Karmylassos and Forced Migrations

Karmylassos (Kayaköy) Fethiye

I was on a very enjoyable tour on western side of our Mediterranean coasts during a local holiday. In context of the theme of this blog one of the places I found thought provoking was Karmylassos (Kayaköy), a Lycian city which dates back to 3 thousand B.C. and today a village 8 km south of Fethiye in southwestern Turkey. Anatolian Greek speaking Christians used to live there until approximately 1923. In that year a  major compulsory population exchange took place based on a agreement  signed by the Turkish and Greek governments,  following Turkish War of Independence which ended the short but savage occupation of Western Anatolia. Turks who came from Greece in exchange for Anatolian Greeks  did not want to live in this village and moved to other places. Thus the city assumed its present ghost-like appearance in due course. It is, now preserved as a museum village and consists of hundreds of rundown but still mostly intact Greek-style houses and churches which cover a small mountainside. 

Population Exchange Museum

The exchange was based upon religious identity, and involved the Greek Orthodox citizens of Turkey and the Muslim citizens of Greece. It involved approximately 2 million people (around 1.5 million Anatolian Greeks and 500,000 Muslims in Greece), who had to leave their homelands. This was not the first time Muslims encountering forced migration. "From the end of the 18th century to 1925, Muslim civilians from territorities that were breaking free from Ottoman rule, were forced to flee from their homes in masses, trying to survive the wars. The mass migrations resulting from the Crimean War (1856), the Caucasian War (1864), the ’93 War (1878), the Cretan Revolts (1896-1897), the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), World War 1 (1914-1918), the Greco-Turkish war (1919-1922), have left deep imprints in the memories of those involved." ^[1]  Detailed information can be found at the web site of the Population Exchange Museum. 

Exchangees

Professor Karpat states that by 1908 the number of emigrants from Crimea, Caucasus, and Balkans had reached some 5 million.^[2] During these migrations many died on the way due to massacre, hunger and disease. For instance only 200.000 survived from over a million who left the lands which joined the Greek Kingdom in 1912-13. The cost of the rise of the nationalism was high for all peoples who shared the same land which great powers wanted to take under their control. Walking up the cobblestone lane of Karmylassos I caressed the walls of empty houses in memory of all those passed away longing for a return to their homelands on both sides and pondered once more on reasons why only Armenian Deportation gets such wide coverage while larger numbers from several ethnicities suffered exactly in the same way in that era. The number of those who died daily on a camp because of hunger or illness was very close to each other in camps for Circassians on Black Sea coast in the second half of 19th century and for deported Armenians near Aleppo in 1915,  180 to 200.  Is reason for the Western world peoples' turning a blind eye to the sufferings of Muslims, ignorance of what happened or are most people a little bit a Joe Keller of All my Sons by Arthur Miller and stand where their interests lie?

<sup>[2] Karpat, Kemal H. Ottoman Population1830-1914: demographic and social characteristics. Madison, 1985 and Osmanlı Nüfusu 1830-914: Demografik ve sosyal özellikleri. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2003.

NB. The tragedy of population exchange is best narrated by Dido Sotiriou in Farewell Anatolia. Louis de Berniere's Birds Without Wings is another good read depicting the waning years of the Ottoman Empire in a southwestern Anatolian village.</sup>

Armenian Holocaust:My Story blog by Selma Aslan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Gayriticari-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.