A DECADE of ETHNO-RELIGIOUS CO-EXISTENCE Following

CHAPTER THREE 1913–1922: A DECADE OF ETHNO-RELIGIOUS CO-EXISTENCE Following the Balkan Wars,1 the Treaty of Bucharest awarded the Greek State Epirus, the East Aegean islands, Crete and Macedonia, the so- called ‘New Lands’ (Nees Hores). Through the annexation of the New Lands, Greece increased its landmass and population signifĳicantly. Muslim populations, the majority of which resided in the region of Macedonia, found themselves by 1912 in the theatre of a war between Greece, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. Perceived as kin of the defeated Ottoman authorities, local Muslims paid a terrible toll in blood and death. At the same time, in Western Thrace the Bulgarian adminis- tration swept away the short-lived autonomous ‘Republic of Thrace’ established in 1913.2 By 1918, the inter-allied army took over the adminis- tration of the region (of both West and East Thrace); in 1920, it passed on to the Greek authorities. 3.1. Nationalization/Ethnicization of Land and People and Minority Protection at the Beginning of the 20th Century As a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria obtained important territorial gains to the detriment of the Empire. ‘Every Greek war is waged for the recovery of a national frontier’3 and Greece increased its area and population by 68 percent. As such, an important number of non-Greek speaking or non-Greek Orthodox peo- ples became Greek citizens, coming to constitute a signifĳicant minority presence. According to offfĳicial estimates, in 1912 more than 560,000 Muslims inhabited Northern Greece, making up 39 percent of the local 1 For an overview of military confrontations between Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria see A. Gerolymatos, 2002. 2 On stillborn attempts to establish an independent state in Western Thrace, see, K. Featherstone and others, 2010: 30. See also Hr. Karamatsiou, 2009. 3 G. Curzon, Frontiers, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1907 quoted by R. S. Peckham 2001: 137. 48 chapter three population.4 The initial response to the new situation on the part of mainstream policy makers in Greece was not assimilation but the preser- vation of regulated coexistence under the condition of loyalty to the Greek state: After 1913 the national ideal is not any more the creation of a purely Hellenic Greece but the establishment of a large Hellenic state in which many foreign elements would coexist with the Hellenic one, keeping unnaturally their particular national consciousness under the sovereignty of the Hellenic ele- ment and using as their connecting link the Greek language, the offfĳicial language of the state.5 However, in keeping with the zeitgeist of the era, the underlying impulse of the nation-state builders was fĳirst to acquire as much as possible of what constituted the (imagined) ‘national territory’ and then to ‘ethni- cise’ it. Population exchanges or transfers accordingly took place under legal provisions which sought to minimize minority presence. Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey all undertook initiatives along these lines.6 Such population exchanges – which took place in the 1920s between Bulgaria and Greece on the one hand, and Greece and Turkey on the other – had an enormous impact on the fate of their respective minorities. The last case of population exchange along these lines in the Balkans was the transfer governed by the Convention between Romania and Turkey signed on September 4th 1936 in Bucharest which aimed at facilitating the ‘voluntary’ migration of the Turkish and Muslim population of Dobroucha to Turkey. Greek nationalism understands the Greek state to be a continuous yet clearly defĳined territorial space which encompasses all or part of the Greek nation.7 Thus, a specifĳic area where a rival nationalism is in evidence – such 4 For fĳigures on the Muslims of Macedonia in 1912, see J. Dalègre, 2002: 206 and D. Pentzopoulos, 2003: 137–138: the main concentration of Muslims was in Hrysoupolis (Sari Saban) (98 percent of the total local population), Drama (79 percent), Kavala (60 percent) and Langadas (60 percent) with fewer in Katerini (18 percent), Elassona (12 percent) and Halkidiki (6 percent). According to Sotiriadis (1918: 16), before 1912 there were 189,690 Muslims out of 355,655 inhabitants of Eastern Macedonia, whereas in 1915 there were 145,857 Muslims out of 384,655 inhabitants. According to A. Pallis (1925b: 13) “in 1912 the Turkish population of Old Greece and New Lands according to a series of statistics was about 523,000 (Macedonia: 472,000, Crete: 28,000, Epirus: 8,000, Aegean islands: 9,000, Old Greece with Elassona: 6,000)”. 5 A. Pallis, 1933. 6 K. Tsitselikis, 2002c: 136. The fĳirst population exchange took place between Bulgaria and Turkey in 1913–1914 regarding populations dwelling along their border; see D. Pentzopoulos, 2003: 54–55. 7 E. Skopetea, 1988: 21..

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