Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [35]
Turkey was not then and is not now ethnically or culturally homogeneous. Until the late 1800s, most Ottoman citizens weren’t Muslim, let alone Turks; it was only after the Empire lost its European provinces that Turks became a majority, for the first time in centuries. The road to nationalism had no room for anyone who wasn’t Turkish. As scholar Renée Hirschon notes in her excellent book Crossing the Aegean, the odds were not in favor of the survival of a multiethnic state after World War I: “The heritage of modern Turkey was said to lie in the true heartland of ethnic Turkishness, that is, inner Asia. The rich cultural history of Anatolia was glossed over. This suppression, which was necessary for the coherence of the energetically propagated official version of national history and identity, could not accommodate the lived experience of the existing population or the abundant physical evidence of a prior ‘non-homogeneous’ population.” In fact, the government’s stance on multiculturism has long been that anyone who lives in Turkey is a Turk, end of story. “Happy is he who calls himself a Turk,” goes the slogan, and its translation has been that any other identity is unacceptable.
And so it was decided, in the Lausanne treaty, that the only criterion to distinguish a Turk from anyone else was religion. Therefore, a Greek-speaking Muslim who had lived his whole life in Greece and never set foot in Turkey was determined to be a Turk, and was forced to emigrate to Turkey. Likewise, Turkish-speaking Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Russians, and others of the Greek Orthodox faith who had only ever lived in Turkey were determined to be Christian, and had to leave.
Ernest Hemingway was among the witnesses to the exchange. He was, at that time, a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star and on October 20, 1922, he filed the article “A Silent, Ghastly Procession,” which began, “Adrianople [present day Edirne].—In a never-ending, staggering march, the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads toward Macedonia. The main column crossing the Maritza River at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.” And on November 14, his column “Refugees from Thrace” opened with these words: “In a comfortable train with the horror of the Thracian evacuation behind me, it is already beginning to seem unreal. That is the boon of our memories. I have described that evacuation in a cable to the Star from Adrianople. It does no good to go over it again. The evacuation still keeps up. No matter how long it takes this letter to get to Toronto, as you read this in the Star you may be sure that the same ghastly, shambling procession of people being driven from their homes is filing in unbroken line along the muddy road to Macedonia. A quarter of a million people take a long time to move.”
I had initially wanted to include here some personal chronicles from both a Greek and a Turk who had lived through the exchange. But in addition to it being a little difficult to find these of suitable length, I decided that I might be misrepresenting myself as a scholar or historian, which of course I’m not. Rather, I chose to feature a news story that recorded the event, which appeared on January 11, 1923, in The New York Times, and to include a brief bibliography of titles for readers who wish to learn more. I believe that historical events must be judged within the time frame in which they occurred, and though it is irrefutable that the exchange was traumatic and cruel on a humanitarian level, it did halt the warfare between Greece and Turkey and led to more stable societies. It also, for better or worse, has