Greeks in Turkey: Elite Nationalism and Minority Politics in Late Ottoman and Early Republican Istanbul by Dimitris Kamouzis (review)

The title of Dimitris Kamouzis's book, Greeks in Turkey, is as deceptively simple as its central topic. Greeks in Turkey? There are no Greeks to speak of in Turkey. Since the establishment of the Turkish Republic and the mandated Greco-Turkish population exchange, both of which were enshrined in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, there have been Greeks only in Istanbul. As everyone reading this journal knows, the Greek community of Istanbul, along with the institution of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the communities of Imbros and Tenedos, were exempted from that exchange. The predicament of those Greeks "lucky" enough to be able to stay in Istanbul through the years of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1918–1922), the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), the population exchange (1922–1924), and the formative period of the Turkish Republic (1923–1928) was anything but simple. And this is because what was at stake was not just Greeks staying on as individuals, but as some kind of communal, confessional, ethnic, administrative, and therefore political entity. Kamouzis gives us a fine-grained, close-up look at that political-administrative quagmire in which the Greeks of Istanbul found themselves between the end of World War I in 1918 and the 1930 Ankara Agreement between the Republics of Greece and Turkey.

One would need a chart to keep track of all the political authorities, actors, and interests that were exerting pressure on the Greek community of Istanbul during these fraught years. Such a chart would include the full range of Ottoman authorities (the imperial government, the Committee for Union and Progress and its various wings, and the local government of Istanbul, just to name a few), the Turkish national movement and presumptive government between 1919 and 1922, and the Republican Turkish government and its new cast of officials who were formulating foreign and domestic policy and attempting to negotiate an existence for the state itself in the international community. All of these are just on the so-called Turkish side. On the so-called Greek side, a world unto itself, we have the patriarch and Holy Synod, the Mixed Council of lay and clerical administration for the Greek community, and the Kingdom/Republic of Greece—also a world unto itself, one deeply divided between Venizelists/liberals and Royalists. Even the Greek state itself had split over the question of involvement in the First World War. To complicate matters further, the traditional heavy-handed involvement of the British and French in Greek and Ottoman politics throughout the nineteenth century was now being replaced by the League of Nations, an international body charged with arbitrating and resolving not only the conflict between Greece and an emergent Turkey, but the whole process of dismantling the Ottoman Empire into distinct states and mandates, and indeed the management of the whole post-World War I world order. The Greeks of Constantinople, and then of Istanbul, had to contend with the entire gamut of these authorities, all in conflict with each other and often divided by internal conflicts as well.

Kamouzis has delved deep into the Greek and European sources on this topic and period, and he demonstrates an intimate knowledge of a mindboggling array of individuals within the Greek community of Istanbul and among the statesmen of Greece, the dying Ottoman regime, and the emergent Turkish one—not to mention the British and French statesmen who were constantly interceding on all sides, and often in conflicting ways. Kamouzis has plumbed family archives, Patriarchate sources, state archives, and contemporary Greek and sometimes even Turkish press sources. With these sources and his intimate knowledge of the factions, nuances, and intrigues within the community, he has reconstructed the day-by-day events, conflicts, and conversations taking place at the highest echelons of politics and administration...