User:Csymeonides/Notes

Greco-Turkish relations/conflicts
From Cyprus Conflict, actually from Cyprus: A Place of Arms (London: Praeger, 1966) Chapter 6:


 * The Treaty of Bucharest, signed on August 10, 1913, confirmed Greek possession of southern Macedonia and part of the coast of Thrace, including the tobacco port of Kavalla. Greece also kept Crete. She remained in occupation of most of Epirus and all the Aegean Islands, except Tenedos and Imbros which guard the approaches to the Dardanelles and the Dodecanese. [...]
 * Greece had almost doubled her territory and population within one year. [...] Greece's new frontiers in the north were greatly extended, and her two million increase of population included 600,000 Moslems with some Slavs and other minorities. [...] in Turkey [...] there were still over two million Christians, the majority of whom were Greek. [...]
 * Turkish resentment was strongest at Greece's formal annexation of Crete and occupation of the Aegean Islands, especially Chios and Mitylene. These two large islands lie only a few miles off the coast of western Anatolia and cover the approaches to the port of Smyrna. The Turks feared they might be used as a base to attack Asia Minor, as indeed happened six years later. Turkey's refusal to accept the loss of her Aegean Islands was, in fact, the main cause of the breakdown of the London Conference and the resumption of the first Balkan war. After the Treaty of Bucharest, when the future of the islands was being considered by the powers, Turkey began a campaign to force Greece to withdraw from Chios and Mitylene by a combination of economic and naval pressure and by the persecution of the Greek minority in Asia Minor. (These tactics were to be repeated fifty years later when Turkey began to take reprisals against the Greeks in Istanbul and the islands in order to put pressure on Greece over the Cyprus question.) A boycott of the Greeks in Turkey began in November 1913, and, at the same time, some 30,000 Greeks were deported or driven from their homes on the coasts of Thrace and Anatolia. [Venizelos claimed at the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1923 that a total of 430,000 Greeks had been expelled from these areas and had taken refuge in Greece in the months just before and after Turkey's entry into the first world.] The Turkish authorities claimed that their jobs and homes were needed for the Moslem refugees who were pouring in from Macedonia.