For Australian born Nicholas Doumanis, an Associate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, interest in Greek and Mediterranean history came as a personal motivation.
His first book and winner of prestigious London Fraenkal Prize, Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean (1997), was a study of everyday Italian-Greek relations during times of peace and crisis, as his all four grandparents grew up and raised families in the Italian-occupied Dodecanese.
Three of his four grandparents were either born in Turkey (Bodrum, or Halicarnassus) or were the children of Anatolian Greeks. A few years ago, this Sydney-based historian discovered his paternal grandfather’s house, with the help of a local Cretan Turk, whose mother tongue was ‘Cretan’.
For Doumanis, the progeny of people who described themselves as ‘refugees’ throughout their lives, it suggested that for many years they were made to feel like outsiders by the host society, with their lives ruined by international politics and the politics of nationalism. Even on the island of Kos, which was only a stone’s throw away from Anatolia.
“I am always interested in identity and the management of difference, and the circumstances in which identity becomes an impediment to social engagement and communal order. Living in Australia, I have always been acutely aware that I am of a minority, but like most of us I feel at ease as I move between identities and cultures on a daily basis. But I often ask myself: In what circumstances might that freedom be curtailed? In what circumstances do we begin to focus on our identities to the exclusion of others? When do people become national?” Doumanis tells Neos Kosmos.
Doumanis’ new book Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia, was recently published by Oxford.
For decades after the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, deported Greek Orthodox Christians retained a love for their homeland, as well as for lost communities which they shared with the local Muslims. Their coexistence, however, was never taken seriously by historians.
Despite the nostalgic memories and language that people would use to describe the ease of coexistence before the troubles, claims like ‘there were no differences between us’ and similar sounded implausible to outsiders and readers of history. And yet, as Doumanis argues in his book Before the Nation, what they were trying to say is that Muslims, Christians and Jews did coexist most of the time in more than acceptable conditions that gelled with their moral and ethical values.
Doumanis’ book is not a history of the Ottoman Greeks, or the Romioi.
It is a history of intercommunal relations of Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians that gives insight into how their worlds of coexistence were destroyed, and the factors that induced this destruction.
“If ordinary Anatolians were left to their own devices,” Doumanis says, “the neighbours would have carried on as before.”
“It was unscrupulous outsiders and political opportunists seeking to play groups off against one another, that could destabilize their cultures of coexistence in the times of stress.”
The interviews historian Nicholas Doumanis used in this book were conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, with some carried out in the 1930s and 1970s, by Kentro Mikrasiatikon Spoudon in Plaka, Athens. 5000 interviews were conducted with refugees in their native tongues, either Pontian Greek or Karamanlidika, the Turkish dialect of the Greek Orthodox Christians of Cappadocia.
In the interviews, Doumanis argues, Greek Orthodox refugees insisted they lived well with the Turks, they participated in festivals, they celebrated each other’s Saint days. The catastrophe in their ethnic coexistence happened due to state political factors and their wish to create homogenous nations, but not due to intercommunal hatred that tends to be exaggerated nowadays.
“Intercommunal hatreds or rather, bigotry, had always existed, but were rarely on a scale to generate conflict, and they did not define relations in Anatolia before 1912. Conflict had to be induced, it was not something that could be ‘unleashed’ because of supposed ‘ancient hatreds’. In the end, the outsiders and politicians got their way, under the cover of war. Civilians did kill other civilians, but there was no pandemic of neighbour-neighbour killings in Anatolia,” Doumanis explains.
Coexistence ended during the course of ten years of violence, between 1912 and 1922. People were killed simply because they happened to be Christian or Muslim. Political violence of this kind has a way of making people hate national enemies, Doumanis says.
“Mere bigotries, which always existed, became the focus of identity. In other words, ethnonationalism was the product of political violence, not the other way around. After 1912, the Ottoman State was no longer prepared to accommodate Christians. The Young Turk regime resolved to expel the Greeks and eliminate the Armenians.”
And yet, Anatolian Christians often wanted to stay in Anatolia even after years of persecution, thinking that one day things might return to normal. However, the interests of such people were never considered by political elites, who believed that Turkey was for the Turks and Greece for the Greeks.
“In other words, the refugees were essentially the victims of high politics.”
Three things lead historians not to show serious regard to refugees’ memories of their intercommunal coexistence, Doumanis tells Neos Kosmos.
“It was the basic distrust of oral sources, especially where they contradict the standard sources.
Another reason is that your standard historian does not know what to make of the memories of ordinary people. The oral testimonies in our case have nothing new to say about the wars, about politics or even economics – they talk about miracles, rituals, folktales and eating habits. There is a disconnect between their interests and those of historians. The final reason is that such sources are deemed to be embarrassing. A conventional Greek historian will regard the refugee testimonies as the words of illiterate common folk who can hardly be taken seriously when they make such implausible claims about the enemy: the Turks are like brothers?” Doumanis explains.
The ethnic violence of Smyrna 1922 would appear to prove that these memories could not be taken seriously. Nicholas Doumanis’ book shows that historians miss the point of these testimonies entirely – there is more in refugees’ memories than just nostalgia.
“I found that the testimonies refer to an authentic depiction of Anatolia, as remembered by the refugees. As such, they are accurate, but must be treated with great care. If read literally, the testimonies suggest Anatolia as a land of milk and honey. What such hyperbole suggests, however, is that Greek Orthodox Christians did appear to thrive in Anatolia. They migrated from Greece in large numbers because conditions were good for tradesmen, merchants and farming. Once you understand such contextual matters, the refugee rhetoric begins to make sense,” Doumanis concludes.
Doumanis’ Melbourne lecture is expected to draw attention to the descendants of refugees, as well as those interested in modern Greek history, and Ottoman and Turkish history.
As part of the 2013 Greek History and Culture Seminars organised by GOCMV, professor Nicholas Doumanis will hold a lecture at Wheeler Centre (176 Little Lonsdale St, Melbourne), on Tuesday, 9 April, at 7:00 pm. For more information, contact GOCMV, on 9662 2722.