The Greek Kristallnacht

In 1955, Turkey took a page out of the playbook of the Nazi Movement in pre-war Germany and conducted a pogrom similar in every respect to the one known as "Kristallnacht (The Night of Glass)".  The victims this time were not Jews but the Greeks of Constantinople (Istanbul), the last vestige of a community that had lived there for over two thousand years. Although this brutal episode occurred over fifty years ago it still rankles in Greek memory and has done much to poison the well of Greek-Turkish relations. The pogrom took place with the backdrop of the emerging crisis in Cyprus at the time. Britain poised to lose her colony on the island of Cyprus decided to play the "Turkish card" and initiated a tripartite conference designed to draw Turkey into the process as a counter-balance to the growing movement toward "enosis" or union with Greece. In the midst of negotiations Turkey decided to send a calculated message on September 6, 1955. The following account is from an article by John Phillips that appeared in Harper's Magazine in June, 1956: "Squads of marauders were driven to the shopping area in trucks and taxis, waving picks and crowbars, consulting lists of addresses, as the police stood by smiling. Greek priests were reported circumcised, scalped and burned alive; Greek women raped. The Greek Consulate was destroyed in Izmir, Just nine out of eighty Greek churches were left undesecrated, twenty nine were demolished. Ghouls invaded the huge cemetery where the Patriarchs of Constantinople are buried, opened mausoleums, dug up graves, and flung bones into the streets; corpses waiting burial with knives. There had been no comparable destruction of Greek sanctuaries since the fall of Constantinople."

The riots were allegedly sparked by a rumor that the birthplace of Kemal Ataturk, the Father of Modern Turkey, which was located in Thessaloniki, had been bombed. This rumor was given legs by the Turkish media and did much to incite the anti-Greek frenzy. Dr Spiros Vryonis in his landmark 700 page work: The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955 details the intent of the Turkish government. to destroy the Greek community of Istanbul and to serve the domestic and foreign policies of the Adnan Menderes government. The pogrom was well planned and the carnage skillfully executed. It was not a spontaneous burst of anger but a methodical and coordinated operation. As the police stood passively on the sidelines, riots began emanating from the center of the city at Taksim Square and moved out to its suburbs The government imported thousands of illiterate Anatolian Turks armed them with crowbars, clubs, spades, pickaxes, dynamite and gasoline. Approximately 100,000 Turks participated. The attack came in three waves; the first broke down doors and windows in order to gain entrance to buildings, the second fell on the contents of those buildings and the third finished the destruction of the building after it was thoroughly looted. One thousand homes were destroyed, 2500 partially destroyed, 4500 stores were looted , damaged or destroyed. Thirty Greek men were killed and 200 Greek women were raped. Nothing Greek was spared, not even cemeteries. It would mark the beginning of the end of the historic Greek community in Istanbul that was supposedly protected under the Treaty of Lausanne.

Turkey imposed a press blackout immediately and the incident received minimal press coverage. Damages were estimated to be $500,000,000. A mildly worded note from the British government was dispatched to the Turkish Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes by his British counterpart, Harold Macmillan.  Although an embarrassment the incident had uses that the British did not fail to grasp. The Americans on the other hand, sent a strongly worded note to both sides from President Eisenhower deploring the antagonism between the two nations and calling for calm despite the fact that Greek government reacted with exemplary coolness during the crisis. The note had the effect equating perpetrator with victim. This seminal event started the downward slide of Greek-American relations that has over time become a rising tide of anti-Americanism.

The Turkish military initially acquiesced to the actions of the Menderes government and the Chief of Staff, General Cemal Gursel promised protection. Five years later, he overthrew Menderes in a bloodless coup and hung him and two of his cabinet ministers. The military intervention tightened the government's grip over its minorities, and intensified the suppression of rights of other ethnic minorities in Turkey as well as the Turlish people themselves.  Ethnic cleansing in Turkey and Cyprus has continued unabated by the Turkish government including the destruction of Kurdish villages of southeast Anatolia which is being slowly reduced to a desolate wasteland. Despite the passage of time, the effects of the Pogrom of 1955 are still reverberating today. For Turks it solidified the notion that they could continue their policy of ethnic cleansing and human rights violations unhampered by the West. For Greeks the event reinforced the futility of relying on the West for support in issues involving Turkey and highlighted their sense of being an aggrieved party, victimized once again. Both outcomes bode ill for the future.

 

    Technorati : Constantinople, Cyprus, Enosis, Greek minority in Istanbul, Greek-American Relations, Greek-Turkish Relations, Pogrom, Spiros Vryonis, Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey

Comments

[demonax]

Stavros
As you mention, the pogroms against the Greeks in Constantinople in 1955 and 1963/4 were intimately connected to the political situation in Cyprus – 1955 being the beginning of the EOKA campaign for union with Greece and 1963 the start of intercommunal clashes on the island.
Indeed, I have the impression that many Constantinopolitans blame the Cypriots for having made their already precarious position intolerable. A couple of years ago– unfortunately I can’t recall this event exactly – I remember Vartholomeos saying to a delegation of Cypriots visiting the Phanari, in what I took to be a kind of rebuke, something like: ‘I know you didn’t want it, but we [the Greeks living in Turkey] suffered because of you.’
Vartholomeos may have had a point. I don’t know. Cypriots have always been accused of carrying on their own fight for Hellenism without taking into account the wider consequences for the ethnos. However, I tend to think such an accusation is harsh and, in the case of the Greeks of Constantinople, Imvros and Tenedos, the Turks would have found a reason, sooner or later, one way or another, to get rid of them.
Seferis said as much in 1950, five years before the pogrom, when as a diplomat in Turkey, he visited the City, and was dismayed by the Turkish assault on all things Hellenic.
‘Constantinople, on the one hand, the aged city and on the other incredible bursts of frenzied native fanaticism. The future is obvious.’

[Stavros]

Demo, Our time in Constantinople would have run out one way or the other. Cyprus was a convenient excuse. If it did not exist the Turkish government would have found another solution, just as unpalatable to the Greek community. Many Greeks tried to hang on even after the riots. Some businesses were rebuilt, only to be taxed out of existence in subsequent years. The Turks still don't realize the negative effect the pogrom and the expulsion of the Greek community had on the country's economy. They lost a great deal of human talent that they have not been able to replace.

[George]

Turks have run several pogroms, the most notorious ones in the 193o's against the Jews in Thrace, and during the 2nd world war with the Varlik taxation that aimed to ruin financially all non-0moslem commercial establishments. In addition they had security battalions all through 1942, at the time thta it looked like nazi Germany would overrun the Soviet Union. Well, the victories at El Alamein (10/42) and Stalingrad (02/43) changed all this; of course many of the displaced in Anatlia payed with their lives, others were spared. It was this remarkable bouncing back of the Orthodox community in Turkey that riled the Turks the most. Do not forget that the EOKA campaign was directed against the British occupation authorities in Cyprus, AND NOT A SINGLE TURK WAS INJURED BY EOKA FOR 3 WHOLE YEARS, DESPITE THE VERY LIBERAL USE BY THE BRITS OF TURKISH CYPRIOTS ASAN AUXILIARY POLICE FORCE!!!!!
For info on Turkish pogroms read Dilek Guven's book (in Greek, Estia publications) on how the Turkish republic practised wholesale ethnic cleansing.
In fact, the leader of the Turkish Cypriots Dr. Fazil Kutchuk sent in the last days of August 1955 an urgent appeal to Menderes, "fearing" a massacre of the Turkish Cypriots after a rally by the left wing AKEL party (President Christofias of Cyprus is the current leader of AKEL!!_). Nothing could be firther form the truth, but as Vryonis shows, Turkish rapacity coupled with British duplicity and monumental ineptness by the Greek government (Papagos should not have accepted Turkey as an interlocutor on Cyprus, as she had renounced all claims to it under the treaty of Lausanne).

Let it also be said, that no matter how hard the Cypriots had appealed to Greece in the 1940's and early 50's all center politiicans, S. Venizelos, Plastiras and G Papandreou REFUSED to pick a fight with Britain over Cyprus. By contrast, Papagos considered that Greece got nothing for her war effort (except for the civil war as an insurance policy to have the king back!), albeit 9 years after the war was over.

Regent Damascenos was the only Greek leader who demanded something for Greece after WWII, but the Brits would not even allow him to visit Cyprus in 1945, and in 1950 lied in public by claiming that Greece had never asked for Cyprus after WWII (See G Seferis, diplomatic secretary to Damascenos, Political Diary).

Of course the real time to ask for something was BEFORE entering WWII......The country that faught for the allied cause and resisted the Nazis more than anyone, suffered the most (remember the hunger of 1941-2), got stuck with a civil war, and was rewarded only with the Dodecanese, which in 1943 were offered to Turkey, along with Cyprus, by Churchill in his secret visit there, but refused by Prime Minister Inonu as "not enough".

Wake up people, we need leaders with vision and guts.