Kevin Featherstone, Dimitris Papadimitriou, Argyris

HISTOREIN VOLUME 16.1-2 (2017) Kevin Featherstone, Dimitris staffed largely by southern Greeks from the Papadimitriou, Argyris Mamarelis “old lands”. A sharp geographical and socio- and Georgios Niarchos economic contrast between the borderland rural territories of the Rhodope mountains Οι τελευταίοι Οθωμανοί: and the urban centres of Xanthi, Komotini and Η μουσουλμανική μειονότητα της Alexandroupoli was exacerbated by political Δυτικής Θράκης 1940-1949 dividing lines: the enduring conflict between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists as a defining [The Last Ottomans: The Muslim factor of Greek politics, on the one hand, and, Minority of Greece, 1940–1949] on the other, the deep strife that cut across the Muslim minority between the defenders Athens: Alexandria, 2013. 574 pp. of a traditional prenational Islam and the sup- porters of the secular, nationalist, Kemalist revolution. Leonidas Karakatsanis British Institute at Ankara The authors of The Last Ottomans1 dive brave- ly into this regional complexity to shed light on At the dawn of the 1940s, Western Thrace the effects of a decade of violence and war that was a region where perhaps the most com- came to upset and reconfigure the sensitive plex matrix of ethnic, religious, linguistic, so- and complex balances and boundaries of eth- cial, ideological and political boundaries with- nic politics in the region. The convoluted map in the borders of Greece was at play. Passing of differences presented above was exposed from the Ottoman state to Bulgaria in 1912, to to significant challenges that included the en- the Entente in 1919 and then to Greece in 1920 trance of Greece into the Second World War, as part of its “new lands”, Western Thrace the Axis occupation of Xanthi and Rhodope by was exempted from the population exchange Bulgarian forces, the emergence of the resist- between Turkey and Greece, agreed to under ance and the Greek Civil War. the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. From then on, its Muslim population was de jure recognised The book tries to penetrate this complexi- as a “Muslim Minority” while at the same time ty through an overarching research question the region became the recipient of a signif- addressing what the authors see as a puzzle: icant inflow of Orthodox Christian refugees the widespread passive reaction of the Mus- who arrived from Turkey. As a result, dur- lim minority throughout the decade. As they ing the interwar period, Western Thrace was document well throughout the book, the Mus- a hub of dynamic diversity that contained all lim minority in its overwhelming majority ab- of the following: Greek Orthodox, Sephardic stained from either resisting or collaborating Jewish and Muslim indigenous populations with the Bulgarian occupying forces, and tried sharing a linguistic garden of Greek, Ladino, to retain its distance from the clashing forc- Turkish, Pomakika (or Pomak language) and es of the civil war: the communist Democratic Romani; a culturally and linguistically diverse Army of Greece (DSE) and the Greek Nation- population of Christian Orthodox refugees al Army (EES). In other words, despite the op- from Asia Minor and the Black Sea that in- portunities for raising ethnic claims amid the cluded Turkophones, Pontic-Greek speakers upheaval of a decade of violence in the region and Armenians; and a local administration (as was the case with ethnic minorities in the 185 Book Reviews Greek Macedonian region), the Muslim com- ulations, stimulated by a number of factors munities of Thrace remained largely passive. throughout the decade – the fear of Bulgarian rule, the effort to escape conflict areas, forced The authors argue that the source of these at- recruitment into the DSE or conscription to the titudes should be sought in a number of fac- EES, or the forced evacuation of rural villages tors. They include Turkey’s focus on preserv- by the EES – brought significant new dynamics ing its neutrality in the Second World War (a and a new geography: the largely isolated ru- decision that restrained its active involvement ral Pomak population came into closer contact as a protector of the minority during Bulgari- with the urban ethnic Turks, while the exodus an rule), the harshness of Bulgarian rule itself, of many members of the minority to Turkey which, combined with the unique geography of created a significant Thracian diaspora in that the region (squeezed between occupying forc- country that played an influential role in minor- es), as well as the decision of the main Greek ity politics after 1950. resistance organisations to avoid major action there, minimised the opportunities for such a At the political level, the events of the 1940s left development. Finally, despite the unavoidable permanent marks on the entirety of Greek so- but in most cases unwilling or even forced – as ciety, but the effects on the politics of the Mus- the book argues – participation of minority lim minority and Western Thrace were also members in different fronts of the civil war,2 concrete. The consolidation of the hegemony this never became a war that was considered of the modernist/nationalist Kemalist ideolo- “their war”, a war of the minority. gy over traditional Islam in the region was the first of them. At the end of the 1940s, this he- The most substantial contribution of the book, gemony started steadily to expand beyond the though, does not stem directly from the explo- urban or suburban Turkish-speaking Muslim ration of this hypothesis, but derives from a re- communities and to have a gradual effect on search question regarding the effects of a dec- the rural Pomak speakers and the suburban ade of war on the ethnic map of the region and, Roma Muslims. As the book documents, this more specifically, on the identity of the Muslim was an outcome of the intense mobility caused minority (44, 499). These effects, despite their by displacement, as argued above, but also a regional or ethnic-specific character, bounced result of the key role that the Turkish consulate back into the main theatre of Greek national and in Komotini played as the main point of refer- international politics in the following decades. ence or support for the entire Muslim population during Bulgarian occupation. The authors Of such effects, the most significant evidenced of the book also bring to light the deeply in- in the book include, first, the establishment of teresting history of the exposure of the rural a new ethnic map in Thrace. With the entirety traditional Pomak communities to the secular of the Thracian Jewish community annihilat- communist propaganda of the DSE, and the ed by the Holocaust and most of the Armeni- experience of rule under the National Libera- an community forced to migrate to the Sovi- tion Front (EAM) in the region during the pe- et Union due to the widespread collaboration riod immediately after the liberation from the with the Bulgarian occupying forces, the Mus- Axis. It was then that a number of demands lim minority and its ethno-linguistic groups be- for secular-national (that is, Turkish) education came the sole actor of politics of difference in and for the self-rule of the Muslim foundations the region. The displacement of Muslim pop- were met for a short period. While the authors 186 HISTOREIN VOLUME 16.1-2 (2017) themselves do not relate this development to from diverse archival sources (mainly Greek the postwar hegemony of Kemalist ideology, it and British with the auxiliary use of Bulgarian should be regarded as an experience that had and Turkish), over 60 oral testimonies of lo- its own effects on the minority. cals, and a successful effort to bring togeth- er the secondary literature written about the Finally, at the end of the two wars, the Po- times in Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish and Eng- mak-speaking Muslims had suffered the most lish, distilling from them valuable information severe conditions among the Thracian popu- about the situation in Western Thrace. Over- lation, both during the Bulgarian occupation, all, the Greek translation of the book by Geor- when a harsh assimilation policy was direct- gios Niarchos is of a very good standard and ed against them, and also during the civil war, offers, as is the case with the English original, since their remote villages were in the conflict an engaging read. In only a few cases does the areas and became the main source of provi- Greek translation deviate from the academic sions and recruiting for the DSE. They there- language style of the original (see, for instance, fore transformed into a group continuous- 175: “σαν να μην έφτανε αυτό”) or uses some ly caught up in a play between the politics of terms inconsistently (for instance, Ioudaioi/ assimilation/proselytisation and the mistrust Evraioi for Jews [58]) without justifying the se- of almost all parties, including the Bulgarians, lection. Greek state and DSE. The details of such prac- tices provided in the book are very interesting, On a more critical note, though, while a real- since such politics of assimilation and mistrust ly rich amount of contextual information and became a stable pattern for the Pomak-speak- of primary and secondary sources are pre- ing population in the postwar period. sented in the book, the authors do not man- age to tame, through their analysis, the crux Still, in presenting the above effects, the au- of the matter to which the book’s title alludes; thors are careful not to assert causality and ar- that is, the final step of the transition of the mi- gue for an uneven effect of the period’s events nority from a prenational past to a context of on the minority. Because of the highly variable “multiple modernities” governed by the logic conditions across the different geographical, of nation-state politics.

Load more