On 1 January 1926, the Izmir-based daily newspaper Ahenk (Harmony) published on its front page a call to “the heroic and genuine children of the fatherland”:
Dear readers, heroic, genuine families of the fatherland . . . What kind of cruelties have you been exposed to, what have you seen, what have you suffered, what have you done during the time of the Greek occupation? Whether tragic or funny, whether your own experiences or ones you have witnessed—write them down and send them to our newspaper. We will publish them. You will help [us] to uncover a hitherto unknown historical event, to establish an important truth, to strengthen our children's emotions, and thus, you will fulfill a formidable patriotic duty. You may write not only about your suffering at the hands of the Greeks [yunanlılardan], but also about that inflicted by other defeated nations, such as Armenians [ermenilerden] or Ottoman Greeks [rumlardan].Footnote 1 (Emphasis mine)
This call, frequently reprinted on Ahenk’s front page alongside readers’ memories throughout the early months of 1926, solicited recollections of the Greek occupation of Izmir, which lasted from 15 May 1919 to 9 September 1922, when the Turkish nationalist army retook the city. Ahenk was in good position to elicit responses. It was widely read among the Turkish-reading public in Izmir, and well established. Started in 1895 as a biweekly periodical, by 1926 Ahenk was Izmir's second-oldest Turkish newspaper, and the only not to have been closed down by the authorities during the Hamidian, Young Turk, and Greek occupation periods.Footnote 2 The periodical's title, meaning “harmony,” is telling: this was a popular daily whose editors were eager to avoid conflict with the authorities.Footnote 3 In the early republican period, Ahenk was owned by Ali Nazmi, Izmir's mayor from 1908 to 1910, and “Ahenkçi” Mehmet Şevki was its main writer.Footnote 4 Similar to many other periodicals, in 1929 Ahenk was dealt a fatal blow by the introduction of the Latin alphabet. One year later it went out of print.Footnote 5
In 1926, however, the paper was still alive and well in Izmir, a city that had only recently become predominantly Muslim. Until 1922, Izmir had been a vibrant, multiethnic, and multireligious port city with a majority non-Muslim population. Beginning with the Balkan Wars of 1912–13—when the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) settled large numbers of Muslim refugees in the area, and launched a major boycott and terror campaign against coastal Greeks—urban conflicts were increasingly framed along ethno-religious lines.Footnote 6 The landing of Greek troops on 15 May 1919, which started peacefully but quickly led to a massacre centered on Konak Square and its surrounding streets, precipitated interethnic strife.Footnote 7 About sixty Greeks and 300 to 400 Muslims were killed that day, with many more Muslims arrested.Footnote 8 Izmir remained relatively calm during the three subsequent years of Greek occupation, but the surrounding countryside was the scene of a bloody guerrilla war. Both the Greek army and the new nationalist government in Ankara relied on irregulars who routinely terrorized the civilian population.Footnote 9 The Ahenk call was an attempt to collect narratives about such ethnicized violence, but only those in which Muslims were the victims.
The Turkish nationalist army's recapture of Izmir on 9 September 1922 precipitated widespread violence against rum, or Ottoman Greeks (as opposed to yunan, or mainland Greeks), and Armenians. Four days after the takeover, multiple acts of arson caused the fire known today as the Great Fire, or the Izmir Fire. The blaze destroyed most of the city's downtown area, killing tens of thousands—most of them non-Muslims—in the process. The exact circumstances surrounding the fire, particularly the question of who committed the arson, remains disputed to this day. Many eyewitness accounts suggest that the Turkish military authorities, which controlled the city, had a hand in it and did not try to fight the blaze.Footnote 10 In contrast, a popular nationalist narrative in Turkey claims that military authorities could not possibly have started the fire, and that accusations that they did constitute the “last atrocity of the war.”Footnote 11 Interestingly, Turkish newspapers (including the Ahenk call and the memories published subsequently) largely ignored the fire. Several Turkish memoirs written decades after the event blamed it on Turkish army commander Nurettin Paşa.Footnote 12
Turkish authorities took surviving, able-bodied Greek men as prisoners of war, while expelling women, children, and the elderly to Greece. Greek refugees who had been Ottoman citizens were later included in the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed at Lausanne in January 1923. After the expulsion of its Greek and Armenian populations, the city once again became a major destination point for migrants, this time mainly Muslims from western Anatolia, Greece, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Although Izmir now had a Muslim-majority population, it remained heterogeneous in terms of language, ethnicity, and geographic origin.
In addition to Jews and some Greeks with foreign passports, Izmir was now home to many Muslims who had not been living in the city at the start of the Greek occupation. This heterogeneity formed the context of the Ahenk call, which specifically encouraged readers to preserve and share emotional memories of anti-Muslim violence. I argue that Ahenk’s effort, with its emphasis on emotions and the persecution of Muslims, helped to create and strengthen emotional bonds among the city's old and new Muslim inhabitants, thus contributing to national consolidation.
SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY
The Ahenk series that is the focus of this article took the headline “Aldığımız Cevaplar” (Responses We Received). Beginning with the 13 January 1926 issue, readers’ responses appeared three to four times per week. The stories vary in length from as short as one column to as long as five installments with three columns each. After Ahenk printed the fifth installment of one reader's lengthy account along with the usual call for submissions on 12 April 1926, the series broke off abruptly. Subsequent issues did not offer an explanation for the discontinuation, though it was likely related to censorship.
The responses cover the entire range of possible topics outlined in the call. Their authors usually signed with their name, profession, and place of residence or origin. Almost all of them were educated, lower middle-class Muslim males who, as high-school students, teachers, or low-level bureaucrats, were closely connected to the Ottoman state when the occupation started.Footnote 13 The authors usually used the first person, with some relaying the stories of relatives in first-person narrative. Only one story, among the longest and most interesting in the series, was signed with a female name. The relative banality of many of these stories, as well as the varying levels of sophistication of writing style and language, leads me to believe that they are authentic, though undoubtedly they were edited by newspaper staff.
In terms of theme, about one-fifth of the stories recount (in the impersonal, third-person voice) outright atrocities committed by Greek soldiers, rum, or occasionally Armenian or Circassian irregulars (çete) mostly in towns far from Izmir, such as Mersin or Ayvalık.Footnote 14 They resemble official accounts of atrocities against Muslims, which were a fairly common genre of wartime propaganda during the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the Greco-Turkish War.Footnote 15 These stories will not be discussed here due to their lack of both first-person narrative and autobiographical content.
The Ahenk stories that will be discussed here resemble self-narratives that were published in the local paper Anadolu (Anatolia) in 1925, which also focused on events shortly prior to and during the occupation of Izmir.Footnote 16 Anadolu first published a Turkish translation of a Greek memoir, and shortly later the recollections of its owner and editor, Haydar Rüştü, in serialized form. Ahenk probably made its call as a reaction to these earlier texts, seeking to make its own attempt to provide the perspective of ordinary people. (The Ahenk series, in turn, may have inspired a subsequent publication of Haydar Rüştü’s memoir in 1927 about the first months of the occupation.) The majority of the Ahenk texts recount the Greek landing in Izmir on 15 May 1919. While they ignore the counterpart to this event—the recapture of Izmir by Turkish troops on 9 September 1922 and the subsequent blaze that destroyed most of the city—some deal with the Greek army's retreat and the fleeing of the non-Muslim civilian population. The rest of the accounts focus on encounters during the occupation period with local non-Muslims and Greek soldiers, who are depicted as cowards or plain criminals. A few mention subsequent anti-Christian violence, though only in passing.
To interpret this set of texts, I draw on the growing literature on the history of emotions. Conceptualizing emotions as a set of social and cultural practices, this literature has suggested that the events, people, and things seen to carry emotional meaning, as well as the forms and narratives in which emotions are expressed, are historically contingent.Footnote 17 Sara Ahmed observes that certain narratives (especially public ones) invite readers to “work on” their own emotions, by, for example, cultivating hatred of another group or vulnerability in the face of a perceived threat.Footnote 18 Through linguistic patterns and metaphors, these narratives produce certain feelings in their readers that allow them to identify as part of a group and to develop group-specific forms of subjectivity.Footnote 19 Thus, as Lauren Langman has shown, collectively shared emotions are critical to the formation and consolidation of nation-states.Footnote 20 For the case of Turkey, Fatma Müge Göçek has argued that early republican officials manipulated two emotions—fear and anxiety—in order to sustain the young nation-state and legitimate their rule.Footnote 21 How exactly such manipulation worked remains to be studied.
In her work on oral history projects, Nükhet Sirman has observed that emotional content is often crucial for establishing bonds between the narrators of memories and their listeners.Footnote 22 This point has direct relevance to the case of the Ahenk series, which was directed to a reading public that included newcomers to Izmir with no memories of the Greek occupation. The personal stories published in Ahenk and the feelings described in them probably facilitated the emotional inclusion of these readers in the emerging nation. For readers with direct memories of the occupation, the common references to standardized time may have triggered recollections of where they had been and what they had done at particular moments. Thus, the stories that narrate the events of 15 May 1919 are very specific about the time of day when these events occured. References to commonly known spaces (public squares, tramway lines) appear across all of the stories as well. As Benedict Anderson has shown, the construction of nations as imagined communities with a shared sense of simultaneity depends on standardized time and commonly recognized spaces. Newspapers have a crucial role in instilling the time-space of the nation among readers, some of whom may never have visited places of national importance.Footnote 23 The Ahenk memories were probably published for this exact purpose, though they dealt with past events rather than the present.
The importance of emotions to the national politics of (public) memory has only recently begun to attract scholarly attention. In this article, I draw on Adrian Parr's work on memorial culture and desire.Footnote 24 Parr uses Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's concept of desire as a positive, productive force whose “investment” in the social field is the very activity that creates social reality.Footnote 25 As used here, investment refers to any form of human activity—including the expression of emotions—that can be interpreted as a form of communication between the inarticulate inner force within each person (desire) and the surrounding world. The forms that this investment takes are powerfully shaped by one's social context, but generally they are either paranoic (fascistic) or schizoid (open). Applying this distinction to memorial culture, Parr argues that the latter in general and memorial sites in particular can be distinguished by the investments of desire they allow people to make. While some limit possible forms of memory and emotional expression, others enable them. Thus, with regard to the Ahenk series, we might ask whether and how its context structured the emotions that people could narrate (or invest) in their stories. Emotional memories are specific investments of desire in the sense that the memory is bound to certain feelings while occluding other feelings entirely. These memories or investments arguably shaped not only perceptions of the past, but also the present world—the city of Izmir in 1926. That world was part of the young Republic of Turkey, and Turkish nationalism, which was violently anti-Christian, had hegemonic status within it. The stories’ depiction of feelings towards Ottoman Christians and Jews during the occupation should therefore be read as a form of active participation in the Turkish nation-building project.Footnote 26
This project and the new political circumstances to which it gave rise must have influenced the memories of our narrators even before they were written down. As Maurice Halbwachs has pointed out, memories tend to be influenced by the context in which they are remembered and by intervening events since the remembered event occurred. The events and emotions that the narrators described were molded by the 1922 Turkish victory and public remembrance before 1926.Footnote 27 They were also likely influenced by the similarity between the events of 15 May 1919 and those of 9–18 September 1922, when in the wake of the Turkish victory non-Muslims were massacred in the very places where Muslims had been killed in 1919, though in much greater numbers.Footnote 28 It is even possible that the memories of these two events and the emotions attached to them were collapsed into each other.
This sequence of mass violence and the similarities between 1919 and 1922 raise questions about the political implications of memories of Muslim victimhood (which often appear in the stories) by 1926.Footnote 29 Göçek has observed that Turkish postwar memoirs and autobiographies tend to highlight Muslim victimhood, while ignoring violence inflicted by Muslims on Greeks and Armenians. She suggests that this pattern helped authors to legitimize anti-Christian violence.Footnote 30 The same mechanism may have been at work in the Ahenk memories. The narrators who connected their memories to the greater political cause described not only victimhood, fear, humiliation, and helplessness, but frequently how these feelings triggered a “desire for revenge.” This connection is worthy of closer examination.
STATE OF THE ART: PUBLIC MEMORY IN EARLY REPUBLICAN TURKEY
In his famous six-day speech in 1927, known simply as “The Speech” (Nutuk) in Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) dated the beginning of the nationalist struggle not to 15 May 1919, the day of the Greek landing in Izmir, but to his own landing in Samsun four days later. His narrative of the War of Independence focused geographically on inner Anatolia and depicted himself as the key figure in the struggle. Other areas of Anatolia (especially the coastal regions, where Izmir lies) and the experiences of their inhabitants were marginalized. Mustafa Kemal's narrative strongly informs official historiography in Turkey to this day.Footnote 31 Many memoirs written by his contemporaries well after his speech can be read as attempts to counter the hegemonic status of his account.Footnote 32
Mustafa Kemal delivered the Nutuk in October 1927. Slightly more than one year later, he launched his alphabet reform, replacing the Arabic script with a modified Latin one. Many educated people suddenly became illiterate, and subsequent generations were cut off from reading Ottoman Turkish texts. Scholars have pointed to the alphabet reform in asserting that the young Republic of Turkey was “based on forgetting” and that the early republican regime practiced a form of “organized amnesia” in order to “erase the Ottoman legacy.”Footnote 33 Yet this claim glosses over the five years of republican history prior to the alphabet reform, which are rarely studied. Newspapers are a neglected, and therefore promising, source for the period. Provincial newspapers, the only comprehensive study of which deals with the post-1945 period, are especially promising.Footnote 34 The few scholars who have actually looked for living memories of the Ottoman past found an abundance of them in oral traditions within mostly illiterate communities.Footnote 35 These scholars have shown that memories are often highly selective and tend to ignore interethnic violence.Footnote 36
PUBLIC MEMORY OF THE OCCUPATION DAY IN IZMIR, 1924–26
The anniversary of the Greek landing on 15 May 1919 was publicly commemorated in Izmir in both 1924 and 1925 (no public commemoration of 15 May seems to have taken place in 1926), and newspaper reports and editorials covering these commemorations offer insights into the forms of public remembrance that may have shaped the Ahenk memories.Footnote 37
On 15 May 1924, Seda-yı Hakk (The Voice of Truth), a periodical that would be closed down in 1925,Footnote 38 published on its front page a photograph of the Great Fire, describing it as “one of the results of the great catastrophe [15 May 1919].” That same page also carried a note from the Izmir municipality announcing a half-hour commemoration of the “martyrs” (şehitlerimiz) killed on the occupation day,Footnote 39 and an editorial stating that 15 May was “as much the Turk's most catastrophic and unhappy day” as it was “the one that laid the basis for happiness and independence.” It was therefore “the most happy of all days”:
Greek troops landed on the morning of 15 May at the Kordon [meaning “seaside boulevard,” but here the name of the boulevard as well] among the stormy cheering of the destitute and ungrateful who had assembled there. The cheers rising from the Kordon were met with sobbing of the elderly, the mothers and fathers in the Turkish quarters, and the weeping of the innocent. The skies later joined in on their rain of tears . . . while the Turks were slaughtered with bayonets in front of their children's eyes, [and] at their family's hearths they were expected to join in the shouts of “Zito Venizelos” [“long live Venizelos,” the Greek prime minister]. Izmir's streets were turned crimson with blood. Oh Turkish youth! Don't forget 15 May!Footnote 40
Whereas Seda-yi Hakk’s editorial stressed Muslim suffering and despair through the use of metaphorical and hyperbolic language, Ahenk’s editorial from that day focused on the emotions of the local Christian population so as to blame them for the subsequent massacre. The piece called on its readers to “refresh” their “feelings of revenge” and to “remember the martyrs who gave their lives in the streets of Izmir.” After describing the Greek landing and the joy and ecstasy of the (non-Muslim) crowd, the author remarked:
In this [ecstatic] state of mind they walked to the area around the hükümet [provincial government building] . . . It was probably ten o'clock. They were shouting and screaming. It was during this shouting that the bayonets on top of the guns, the bullets inside of them, and the knives in the hands of whores and bastards started to be turned against the Turks. A couple hours later, the streets, the park, were full of dead bodies.Footnote 41
Unlike later accounts emphasizing the importance of a “first bullet” (today ascribed to a journalist known as Hasan Tahsin) in triggering the violence of 15 May, this piece blamed the non-Muslim population's public expressions of joy and ecstasy.Footnote 42 The text continued:
Let us not forget that today is the anniversary of 15 May, the events of which are known to all of us. Today we have a duty, namely to honor and revere those who were killed. . . . and later, to curse the bandits and murderers. And even later, to refresh the desire for revenge [intikam hislerini tazelemektir]. [It is also our duty] to know the value of loving each other, and of uniting through love [sevişmenin ve sevişerek birleşmenin kiymetini bilmektir].Footnote 43 (emphasis mine)
The text outlines several emotional duties: honor the dead, curse the “bandits and murderers,” refresh the desire for revenge, and “know the value of loving each other and of uniting through love.” The last duty is especially noteworthy, for the Turkish word sevişme (loving each other, or love making) is used to liken the relationship between all Turks, most of whom surely did not know each other personally, to one between lovers.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Ahenk calls were published in the midst of severe economic and political instability. The expulsion of the non-Muslim population from Izmir and western Anatolia in September and October 1922 and the plunder of their possessions brought a severe economic crisis rather than prosperity. Strikes were a common occurrence.Footnote 44 Exacerbating the situation, in early 1925, after the Turkish army crushed the Kurdish-Islamic Şeyh Said uprising in Eastern Anatolia, the National Assembly of Turkey issued the “Law for the Maintenance of Order” that closed down the short-lived oppositional Progressive Republican Party and many newspapers, including the Izmir-based Seda-yı Hakk. Periodicals that continued to publish were subject to heavy censorship. In November of that year, the new Hat Law (şapka kanunu), which made European hats mandatory headgear for men, was met with strong resistance in the provinces. The Ankara government tried Kurdish insurgents as well as men who openly refused to wear the hat in so-called Independence Tribunals (istiklal mahkemeleri), which were notorious for arbitrary judgments and issuing the death penalty. By early 1926 these court cases were in full swing, and Ahenk reported on them alongside the responses to its call. The effect of these trials is described in an American consular report from May 1926, which observed that local people in Izmir, while very critical of the central government, were “too deathly afraid” of the Independence Tribunals to “show any outward signs of violent opposition.”Footnote 45 Yet exactly such a sign of violent opposition took place in June 1926 when a plot to kill Mustafa Kemal in Izmir was uncovered. He used the discovery of the plot (whose masterminds were not from Izmir) as a pretext to have the plotters as well as all major opposition members tried by yet another Independence Tribunal.Footnote 46 This tribunal helped to establish Mustafa Kemal as the unchallenged leader of party and state.Footnote 47
Ahenk published its call about a year after the 1925 Law for the Maintenance of Order and about six months before the Izmir plot was discovered. Its solicitation of readers’ memories was likely a reaction to the growing tide of discontent among the Muslim population, and an attempt to foster unity through shared memories of the occupation and hatred of non-Muslim Ottomans. In February 1926, Ahenk’s chief writer Mehmet Şevki nostalgically recalled how the Muslims of Anatolia had fought “as one conscience” (yekpare bir vicdan halinde) against the Greek occupation, and warned readers of the grave consequences of losing that unity (though it had already been lost). Şevki also warned not to let “microbes” enter the “moral and material wealth of the nation.”Footnote 48 The “microbes” to whom he referred were the Armenians and Greeks who had been forced out of the country in 1922 and whose possible return was discussed anxiously in the press.Footnote 49 The metaphor also might have applied to Muslims who had dared to rise up against the republican regime.
THE MEMORIES
One of the first recollections published in the Ahenk series was by a young man who signed as “H. Celal from Kokaryalı.” This young man relates the story of his aunt, but not before explaining his own emotional involvement in the national cause:
Thank God, I was studying in Istanbul on that evil day when the occupation left [its] bloody marks [in Izmir]. . . . I will never forget, it was a cloudy, sad morning. I cannot find words to express my despair and grief at that moment. From that day onwards, I would see the emerald-green shoulders, the lovely streams, and the sea of my orphaned homeland in my dreams: covered in black fog, consumed by wild flames, burning. [I would inwardly cry out] “Oh my dear homeland that inspires such sweet, poetic feelings in me, today I am in agony in your poisonous embrace. Watching your tears, I miss you dearly!” . . . Always the homeland, always! Constantly thinking of it, I would cry. . . . When I hear of the homeland I can feel something warm stirring in my soul.Footnote 50
The author expresses his love for the homeland through the largely Persian vocabulary of Ottoman romantic poetry. In line with this genre, he presents suffering associated with longing for a distant beloved as a bittersweet experience.Footnote 51 In his case, however, the beloved is the homeland rather than a person. Such patriotic expressions of love—even eroticization—of the homeland (vatan) were common in 19th-century Persia, where the vatan was increasingly conceptualized as the entire country of Iran (rather than a place of origin) and represented as female.Footnote 52 The absence of grammatical gender in Turkish makes it impossible to ascertain the gender of the beloved vatan in the young man's text. His devastation at hearing news of the occupation is caused by the inwardly feeling of patriotic love, and finds expression in outwardly signs (such as crying). Not having experienced the occupation first hand, the author was not exposed to physical violence. He describes Izmir's occupation as an act of violence against the metaphorical body of the beloved homeland.
Most of the other stories in the Ahenk series were explicitly set in Izmir, and their (male) protagonists did experience physical violence and arrest. One man, whose name is never stated, explains that his father was “in the vicinity of the hükümet [the provincial government building at Konak Square] when he heard the first gunshots and went inside.” Greek soldiers arrested him there. By specifying the location of his father's arrest in the hükümet, the author references a pillar of public memory of that day, namely, the arrest of all civil officials who were working in that building. The story continues in the father's voice:
They took our fezzes from our heads and tore them apart. And they said: “let's kill them here.” Later they said, “no, let's do it outside.” When we went outside, the rain started. And the bodies of our citizens and coreligionists covered the ground. It was at that moment that the whole world became a dungeon to me [işte o zaman bütün dünya bana zindan oldu]. They walked us slowly along the second kordon, so we could see our martyrs [on the way]. There, they searched us and stole our money. . . . When I moved my arm a tiny bit, I saw, I saw [gördüm, gördüm] in the very same second that the butt of a rifle was moving towards my back. Another [soldier] dealt a heavy blow to my forehead with a cartridge belt. Yet another one put his bayonet on my chest and swore at me, saying “I will kill you right now.” But I was no longer myself [benlikten çıkmıştım]. I was physically wounded and badly shaken [aldığım yaralarla fena halde sarsıldım].Footnote 53
The story contains both symbolic and physical violence. On the symbolic level, the father and others in the hükümet were robbed of their fezzes, which was considered a humiliating act. When the father steps out of the building, presumably expecting to be killed, and sees the bodies of “citizens and coreligionists,” the world “becomes a dungeon” to him—he loses all hope. The threat of death, already communicated verbally, is heightened by the sight of the dead bodies. In a state of despair, the man experiences yet another act of humiliation when he is searched—presumably strip-searched—for money. Physical violence enters the picture toward the end of the story when the father is hit with a rifle butt to the back and with a cartridge belt to the forehead, and a bayonet is put to his chest. The rich detail and the inclusion of stuttered narration (“I saw, I saw”) produce a slow-motion effect and make it clear that the violence (which was aimed at the man's vital functions) was not symbolic. In order to describe his emotional reaction to that violence, the narrator draws on a metaphor: “I was no longer myself,” possibly meaning that he was in a state of shock.
A man who signed as “Kemal, owner of the Sakarya bookshop,” recalled that he had been in Kemeraltı (a neighborhood in the Turkish quarter) on the day of the occupation. Greek troops arrested him and locked him in an improvised jail, where many others were already being kept. They were robbed of their valuables, and, if of good quality, their clothes as well—a highly humiliating act. After several hours, the narrator was sent home with a group of other prisoners:
But we don't have fezzes. Our heads are uncovered. Fortunately, I passed the shop of the kalpak [felt cap] maker Ali Haydar in Kemeraltı. They had looted the shop. I found a kalpak and put it on my head. I went home. But I saw with my own eyes that the Jews were looting Turkish shops together with the Greeks.Footnote 54 (Emphasis mine)
The narrator only indirectly admits to having suffered the humiliation of being robbed of his headgear, an act that had important political and symbolic implications. The fez was first introduced in the mid-19th century as part of an effort to produce a shared Ottoman identity. By the early 20th century it was often perceived as a marker of Muslim identity, especially in cities such as Izmir where many non-Muslims wore the European hat.Footnote 55 As most fezzes were imported from Austria, the anti-Austrian boycott movement of 1908 precipitated a turn to alternative headgear manufactured in the Ottoman Empire. Among these was the felt kalpak that after 1919 was adopted by members of the nationalist movement.Footnote 56 Significantly, the narrator reports to have “found” the kalpak in the shop, and in the same breath blames Jews and Greeks for looting, an act he clearly committed himself. He seems to have considered his own looting of the kalpak shop perfectly legitimate, possibly because it helped him to regain his dignity. By identifying his new headgear as a kalpak, the narrator may also have been suggesting he was transitioning from an Ottoman to a Turkish identity. (He does not mention whether other kinds of headgear were available in the shop, but a kalpak maker would not have sold fezzes.) The fez and the kalpak had been outlawed in November 1925, and at the time this recollection was published, men insisting on wearing these more traditional forms of headgear (rather than the European brimmed hat) were subject to violence and persecution.Footnote 57 Many readers may have sympathized with the hero's experience precisely because similar acts of public humiliation were still taking place, though at the hands of the Turkish state. It is not coincidental (though also not necessarily intentional) that the sentence “we don't have fezzes, our heads are uncovered” is the only one rendered in the present tense. This detail may have expressed the author's feeling of humiliation at having to uncover his head and replace his fez (or kalpak) with the European hat.
The story of “Mustafa Asım from Akseki” is somewhat similar, though in his case it was local civilians who stole the fez. This narrator reports that he was fifteen years old on the first day of the occupation. Upon hearing news of the lootings in the bazaar, he foolishly (çocukluk esiri) decided to head there. On his way, a group of Jews tore his fez apart. When he arrived at the bazaar bareheaded (and therefore not immediately recognizable as a Muslim), he found Greeks and Jews busily looting the shops. When a Jewish man (or boy) recognized him, he betrayed him to a Greek officer who tried to force him to shout “Zito Venizelos!” Proud of his Turkishness, the boy refused. For this offense the officer severely beat him with a whip only to finally let him go. On leaving the bazaar, he saw the bodies of other Muslims in the street, making him “even more afraid” (daha ziyade korkmaya başladım).Footnote 58 He eventually found an opportunity to take revenge:
After the happy restitution [istirdad-ı mesud], I saw our Jewish citizen who had turned me in to the Greeks. As a result of my pride in my Turkishness, I confronted him. Of course he showed remorse, and treated me with great respect. When I remember those days, I pray with all my heart for our Gazi Pasha [Mustafa Kemal] and our glorious army, which rescued us from this captivity and mistreatment.Footnote 59
The story (which, with its lack of detail, implausible order of events, and succession of standard elements, reads like a teenager's fantasy, complete with the unlikely accessory of a whip) is saturated with anti-Semitism, which was on the rise in Izmir beginning in 1922.Footnote 60 The author was likely striking a sarcastic tone when he spoke of “our Jewish citizen,” implying that Jews could not be citizens of Turkey unless they relinquished their Jewish identity. Following the expulsion of the Ottoman Greeks and Armenians, Jews were the only relevant religious minority to remain, explaining why they were increasingly targeted.
The terror experienced by Mustafa Asım on encountering dead bodies in the street runs through many other stories about 15 May. One such story belongs to Sabriye Hanım, who identified herself as “the wife of the chief clerk at the population registry” (nüfus başkatibinin refikası). Unlike the male respondents, she explained why she had been out in the streets in the first place: her husband and brother had failed to come home the previous night, so in the morning she reluctantly left her children in the care of a servant in order to look for them. She described the scene on Konak Square as follows:
In the square, there was nobody. I walked a little closer to the park. It was full of human bodies. There was one body that was torn apart at the waist, the legs lying on one side, the upper body on the other. I don't know how to describe my reaction to that situation [o hal karşısında ne olduğumu bilemiyorum]. Everything was full of blood, and nobody was there besides me and the dead. A powerful tremor shook my body. My teeth were chattering violently. I could not turn my gaze away from the dead bodies. . . . Are my husband and brother among them [zevcem ve biraderim burada midir]. . . . In that moment I was not myself [o dakikada kendimde değildim]. It would be wrong to call it fear—it was not—but I was there as a woman. Any man, however brave he may be, would have been terrified [bir dehşet hissederdi] in the face of this sight.Footnote 61
Though a “powerful tremor” shook her body and her teeth chattered when she saw the dead bodies in the square, Sabriye Hanım insisted that she had not been afraid. Yet by adding that “any man would have been terrified in the face of this sight,” she was indirectly admitting that she had been terror-stricken. Only then does she describe her bravery in the situation.
Sabriye Hanım goes on to relate how she walked onward toward the government building (hükümet). On her arrival, she was surprised to find that the Greek soldiers stationed there completely ignored her “as if a curtain had fallen over their eyes.” Just then, a Greek officer who had not been with the others began to walk toward her, causing her to fear for the worst:
So this is the one who will take my life. I am trembling like a leaf. But I want to keep my composure in front of him. He came up to me: “Lady, what are you looking for here?” And I answer, in cold blood: “I am looking for my husband and my brother.” [He answered:] “What bravery of you to look for them now; don't you know that your life is in danger here?”
The officer, who turns out to be a Greek from Macedonia (a detail that is used to explain his flawless Turkish), proceeds to offer an explanation for the dead bodies lying around them:
If your husband and brother are good people, you can be sure that they are fine. But if they are evil, if they have enemies, there is no hope for them. Any enemy would take advantage of such an opportunity. Look, all these [dead people] are Turks. It was not only Greek soldiers who killed them, but also local people.
The officer suggests that the Muslims in the square were killed not because of their ethno-religious identity, but because they had enemies who seized an opportunity created by general chaos. Sabriye Hanım does not comment on this explanation of the killings. Her search continues into the second day of the occupation. Moving freely about a city where Muslim men can only be found in jail, she returns to Konak Square to find it crowded with people (iğne atılsa yere düşmez) this time. After witnessing soldiers mutilating the dead bodies of Turks on the seaside boulevard kordon, she walks on in despair:
All ships and ferries were wrapped in blue ribbons. If they had killed me at that moment, I wouldn't have bled. My pain was numb. It was as if they had wrapped their icy hearts [sanki buz kalpleri sarmışlar]. Great Lord, what a catastrophe, what terrible moments. We are passing through them cringing with humiliation, crying and lamenting [ezile büzüle ağlaya sızlaya]. They are shouting ferociously [kudurmuşcasına] “Zito,” and I silently curse them in my heart: dear God, please let me see their voices silenced and their heads ripped off. Please don't let me die. If I die [now], I will die unsatisfied [gözüm açık gidecektir]. I cannot silence this desire for revenge in my heart [bu intikam hissini kalbimde yenemem]. These cries for “revenge, revenge” were rising up [intikam, intikam sedaları yükseliyordu]. Thank God, I have taken my revenge through the fearless army of our great Gazi [intikamımı aldım]! I have seen happy days.Footnote 62
The quick changes of tense in the passage are instructive. The narrator describes her desire for revenge first in the present tense, from within the situation, then in the past continuous (“cries were rising up”), and finally in the past perfect (“I have taken my revenge”). In a mere three sentences she traces her progression from an unfulfilled desire (in 1919) to a fulfilled one (in 1922).
Expressions of gratitude and joy over the eventual Turkish victory appear often in the stories. Even more common, however, are expressions of a desire for revenge. In recounting the fate of his neighbor (Fezci Mansur Bey) who had been tortured in prison, a certain Ali Necati ends his account with the words: “My soul burns when I think of those days. My heart screams ‘revenge, revenge!’”Footnote 63 Hüseyin Hilmi from the village of Barbaros (in the vicinity of Çeşme) recounted how a band of irregulars comprised of Circassians and Armenians attacked his village during the period of occupation. Threatening to kill the males and burn the place down, they extracted money and valuables from the population. Meanwhile, local Greeks took advantage of the chaotic moment by looting Turkish houses. The account ends with a pledge:
These people are local Greeks [bunlar rumlardır]. They can never be forgotten [bunlar unutulamaz]. Once the time of revenge arrives, I shall take part in it with all my might. I shall take that revenge. And if I don't get to do it, I shall bring up my children with this [desire for] revenge!Footnote 64
Ali Necati's hunger for revenge was echoed in a memory signed by a certain Ali Muharrem. This narrator explained that on 15 May 1919, the day of the Greek landing, he had still been a (military) high school student. He and his friend were taken by surprise when they first heard the shooting in the streets. Scrambling for refuge in a nearby building, the narrator lost track of his friend. He later found him in the hospital where he was lying dead in his own blood: “I cried. But there was nothing I could do. He had died as a martyr [şehit olmuştu].” The narrator concluded his story with a pledge: “Down with the enemies! I am always ready for revenge.”Footnote 65
Though they often invoke the desire for revenge, the authors or protagonists of these stories rarely spell out whether and how this revenge should be carried out. In fact, they give the impression that no revenge was ever taken, thus glossing over the widespread anti-Christian violence that occurred after the events described. Very few stories depict the despair and mass flight of the Christian population in the autumn of 1922.
The story that follows is one of these few exceptions. It was told by the same patriotic young man (H. Celal from Kokaryalı) who, when we encountered him earlier, expressed his near-romantic love for the homeland. Continuing his narrative, he conveyed his aunt's account of her rich Christian neighbor's end:
My aunt would tell her memories of the occupation whenever she found time for it, and I would eagerly listen, with my heart beating so quickly it would almost jump out of my chest, full of feelings of revenge. Below, I am passing on the funniest among her stories [From here on, the story is told from the aunt's perspective] . . . On Sundays, on her way to church, [the neighbor] would dress like a queen, walk proudly, glancing despisingly [at me]. . . . But this pride did not last long. Our heroic little Mehmets [soldiers] entered Izmir, and I wanted to meet her and say a couple of scathing words to her because she had made me very miserable in the past. But she was not home. I went to the garden to do something there. And what do I see? Our lofty Madam! Barefoot and bareheaded [baş kabak, yalın ayak], she has entered our goose coop and is shaking like an aspen leaf [zangır zangır titriyor]. She begs me, moving her body about in a rather special, and quite disgraceful, fashion: “Madam, they will slaughter us, have mercy with my children! Ah, Madam, save us!” Oh Lord, I still cannot forget my joy on that day. A Turkish woman would never accept such humiliation. The Turkish woman prefers to die in honor and pride.Footnote 66
Though the account does not tell the remainder of the story, the aunt's comment at the end of the quotation suggests that her neighbor was ultimately killed. The jealous narrator happily indulges in recalling all of the signs of fear, desperation, and humiliation that showed on the woman: the lack of a hat and shoes, her hiding in a goose coop, her shaking like a leaf, and, finally, her begging for mercy. She presents the neighbor's request for help as an act of self-humiliation, suggesting that it would have been more graceful for her to accept her fate (or possibly to kill herself instead). The invoking of “honor and pride” may even indicate that the unfortunate neighbor was later raped. According to the nephew, the signs of fear, desperation, and humiliation that filled the aunt with joy caused him to emotionally connect with “feelings of revenge.”
Whereas this story merely insinuates the rich neighbor's fate of death, the following story describes the sight of an adversary's dead body. The story was told by a boy or young man (Kemal Hakkı writing from Kızılçullu) who had still been a child during the occupation. He recounted how a group of Armenian children had attacked him and his friends in an attempt to steal their kites. One of the Armenian boys cut him with a knife on his face and hands. The narrator goes on to explain that,
Six months later our heroic cavalry entered the city, and I was mad with joy. It turned out that the Armenian who had knifed me was a guerrilla fighter [benim başıma çakı saplayan Ermeni komitaci imiş]. He attacked our soldiers and bit the dust [askerlerimize saldırmış ve gebermiş]. The next day, I saw his body lying on a trash cart and said to myself: God is righteous.Footnote 67
Here it is the end of the story that bestows meaning on earlier events: the Armenian turns out to be not only a violent child, but also a guerilla fighter (komitaci imiş)—at least this is what the narrator deduces (using the postposition imiş, which may also indicate hearsay) from the sight of his adversary's dead body lying on a trash cart. The narrator interprets the Armenian's death as God's just punishment for his earlier attack on him. The account avoids mentioning who killed the boy: “he attacked our soldiers and bit the dust.” This phrasing masks the act of killing, ascribing responsibility not to the perpetrators but to the victim himself: it was he who “attacked” and therefore “bit the dust” (gebermiş). The narrator does not mention that such killings were ubiquitous in September 1922 after the Turkish victory, probably because everybody knew that many Armenians and Greeks had been killed around that time. But their ubiquity is implied when he describes seeing the dead body lying on a trash cart as if this were a banal sight. The young man's story presents the Turkish victory as having caused him to be “mad with joy,” a joy that was coupled with satisfaction when he spotted the Armenian's body.
CONCLUSION
The stories published in Ahenk, which preceded Mustafa Kemal's landmark speech by more than a year, were part of a larger endeavor pursued by Izmir's newspapers between approximately 1924 and 1927 to publicly remember the Greek occupation. A standard local account of that day (including the emotions attached to it) was already in place by 1924, when the Ahenk and Seda-yı Hakk editorials were written. The publication of individual accounts seems to have started in 1925 with the Greek memoir in Anadolu, and continued with Haydar Rüştü’s armistice recollections. The subsequent publication of the Ahenk series shows that popular participation in public remembrance was still possible in early 1926, by which time the Independence Tribunals were in full swing. However, the sudden end of the series in April and the newspaper's lack of reporting on the 15 May 1926 festivities suggest that the central government had intervened. The campaign of public remembrance may have aroused suspicions in Ankara because it encouraged a local (rather than national) culture of memory. Moreover, the stories recalled places where the Great Fire had raged, and some hinted at the anti-Christian massacre of September 1922. These ambiguous references would have been unwelcome to the authorities, and may have been what made the stories so popular. Haydar Rüştü’s memories of the occupation, published in 1927, were arguably less threatening because they were not set in the fire zone of 1922.
The Ahenk stories differed from other accounts in that they were written by relatively insignificant people. In terms of narrative content and the emotions described, they closely resemble the 1924 account published in the editorials: both emphasize the first day of the occupation, public Greek excitement, Greek violence against the Muslim civilian population, and the sight of (Muslim) bodies in public space. In many of the stories the experience of having to hear (or even being forced to shout) the formula “Zito Venizelos!” seems to have been considered deeply upsetting, probably because this refrain marked the acceptance of Greek sovereignty over the city. Most authors made sure to situate their stories within standardized space and time, explaining where they or the narrators had been when the first shots were heard. Landmarks such as Konak Square, the Kordon boulevard, and the hükümet building appear frequently, and may have been used by the authors to integrate their memories into the standard narrative of 15 May.
The texts come surprisingly close to what today we call oral history: like interviewers in oral history projects, Ahenk specifically asked people to remember, and it recorded memories that were shaped by subsequent events and the call itself. Respondents almost universally stuck to first-person narrative, and in most stories author, narrator, and protagonist were presented as identical. The stories depict experiences of violence at the hands of Greek soldiers and local non-Muslim civilians (and their emotional effects) as an initiation into the Turkish nation. This dynamic is clear in the story of the young man who quickly replaced his stolen fez with the nationalist kalpak.
The stories display remarkable differences in terms of the emotional reactions expressed at the sight of dead bodies. Narrators made sure to mention that the sight of dead Muslims terrified them, while they rarely mentioned non-Muslim bodies. This discrepancy suggests that Muslims in early republican Turkey had begun to empathize only with members of their own ethno-religious group. As a case in point, the two narrators who described the suffering of non-Muslims (the jealous neighbor and the kite-flying boy) focused on individuals whom they hated for personal reasons and viewed their demise as a source of happiness. The violent death of their enemies in the course of the general massacre in 1922 bestows meaning on the narrators’ earlier antipathy for them.
Most stories describe both spontaneous feelings caused either by the experience of physical violence or terrifying sights, and more stable, longer-lasting emotions. Especially noteworthy in this respect is the “desire for revenge” described by many narrators, and the question of whether by 1926 this desire had been satisfied. The one female narrator, Sabriye Hanım, described how her feelings of devastation and (possibly) helplessness in the face of Greek violence led her to pray silently for the Greeks’ eventual demise. She later stated that her silent wish was eventually fulfilled. Indirectly acknowledging that violence against the Greeks took place when the Turkish army retook the city, she identified this violence as the source of her happiness at the moment when she wrote down her memories.
By contrast, several male narrators described their desire for revenge as ongoing and unfulfilled. By declaring themselves “ready for revenge,” they projected revenge into the future, which is surprising given that their accounts were published four years after the violence of September 1922 directed against Greeks and Armenians. There are two possible explanations for this omission: first, that the accounts depict the actors’ emotional state prior to September 1922; or second, that the accounts testify to a widespread suppression of memories concerning the anti-Christian massacre that took place in 1922. The latter, darker explanation coincides with the findings of earlier studies on memory in Izmir, which have shown that both the Great Fire and the violence that followed it were actively forgotten.Footnote 68 Unable or unwilling to remember these events, the authors seem to have projected violence against the enemy into the future. Such a projection of revenge was actively encouraged by the 1924 editorials and the Ahenk call of 1926, which depicted the desire for revenge as a patriotic duty.
This desire for revenge can be described as a fascistic investment in the social field. According to Parr, an open (schizoid) investment allows “the affective dimension of memory to generate future-oriented connections.” A fascistic investment, by contrast, is “when the energies and affects of the labor of memory are coded and given a fixed use.”Footnote 69 Almost all of the Ahenk stories fit the second category because emotional memories were “fixed” within the framework of violent anti-Christian nationalism. That said, some seem more fascistic than others. Stories that project the act of revenge into the republican present and future do not provide any other descriptions of feelings or emotions (which is why I have discussed them so briefly). By contrast, people who described their own feelings of fear, humiliation, and despair (and, eventually, joy and excitement) were apparently able to admit that their desire for revenge had been fulfilled. To be sure, these stories were anything but peaceful, and they attest to the strong anti-Christian sentiments of their authors. Yet by acknowledging past violence, the authors may have been able to imagine a more peaceful future. Though far from open investments in the social field, these memories suggest a certain degree of satisfaction and an ability to experience happiness. Stories that project the desire for revenge into the future, on the other hand, give the impression that their narrators were no longer able to feel anything but hatred.
