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Lemos, Anastasia Aglaia (2019) Aspects of the literatures of the Turkish war of independence and the Greek Asia Minor disaster. PhD thesis. SOAS University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/30967 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. ASPECTS OF THE LITERATURES OF THE TURKISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE GREEK ASIA MINOR DISASTER Anastasia Aglaia Lemos Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD 2018 Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East SOAS, University of London 1 ABSTRACT The thesis examines literary works in Greek and Turkish inspired by the war of 1919- 1922 and the subsequent exchange of populations, the most critical years in the recent life of both nations. It focuses on the early period, particularly the works of Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and Halide Edip Adıvar in Turkey and Elias Venezis in Greece. It seeks to show the way themes were selected and then used or adapted to reflect more contemporary concerns. For this purpose successive variants of the same work are examined. Attention is drawn to the importance given in both literatures to victimhood which explains their quite divergent emphasis on different events which has resulted in the readership in each nation being largely blind to the view held by the other. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Title Page 1 Declaration 2 Abstract 3 Table of Contents 4 Dedication 5 Acknowledgements 6 Chapter 1 Introduction 9 Chapter 2 Historical Background 30 Chapter 3 Some Topoi in the Kurtuluş Edebiyatı 80 Chapter 4 Halide Edip and Yakup Kadri 102 Chapter 5 Two Shirts of Flame 161 Chapter 6 Vurun Kahpeye! 192 Chapter 7 Ergenekon 201 Chapter 8 Yaban, Kadro, Ankara 233 Chapter 9 The Greek Case: Venezis 280 Chapter 10 Conclusion 298 Appendix 1 Yakup Kadri’s Ateşten Gömlek 301 Appendix 2 Yakup Kadri’s Ateşten Gömlek Translation 311 Appendix 3 Yakup Kadri’s 1964 Preface and Epilogue to Ergenekon 323 Appendix 4 Yaban Textual variants 329 Bibliography 435 4 To my Greek and Turkish families George Zerrin Dimitris Christos and Koula Zeynep and Salih Zeki Takis and Katerina 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS From the time I started my research for this thesis many unforeseen events in my life delayed it and postponed my attempts to complete it. Over the years a number of people, friends old and new, kindly helped me, each in his or her own way, and contributed to its progress. I am grateful to them all. I would like to thank Ourania Bessi, Erol Köroğlu, Yalçın Armağan and Kesibe Karaosmanoğlu who very kindly provided me with useful material and information and facilitated access to research material. Special thanks also are due to Zeynep and Salih Zeki Sayar, Katerina Drossou and Takis Koutsoyiannopoulos and my children Dimitris, Christos and Koula for their support in so many different ways as well as to Sibel Kocaer for helping me to decipher the manuscripts at the early stages of my research. At the Gennadius Library I am indebted to Maria Georgopoulou, Natalia Vogeikoff- Brogan, Leda Costaki and Eleftheria Valeziou for making the Myrivilis and Venezis archives available to me and for their personal interest in my research. I am also grateful to Sevengül Sönmez for entrusting me with original material from the vast Karaosmanoğlu archives relevant to my research and to my special interest in Yakup Kadri. I am also indebted to my friend Polymnia Athanassiadi for reading the whole draft of my thesis, for her corrections and valuable suggestions. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During the long years of studying Turkish at SOAS at a mature age I was lucky to have two inspirational teachers, Dr Bengisu Rona and Dr Yorgo Dedes. Dr Dedes gave me the keys which open the fascinating and complex Old Turkic and Ottoman worlds and their relationship to the present world of Modern Turkey. Apart from the practical help he gave me during the research period and his help in deciphering the illegible parts from Dergâh, he introduced me to Yaban, the work which has become a focal point in my thesis. Dr Bengisu Rona was the teacher who suggested and encouraged me to delve into the subject of the thesis. I owe my love of Turkish literature to her. In her literature classes, which were much anticipated by all participants, she provided us with a very great range of literary texts in the original language. Difficult prose and verse of the Tanzimat period were analysed with the clarity which her own name suggests. As we moved into the 20th century, the beauty and eloquence of the unadorned Turkish language was revealed to us as well. The extensive notes I took in her classes have never ceased to be a point of reference. In addition to this, I am grateful for all her good guidance throughout my research, for painstakingly reading the drafts of my thesis – even when these were presented to her at the eleventh hour – for her encouraging comments and for always making difficulties sound manageable. I am also indebted to her for all her suggestions and corrections in my translations from Turkish. There are two people without whom the thesis would have been impossible to complete. 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my friend, Zerrin Sayar, who helped me throughout with an unreserved and sisterly devotion. She untied knotty points in Turkish texts, checked long passages of translation, helped bypass the impassable difficulties of ordering Turkish books online from London and always made everything she did for me seem as if she enjoyed doing it. I quickly concluded that Turks and Greeks have more in common than I found their literatures have. Needless to say, our friendship was formed in Dr Rona’s literature class. Last but definitely not least I would like to express my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to my husband, George, who very patiently has always been next to me, mercilessly challenging me, mercifully helping me and always remaining a source of inspiration. I owe him a great thank you for his practical help while writing my thesis and for making attempts to correct my English. I know however that despite all the help I have received I am responsible for many shortcomings. 8 CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION The literatures of the War of Independence and of the Asia Minor Disaster are closely related to the shaping of the respective national narratives about the foundation of the independent national and “homogeneous” states of Turkey and Greece. The end of the 1919-1922 war also ended the process of dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire as well as the process of the formation of the independent Greek state. The latter had started with the Greek revolution in 1821 while the former nearly sixty years later with the Berlin Congress in 1878. The outcome of the war, victorious for the Turks and disastrous for the Greeks, consolidated the borders of two independent states. Turkey retained Anatolia but did not regain any of the Ottoman provinces of whose recovery some had dreamed, while Greece achieved the sway of a Greek state over the populations of Asia Minor not by extending its borders across the Aegean but by their removal to “old Greece” through the exchange of populations. The demographic changes in both states were dramatic. They were felt more in Greece as she had to accommodate a proportionately larger number of refugees within a smaller area. The arrival of the refugees in Greece and its impact has been and is still studied and discussed extensively. In Turkey interest in the study of the refugees has been more recent. The literature which in one way or another has been inspired by these events in Greek and Turkish since they occurred nearly a century ago is enormous in bulk. It is far beyond the capacity of a single work to survey it all. This brief introduction will 9 CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION attempt a very general survey and then describe the principles underlying the selection of the works chosen for study. There is a recognisable canon of works and existing scholarship divides it into chronological periods.1 The first such period starts with the war itself and extends into the 1930s. Works of literature written at the time of the war and the next decade and drawing their subject matter from the war and its impact on all aspects of life in the newly emerging Republic of Turkey are generally classed under the heading of Millî Edebiyat (National literature)2 or are commonly referred to specifically as Kurtuluş Edebiyatı3 in the most histories of Turkish literature4. This literary movement had appeared much earlier and took its definite shape and character with the constitutional changes of 1908. It is an offspring of the more general Turkish nationalism which eventually prevailed over various other “isms” (eg. Westernism, Islamism, Ottomanism, Turanism) which had made their appearance in the mid nineteenth century as possible paths to the future5. Kurtuluş Edebiyatı, as generally conceived, does not include every relevant writer.