cypriot partners from all the government organs by force of arms, usurping the state machinery. The Turkish Cypriot people refused to bow to this illegality.

[Nikephoros]

http://www.datafilehost.com/download.php?file=dd357602
File: pgs315-322_Vryonis1955.zip.zip
Size: 877.68 KB

The Pogrom and NATO (NATO scolds Greece!!!!!)

[akritas]

http://www.datafilehost.com/download.php?file=dd357602
File: pgs315-322_Vryonis1955.zip.zip
Size: 877.68 KB

The Pogrom and NATO (NATO scolds Greece!!!!!)

No Greek will help me?
what do you want ?
Send your e-mail via PM.

[Nikephoros]

80
The Mechanism of Catastrophe
largely a post-pogrom phenomenon.
The organization, legal incorporation, and sub rosa encouragement by Menderes and his colleagues of the Kıbrıs Türktür Cemiyeti in late August to early September of 1954 is rightly considered by many to mark a significant institutionalization of anti-Greek activities by the Turkish government and the second phase of the formation and mobilization of public opinion on Cyprus. It is at this point that the ktc becomes a new factor in Turkish politics. At the concluding session of the organizations first general meeting, the governing board proceeded to an open and systematic confrontation with Istanbul's Greek minority. The members of the new society invited Alexandros Chatzopoulos to join its governing council. It demanded that the patriarch admonish all Orthodox hierarchs to refrain from involvement in the politics of Cyprus. It further demanded that all the organizations of the Greek community in Istanbul issue printed statements that they took the side of Turkey in the Cyprus issue.137 With these demands, the government, through the ktc, began to tighten the two separate jaws of a political and ethnic vise that now increasingly threatened to crush the Greek minority. On the one hand was the political friction between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, while, on the other, was the tradition of hatred, suspicion, and jealousy that many Turks—and many members of the Turkish government—inherited and harbored in their respective political outlooks.
Many of these attitudes were in evidence in the formal manifesto issued on October 17, 1954, at the annual meeting of the Organization for the Welfare of the Refugees from Western Thrace: "Since the Turks of Western [i.e., Greek] Thrace have remained as non-exchangeables [in Western Thrace] by virtue of the Treaty of Lausanne, as counterparts of the Greeks of Istanbul, they must be found to be in the same situation from every point of view [stress added] as the Greeks of Istanbul. This being the case, it is obligatory that equality shall be secured, and that the Turks of Western Thrace be raised to the level of the Greeks of Istanbul, or that the Greeks of Istanbul come down to the level of the Turks of Western Thrace."138 The organizations statement, including the explicit threat to bring "the Greeks of Istanbul... down to the level of the Turks of Western Thrace," was repeated and expanded by the Turkish press. The latter insisted that though the Greeks of Istanbul had been allowed to prosper so that they remained in the city, the Turks of Western
137 Theodoropoulos, Semeioma, p. 3; Armaoğlu, Kıbrıs meselesi, p. 124; Robert Holland, Britain and the revolt of Cyprus, 1954-1959, Oxford, 1998, passim, especially Chapter 3, pp. 55-82; and Francois Crouzer, Le conflit de Chypre, 1946-1959, Brussels, 1973, Volume II, pp. 688-690.
138 Chrestides, Ekthesis, pp. 120-121.
Background and Institutions of the Pogrom
81
Thrace had become so poor that they had to abandon the region and come to Turkey. Thus, the Turkish press was led to a different conclusion from that in the statement above, namely, that the Greeks should be removed from Istanbul. Unfortunately, both the Organization for the Welfare of the Refugees from Western Thrace and the Turkish press had very selective memories. They chose to ignore the three decades of incessant and growing discrimination against Istanbul's Greek community, which had been restricted in the trades and professions it could exercise—indeed, had been financially destroyed through the wartime measures that had plundered Greek businesses, estates, and wealth—and had its men conscripted into the harsh labor battalions of Asia Minor, in which many perished.
On August 30, 1954, the day of national celebration of the decisive victory of the Turkish over the Greek forces in Asia Minor in 1922, the National Federation of Turkish Students attacked the Greek stores of Istanbul that had failed to place Turkish flags outside their shops. After an oral admonition of displeasure with these actions, the vali of Istanbul let the matter pass, however.139 In the event, despite the ups and downs in the continuing struggle between Britain and Greece in the United Nations over Cypriot self-determination, the intensity of demonstrations by students and regional organizations, and the stridency of the Turkish press, continued to increase. Throughout the winter of 1954-1955, this unrelenting pressure raised the temperature of Turkish internal political life and, in so doing, reduced the Greek minority of Istanbul to frightful despair.140 From June 30, 1955, when Great Britain invited Greece and Turkey to a conference in London to propose its own settlement of the Cyprus issue, to the time that Turkey and Greece accepted the invitation (July 2 and 8, respectively), the Turkish press and various Turkish organizations pulled out all the stops in a frenetic effort to rouse Turkish popular feelings and therefore complete the general task that they had set for themselves since the latter half of 1954. The appointment of a new foreign minister, Zorlu, who had very different views from his predecessor regarding Cyprus, fit in with the general turn of events.
Indeed, Zorlu was crucial in the further evolution of the events that led to the London conference, to its failure, and to the pogroms timing. After his appointment, on July 27, 1955, as acting foreign minister and Turkey's representative to the London conference, he established a small committee of experts to study the Cyprus problem. The committee included Nuri Birgi (general secretary of the ministry of foreign affairs), who composed Turkey's
Theodoropoulos, Semeioma, p. 3. See note 131 above.
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The Mechanism of Catastrophe
White Book on Cyprus; Rüştü Erdelhun (second-in-command of the Turkish general staff); Settar İksel (Turkish ambassador to Athens); Orhan Eralp (general director of the ministry of foreign affairs); and Mahmut Dikerdem.141
Meanwhile, the press stepped up the frequency and intensity of its attacks on the Greek community, and the various organizations intensified their political activity in the same general direction.142 In June, Türk Sesi, a newspaper in which the government often aired its views, proposed amending the treaty of Lausanne (1923) so that the Greek etablis in Istanbul, whose status was regulated by the treaty, could be expelled from Turkey.143 In general, the subject of removing the patriarchate from Turkey, and a broad attack on the institution, had already become a set piece for the better part of a year and now began to appear in profusion.
This was to continue into August 1955, as the tripartite conference loomed on the horizon. With Zorlu's appointment, a new and more aggressive leadership infused Turkish policies toward Cyprus, Greece, and Great Britain with a vigorous and efficacious spirit.144 In this penultimate and intense stage of "manufacturing consent," the government, acting discreetly through the student and regional organizations, fully applied the tactics of disseminating false news and manufacturing rumors so as to raise to the level of hysteria the pitch of public fervor and anger against Istanbul's Greek minority.145
A critical factor in this campaign of disinformation was the generation and diffusion of the false rumor, essentially manufactured by Fazıl Küçük, that the Greek Cypriots planned to massacre the Turkish Cypriots on August 28, 1955. Given the transformation of the Greeks of Istanbul into a helpless and hostage community, the rumor of a purported Greek plan (in fact, false)
141 For a detailed account, see Sarres, E alle pleura, Volume II Part I, pp. 51-71; Dikerdem, Ortadoğuda devrim, pp. 121-159, especially p. 125. Sarres, pp. 81-83, gives a detailed exposition of the new Turkish position on Cyprus as presented in London and in the Turkish White Book. Also, Armaoğlu, Kıbrıs meselesi, pp. 27-28; Burçak, Yassıada ve öncesi, pp. 124-125, like many other observers who wanted a more aggressive Turkish policy on Cyprus, warmly welcomed the replacement of Köprülü with Zorlu as foreign minister, and his evaluation of the two men represents the thought of all those who wanted Cyprus for Turkey. Whether Zorlu's "abilities" served his country well in the end or not remains in question.
142 Palaiologos, Diagramma, pp. 20-22, gives a representative sampling of the specific issues and tone of the Turkish press; for other references, see footnote 137 above.
143 Theodoropoulos, Semeioma, pp. 4-5.
144 Such was the opinion also of Nüsret Kirişçioğlu, Yassıada Kumandanına cevap, p. 149: "Köprülü, a man with no clear idea, was an incompetent minister. ...We almost lost Cyprus because of him. Finally, the late Fatin Rüştü Zorlu was elected to the Assembly and we were saved. ...We were saved but the blessed Fatin Rüştü Zorlu was not able to save his neck from the hands of the clever Fuat Köprülü. ..."
145 Sarres, E alle pleura, Volume II, Part I, passim.
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to massacre the Turkish minority of Cyprus required no daring conceptual leap on the part of belligerent Turks to consider the Greeks of their (mutual) city as future targets to be destroyed. Early on in its genesis, this rumor was exploited by Hikmet Bil, who issued a secret circular to the ktc's branch offices on August 16. Here, one can do no better than to quote from the transcript of the court-martial proceedings in February 1956 against him and other members of the society:
While Kamil Onal was making these trips and confusing opinion by boastings ignominious to his own country, Hikmet Bil took upon himself to send an urgent and secret circular directive to the organizations. In this circular, dated August 16, 1955, Hikmet Bil refers to a letter dated August 13, 1955, sent by the Cyprus is Turkish Party President General [sic] Dr. Fazıl Küçük to the central headquarters [of the society] in which the latter said that particularly recently the Island [i.e., Cypriot] Greeks had become intolerable and unfortunately the situation is becoming worse. If one can believe the news being spread around Nicosia, they [the Greek Cypriots] are getting ready for a general massacre [of the Turkish Cypriots] in the near future.
Dr. Fazıl Küçük added the following sentence in this letter:
My request of you is that as soon as possible you inform all branches of this situation and that we get them to take action. It seems to me that meetings in the mother country would be very useful. Because these [Cypriot Greeks] will hold a general meeting August 28. Either on that day or after conclusion of the Tripartite Conference they will want to attack us. As is known, they are armed and we have nothing.
Bil added his own order to the society's many branches, attaching it to the end of Küçük's message: "As might be suitable, with whatevet additional observations that the headquarters wishes to make, please notify all organizations that our branches should choose whatever action they see fit, particularly with the view that London and Athens should be intimidated by the manly voices arising in the mother country."146 It is of no little interest to observe at this point the enormity of the transmogrification of Küçük's letter
146 National Archives, Dispatch No. 306, American Consul General of Istanbul to the Department of State, February 20, 1956. The memorandum is discussed in Armaoğlu, Kıbrıs meselesi, pp. 127-130. Dosdoğru, 6/7 Eylül olayarı, p. 220, quotes the text from the third trial at Yassıada. It is interesting that Chrestides, Ekthesis, pp. 152-153, translates from the Turkish newspaper Tercüman, August 19, 1955, a message by Faiz Kaymak in Ankara stating that the Turks of Cyprus are being threatened with destruction and asking for assistance from Turkey.
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at Bil's hands, his transformation of a general fear of an "attack" on Turkish Cypriots into a specific plan, and finally the carte blanche to respond given to the ktc's branches, without prior approval of the society's governing board but undoubtedly with covert approval from on high (as we shall see later). One of the military tribunals set up by General Aknoz that later charged Bil accused him of incitement to violence, as argued below by Major General Namık Arguç:
This circular that gives the branches a complete freedom in the matter of actions to be taken in the mother country as a counter to the activity of the Greeks who had announced they were preparing for a massacre will go down in our political history as a masterpiece of presumption on the part of the Cyprus Is Turkish Society President General who took upon himself the defense of the Cyprus problem. Whereas in a matter this important it would not be a question for the central executive committee or even a congress, nor a general assembly. First the line the government would follow in such a case should be established to the last detail and then a circular might be sent to branches. Noting good intentions and common sense of the executive committee of the branches, it was necessary that the President take into consideration that they could fall into error or that each branch would consider the question from a different angle and that therefore a complication would arise. Later, during the explanation of the roles played by the Kadıköy and Sarıyer branch presidents Serafim Sağlamel and Osman Tan, it will become clear how this very urgent and secret circular was understood and particularly how the directive regarding the "intimidation from the manly voice" was applied.
Bil was charged—along with other members of the ktc, and with officials and members of dp branch offices—with a variety of offenses, including the ktc circular, burning Greek newspapers, and drafting a ktc statement on the day of the pogrom. His colleague, Kamil Önal, was accused of making various statements to the press, burning Greek newspapers, a demonstration in Taksim, and destroying evidence.147 (It should be added, in regard to these military tribunals functioning under the martial-law regime legislated on September 12, 1955, that they were clearly kangaroo courts. Hikmet Bil and his co-defendants were used as scapegoats by Menderes to deflect guilt from himself and his government. Still, the ktc did commit the acts of violence during the
147 National Archives, Dispatch No. 306, American Consul General of Istanbul to the Department of State, February 20, 1956.
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pogrom of which its leaders were accused. While Menderes bore the moral responsibility for the crime, his confederates were the actual perpetrators.)
Bil's secret circular to the ktc's branches helped considerably to inflame Turkish public opinion, but also to provoke acts of violence against the Greek minority, not only during the riots but, as we shall see, in the sporadic violence against Greeks that broke out even before the pogrom. Furthermore, his circular and its effects were tied to the violence of the local dp branch officers who were also officers of the ktc's local branches. Finally, Bil transformed the general anxiety of a segment of Turkish Cypriots—and the general, non-specific information passed on to him by Fazıl Küçük and Faiz Kaymak—into a definitive, planned, general massacre of Turkish Cypriots by their Greek neighbors on August 28. There is no evidence whatsoever that such a massacre was ever planned, and it was certainly never attempted either by eoka or the Greek Cypriot leaders at the time. Nevertheless, through the circular and in an article that was published in Hürriyet on August 18, Bil gave the rumor of the massacre its final form, which, as such, was passed off to the Turkish people as a whole. Only two days after receiving the copy of Küçük's letter, he wrote in his newspaper that: "One can say today that the Greeks of Cyprus are fully armed. As for the Turks, they do not have weapons even
for display____In this manner there has arisen today a paradoxical situation
in Cyprus. According to special information that has been transmitted to us from Cyprus, the Greeks of the island will organize a major demonstration on the twenty-eighth of the present month, and they will attack the Turks. From all this, the Greeks have also given a name to this day: They have
named it "The day of the general massacre'. ..."148 Accordingly, from August
18, by virtue of both the circular and the article in Hürriyet, the rumor of the massacre became an established "fact," and was now adopted by individuals and groups devoted to creating an atmosphere of hysterical chauvinism and passionate hatred of the Greek minority.
On the day Bil's article appeared, the ktc's Bandırma branch telephoned the offices of the newspaper Tercüman, which published the branch's decision to send 1,000 ktc members to defend Turkish Cypriots, all to go before August 28. One day later, on August 19, Hürriyet published the declaration of Hüsamettin Canöztürk (general director of the National Federation of Turkish Students) and of the president of the Union of Turkish Students, according to which, "The Greeks cannot proceed to general massacre in Cyprus because they would reflect carefully on the consequences of such an act."149 On the
148Chrestides, Ekthesis, p. 153 149 Ibid., p. 154.
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twentieth of the same month, the journalist Doğan Can published an interview with Bil in Yeni Sabah in which the Greek minority of Istanbul was depicted as hostages who would have to pay for the purported massacre of Turkish Cypriots, specifically on August 28 or 30: "I asked the General President of the organization ktc to inform me as to what his own opinion is in regard to the decision which the Greeks of Cyprus have taken in connection with the twenty-eighth of August, in which they have announced that that day will be the day of the general massacre of the Turks. To this question, Hikmet Bil gave me the following answer: 'The answer to such a question is the following: In Istanbul, there are many Greeks.'"150 On August 20, Tercüman published a second news item from Bandırma, according to which Menderes himself had replied to the local ktc office's offer to send 1,000 volunteers to defend Turkish Cypriots: "I esteem your patriotic sentiments. At the same time that I express to you my respect, please remain certain that the Government is ever alert and that it shall not hesitate to take the required measures."151 The following day, Yeni Sabah published a second statement by Faiz Kaymak: "The innocent and unarmed Turks fear that at any moment they will be massacred by the terrorists. We desire that Turkey provide every aid and that it ensure the lives and the property of the Turks of Cyprus."152
The Turkish government, aware of the sources of this rumor-become-"fact," did nothing to squelch it. On the contrary, the government validated it by giving it credence and, ultimately, used it to justify its new Cyprus policy. Given the fact that Menderes's liaison with the ktc was his close confidant, Ahmet Emin Yalman (who was on the ktc's governing board); that Bil and his organization had been handpicked by Menderes himself as the man and group to arouse Turkish national passions; and that, finally, the organization itself was financed by the government, it is clear that Menderes knew well what the organization was about in spreading such rumors, first covertly, and then openly through the Turkish press. Finally, such a rumor-become-fact would please both Eden and Macmillan at the London conference, during which time the pogrom had been calculated to erupt.153
On August 24, Prime Minister Menderes held a banquet at the Liman Lokantası (Harbor Restaurant) in honor of Foreign Minister Zorlu and of the members of his mission who were to depart for London to represent Turkey at the tripartite conference. Among the guests were various other ministers,
150 Ibid., p. 155.
151 Ibid., p. 155. 152 Ibid.,p. 156.
153 Sarres, E aile pleura, Volume II, Part I, pp. 74-77, gives a brief survey of the virulence of the Turkish press.
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members of parliament, businessmen, and newspaper editors.154 Menderes would seize the occasion to make a strong public statement on Turkeys new policy on Cyprus. The process of transforming his previous, more circumspect policy vis-a-vis Greek claims in Cyprus and the issue of self-determination had ended as a result of the Turkish response to the British prodding of the preceding year. The intensified encouragement and support, often covert, of student and political organizations now gave way to a trumpeting of Turkeys overriding interest in Cyprus because of the former's "historical rights" in the matter and because the Turkish minority was supposedly threatened by massacre. The timing was excellent, as the new Turkish team of foreign-ministry specialists and officials were preparing for the trip to the London conference after having prepared and published the White Book that set forth Turkey's claims, indeed demands, which not only startled the Greek side, but made the British apprehensive at the Pandora's Box-like results that they had provoked, with a number of Foreign Office staff unsure as to what they had unleashed exactly. The Greek scholar, Neokles Sarres, has described the Turkish appearance at the conference as the "Turkish Premiere." The time and place were appropriate for Menderes's speech to the assembled banqueters. The speech formally announced Turkey's new policy and outlined the demands to be made in London. It also included the timeworn cliches about his opposition to Cypriot self-determination, the plight of Turks in Greek Thrace, the war between Greeks and Turks in Asia Minor, the old (and long-settled) "Cretan Question," and related subjects of random relevance. He gave his sharpest attention and force to Cyprus, however, still building on Bil's fabrications:
I wish to observe that our recently published diplomatic note to the British Government does not constitute the full and complete content of the actual importance and significance of this diplomatic note. In this diplomatic note, we expressed the malaise which we feel over the danger to which our fellow Turks in Cyprus are exposed.
The stance that the terrorists have taken on the question of Cyprus, and all that which is being said in regard to our subject, have plunged us into justified uneasiness. This malaise refers in part certainly also to the future. Among all these things, the major source of our malaise is constituted by all those things that are reported, somber events that will unfold in Cyprus from one day
154 Sarres, Ibid., has an informative account of the meeting as well as of the perception of the coming London gathering from the pen of a more junior member of the diplomatic mission, Mahmut Dikerdem, as presented in the latter's memoirs, Ortadoğuda devrim, pp. 121-159.
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to another. We do not wish to considet these things certain, not ate we able to accept that it is possible that the matter may take such a turn. Nevertheless, those men announce uninterruptedly, with a terrorist ait, that August 28 shall be a day of general massacre of our fellow Turks in Cyprus. We are certain that the British Government, based upon its legal rights, shall carry out its obligations thoroughly. It is said that the excitation of the Greek population of the island...has reached a peak. Consequently, a sudden undertaking, a criminal initiative devoid of all conscience, could provoke results of which the consequences would be
inescapable and incurable____The local officials, it is possible, will
be unprepared for this. And out population there will probably be found to be unarmed and unable to move against a majority which is extremely excited and armed. This does not mean, however, that these people, I mean the Tutks, will remain, not even for a moment, undefended.155
This speech combined many of the weapons of political complaint from the traditional Turkish armory of diplomatic war on Greece. Nevertheless, it was based primarily on the fabricated Greek Cypriot plan to massacre Turkish Cypriots, combined with a new diplomatic offensive to wrest the previously existing advantage from the Greek side and transfer it to the Turkish side. This offensive would ultimately lead to the split of the Demokrat Parti, the pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, the destruction of the Greek community of Istanbul, and the poisoning of all hopes for some kind of rational and peaceful accommodation of two neighbors fated to live side by side. For Turkey and its people, the speech was the opening salvo in the dictatorialization of Menderes's government; it also led to the decades-long presence and interference of the military caste in Turkish society, politics, culture, education, and the economy that was inaugurated by the overthrow of Menderes's government by the military coup of May 27, 1960. For Menderes was to be destroyed in the end by his very success in subverting the structure of democratic government through the party structure of the Demokrat Parti, which, at the same time, was increasingly subjected to his personal authority.
In his extraordinary and astute account of the pogrom, Christoforos Chrestides, the most perceptive Greek observer of Turkish social and political evolution, and of the relations of Greece and Turkey in particular, describes his increasing apprehension over the disintegration of these relations. An attorney by profession, Chrestides was in and out of Istanbul for consultation with a
155 Chrestides, Ekthesis, pp. 157-158, where it is translated into Greek.

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The religious hatred behind this physical violence against Orthodox ecclesiastics was not restricted to them but included Orthodox communicants. The pogromists repeatedly yelled out a variety of pejoratives, including: gavur (infidel); Kahrolsun, gavurdur (Damn him, he's an infidel); Rum haram (the Greek is illicit); Yıkın, kırın, gavurdur (Destroy, smash, he's an infidel); and ihtar gecesi (night of warning), which was completed by the phrase, Dün seker bayramı, bugün kurban bayramı (Yesterday was the holiday of sugar, today is the holiday of sacrifice).50 In destroying Greek merchandise, the rioters often yelled out, "We do not need infidel goods."51 So it was that the local Greek masses bore the brunt of the attacks. The Greek government estimated that some hundreds of Greeks were assaulted that night.52 We are, accordingly, looking at mass assaults in which the police intervened only when it seemed that the attack might lead to the victim's death, which nevertheless occurred in a number of cases.
Fred Sondern writes of a particular incident in which a Greek storeowner and his wife were present when the demonstrators appeared: "The owners of the store, an elderly Greek-Turk and his wife, had pulled down their shutters but had stayed in the shop. The old man had courage: 'You filth,' he shouted as the first rioters broke in, my family lived in Istanbul for six generations. We are as good Turks as you.' He was silenced with a blow of a club. In a few minutes the store was a shambles."53 Reference has already been made to the frightful clubbing by demonstrators of the teacher Alexandros Iatropoulos.54 The author, Leonidas Koumakes, himself bom in Istanbul and present in the city that night, records the experience of his father, who had been forewarned by a Turkish friend and neighbor to stay home the next day. The elder Koumakes had ignored his friend's warning, however, and was closing his shop the following evening when he heard strange noises:
He hurriedly turned off the lights and slipped out of the shop. That instant he was approached by five people who had detached
naming their sources out of fear of compromising them.
50 See footnote 26 above, and also Koumakes, Miracle, p. 65. For "gavur" and "Rum haram," see National Archives, Foreign Office Dispatch No. 116, American Consul General, Istanbul, September 14, 1955; for "ihtar gecesi" and "Dün şeker bayram, bugün kurban bayram," see Paulos Palaiologos, Diagramma, p. 35; and for "Kahrolsun, gavurdur" and "Yıkın, kırın, gavurdur," see Leonidas Koumakes in Tsoukatou, Septemvriana, p. 183.
51 B. E./Khosdegian, "A Historical Night," II, "The demonstrators shouted, 'we do not need the merchandise of infidels'"; also, footnote 38 above.
52 Greek Embassy, Washington, No. 45871/T4, Ep, October 11, 1955; also, footnote 38 above.
53 Sondern, "Istanbul's Night of Terror," p. 186.
54 Tsoukatou, Septemvriana, pp. 179-180.

Moral and Material Damages, and the Economics and Politics of Compensation 219
themselves from the mainstream of the mob. They closed in on him menacingly....
"Hey, gavur, why don't you hoist a Turkish flag in your shop, eh," asked one of them. That was the signal. The five of them fell on him immediately, punching and kicking him.
My father, dizzy from the pummeling, tried, hopelessly, to protect himself with some defensive punches. But his situation was not good at all.
Fortunately, a noisy ambulance passing by distracted his attackers and, "bleeding badly and still dizzy from the blows, he ran for his life as fast as he could, pulling in the last ounce of his strength."55
The same author records the vicious attack on Apostolos Nikolaides, whose shop was in Galata. Hearing that there would be demonstrations over the purported Greek bombing in Thessalonike, he closed his shop early and crossed over to his home at Kuzguncuk, in the district of Yeni Mahalle. There, he and his family witnessed and heard the destruction of Greek businesses, churches, and dwellings. Although it seemed to be over by midnight, a new wave of rioters appeared on the scene and eventually reached Nikolaides's home. The leader of this particular mob, a certain Kemal who was well-known to Nikolaides since the latter had often helped him, placed the Greek in a dilemma as to how to avert pending disaster. He hesitated over whether to lock the door or to try and reason with his acquaintance. Taking a Turkish flag with him, he decided to reason with him. Thus, armed with the flag, he descended the steps of his house and appeared suddenly before the assembled crowd. He stated that he was loyal to Turkey and that he had actually served in the Turkish armed forces on three different occasions. The suddenness of their intended victim's appearance before them, with the Turkish flag and military service, temporarily silenced the crowd, but, after this temporary hesitation, they attacked him nonetheless. He was hit from behind, struck forcefully in the back of the head by a mace, and collapsed, unconscious. The victim's fifteen-year-old son screamed loudly, "Brother Kemal, you're murdering my father,"56 which finally succeeded in turning away the mob. The family decided that night that they would abandon their home early in the morning, taking with them only what they could wear (so as not to attract attention), and never return. Despite two subsequent surgeries, Nikolaides never recovered and suffered partial amnesia for the rest of his life.
In her seventh month of pregnancy, Gedikouliane Ioannidou-Moysidou
55 Koumakes, Miracle, p. 49.
56 Ibid., pp. 63-65.

Vryonis, Speros. The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom Of September 6-7, 1955, And The Destruction Of The Greek Community Of Istanbul. Greekworks.com (New York, 2005) pp. 218-219.

[Nikephoros]

Background and Institutions of the Pogrom
33
some thirty-one laws during the period between the two world wars severely crippled and, finally, paralyzed the community as a result of these efforts to reduce its political, legal, economic, and cultural presence. The laws against the etablis, for example, forbade them from some thirty trades, including those of tailor, itinerant merchant, photographer, carpenter, and doorman, as well as from professions of more "elevated" social and economic status such as medicine, law, insurance, and real estate. Some 10,000 Greek etablis were thus deprived of their livelihoods and forced to abandon their homes and businesses in Istanbul and emigrate, penniless, to Greece (at the expense of the Greek state).16 It is noteworthy that, alongside this more general xenophobia, a certain antisemitism was soon manifest in Turkish government policy at the same time that it was mushrooming in Nazi Germany.17 The law on language in turn placed the Greek minority under constraint not to speak Greek in public and subjected it to "correction" by its ethnically Turkish co-citizens, who were in fact legally enjoined to vigilance against and public rectification of these infractions, which were all liable to punishment.
Even more serious, however, were the discriminatory, intimidating, and economically ruinous laws passed by the Turkish government during the Second World War. The first, in 1941, led to the forced conscription into labor battalions (amele taburları) of all Christian and Jewish males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Many of these men died from the heavy labor they were compelled to do (particularly in road-building).18 This discriminatory mobilization, and the hardships imposed, led not only to the death of many conscripts but to the terrorizing of their communities. The labor battalions were finally disbanded for reasons not immediately apparent.19
Just a few months later, however, in 1942, the government of Şükrü Saraçoğlu passed legislation that was not only highly discriminatory against non-Muslim minorities but actually punitive. It thus set the foundation for
Turkey. (In Turkish, by the way, "etabli" was rendered as etabli.)
16 Alexandris, The Greek minority, pp. 184-185; Syllogos Imvrion-Konstantinoupoliton-Tenedion and Anatolikothrakon Thrakes, Oi paraviaseis tes Synthekes tes Lozanes, second edition, Komotene, 1993, pp. 19-28.
17 Faik Okte, The tragedy of the Turkish capital tax, London, 1987, pp. 38-39, "a new class of tax payers, the Dönme Class (D) (of Jewish converts to Islam) was instituted, which was taxed at rates double those for Muslims (M)...." Also, Alexandris, The Greek minority, pp. 215-216.
18 Nikos G. Apostolides, Anamneseis apo ten Konstantinoupole, Athens; 1996, pp. 210-213, was among the Greeks sentenced to hard labor in Anatolia, although he had faithfully performed his military service in the Turkish army during 1935-1936. He estimates that the number of Greeks conscripted into the labor battalions at 20,000, and refers to them as the "twenty generations."
19 Alexandris, The Greek minority, pp. 213-214, speaks of very large groups containing 5,000 men each by the end of 1941, pp. 207-233; Lewis, Modern Turkey, pp. 297-302.

Vryonis, Speros. The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom Of September 6-7, 1955, And The Destruction Of The Greek Community Of Istanbul. Greekworks.com (New York, 2005) p. 33.

It would be nice to have more sources on this "speak Turkish, citiziens" law used to terrorize minorities in Turkey into speaking Turkish in public.