by Benny Morris
guerrilla operations and atrocities.
With the expansion of the Greek zone in June– July 1919 came a number of
massacres. But as the occupation consolidated and extended eastward over the
next few months, the Greek army by and large maintained discipline among
troops and irregulars. The Turks complained of heavy- handed arms searches,
beatings, robbery, and crop damage, but not of massacres or mass executions.658
Much of the pillaging appears to have been done by Greek brigands. The Ster-
giadis administration was so thorough in identifying Greek offenders, and so
harsh in punishing them, that local Greeks complained that “the authorities are
now more severe towards them than towards the Turks.” 659 In April 1920, for
example, three Greek brigand leaders were publicly executed.660 But Toynbee
maintained that many brigand bands in the Greek zone— some comprising only
Greeks, others mixed Turks and Circassians— were or ga nized by the Greek
military.661
Over the next two years, Turks abandoned dozens of villages as the Greeks
advanced westward past them, toward Ankara. Usually the Turks were ordered
out by Nationalists, but sometimes the Greek army expelled them or other-
wise pressed them to leave. West of the front line, Turks occasionally attacked
Greek columns or trains, triggering reprisals, including mass arrests and the
destruction of villages. Occasionally Turkish women were raped.662 In Gemlik
and Orhan Ghazi kazas, in Bursa vilayet, Greek and Armenian bands killed
and robbed Turkish travelers and raided villages. The Turks complained that
the Greek army had disarmed the Muslim population but not the Christians.
On September 7 brigands torched the villages of Tutluca, Bayir- Keuy, and
Paşayaylası; massacred dozens of their inhabitants; and carried off Muslim
girls. The Greek authorities arrested thirty Armenian and Greek brigands
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
suspected of attacking Tutluca.663 In November, in Bandırma and its sur-
roundings, locals and soldiers assaulted and murdered Turks before the
Greek army restored order.664 In other areas such as Aydın and Nazilli, Greek
administration was sufficiently benign and effective that Turkish refugees
were attracted back to their homes.665
Greek depredations were most frequent during the army’s retreats. Greeks
would raid Turks in response to acts of sabotage. Especially during the final
retreat to the coast, the Greeks, as a matter of official policy, scorched the earth behind them in order to deny the advancing Turks food and shelter.666 Already in early January 1921 Rumbold wrote that the Greeks were gradually
turning their “zone of operations . . . to . . . a wilderness.” 667
As the war dragged on, with the Greek army suffering heavy casualties and
the Turks massacring Greeks along the front lines and in the Pontus, Greek
brutality increased. As one British Smyrniot wrote in April, “Flogging has be-
come shooting and there is now a reign of terror throughout all the [Greek-
occupied] country.” 668 One factor here may have been the large number of
Anatolian Greeks newly enlisted— usually under compulsion—in the Greek
army.669 The Anatolian Greeks no doubt had vengeance in their hearts.
In the Edirne- Thracian borderlands, crime appears to have been common.
The Turks accused the Greeks of mass arrests, beatings, robbery, and occasional
rape.670 In Söğüt, near Bilecik, the Greeks blew up the tomb of Ertoğrul, father
of Osman, founder of the Ottoman dynasty.671
In spring 1921 Turkish leaders accused Greek irregulars of several heinous
acts. Allegedly they threw inhabitants of the village of Tcherkess- Muslim into
a fire and cut off women’s breasts there. They set fire to notables in Tcigilli.
Near Gumuldjina they forced a shoemaker to walk barefoot on live coals.672
In Beicos (Beykoz) Greeks cut crosses on the faces of murder victims.673 And
in Kodjai Dir, near Yalova, 1,500 Turkish men, women, and children were as-
sembled in a building and burned alive.674
The veracity of these assorted accusations is questionable. Routinely, the
Turks threw out general charges, such as a Greek “preconceived plan” to
exterminate “the Turkish ele ment.” 675 But when the Turks gave specifics—as
in March 1922, when the mutesarrif of Samsun told an American officer that
Greek brigands had “killed 10,000 Turks” in the Bafra area— they were al-
most never confirmed by Western diplomats, missionaries, or journalists.676
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
Western diplomats came to believe that most Turkish charges were fraudu-
lent, in ven ted to offset Western accusations of Turkish atrocities.
But there were occasional Western confirmations of Greek atrocities. A
number of factors contributed to the Greek vio lence. The Greek soldiers re-
sponsible included a large number of raw recruits and some recent Anatolian
Greek recruits. Morale occasionally was low following the failure of Greek of-
fensives. The area of occupation was manned with insufficient forces, making
population control more difficult. And the cumulative effects of protracted
battle and occupation took their toll.677 The Greeks also felt justified by their
historic claims and their own suffering. As Constantine, the Greek king, put
it in a private letter:
It is extraordinary how little civilized the Turks are. . . . It is high time
they dis appeared once more and went back into the interior of Asia
whence they came. . . . There are still some villages where dangerous
fanat i cism still reigns, and the Turks go out by night and massacre, in
the most atrocious manner, our men or the lorry drivers who happen to
be isolated; they mutilate them or even skin them, which enrages our sol-
diers to such an extent as to give rise to disagreeable reprisals. . . . That
is the reason we have so few prisoners— they are all massacred on the
spot.678
One Greek atrocity occurred along the southern shore of the Sea of Mar-
mara during March– May 1921. In the Yalova- Izmit area, Greek brigands, often
commanded by regular officers, destroyed dozens of villages in a pro cess of
systematic ethnic cleansing. The Greeks took a leaf out of the Turkish play-
book and deported Turkish civil and religious notables.679 The Allies sent
commissions of inquiry to investigate “alleged excesses” by both Muslims and
Christians.680 In Yalova- Gemlik the commission visited torched villages and
interviewed Muslims, Armenians, and Greek refugees, as well as Greek offi-
cers. One Greek officer “acknowledged” having had four Turks shot. Near
Kumlar, the commissioners found “28 bodies of old men and women who had
been recently shot or knocked on the head.” Some had apparently been killed
while the commission was in the area. Dozens of Muslim villages had been
looted and burned “by Christian bands” and their populations scattered. The
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Greek commandant of the Bazar Keui (Pazarköy) area said that his orders were
to “evacuate the Turkish population . . . within his sector” after Turks had at-
tacked Christian villa gers and the army’s lin
es of communications.681
The commission concluded that, in the Gemlik- Yalova area, the Greek au-
thorities were implementing a policy of “destruction of [the] Moslem ele-
ment, Greek troops and brigands appearing to act . . . in complete accord.” 682
One Greek general told the commissioners that they were carry ing out
“reprisals.” 683
The Allied commission of inquiry in Izmit stated in its interim report that
“both Greek regular officers and men” had committed rape, robbery, and other
acts of vio lence. Several women testified that they had been “raped five times.”
At Darlık village, a woman and a young girl “ were killed after having been
raped.” Greek troops or irregulars murdered a number of men. In many vil-
lages the Greeks stole property, sometimes using torture or murder to extract
information about valuables. At Tchboukli (Çobuklu?), near Beykoz, there had
been “widespread murder.” Eigh teen Turks were imprisoned for ten days in
an underground cistern; most of them were eventually killed.684 The commis-
sion found that Greek troops had committed murders and rapes in Beykoz in
July– August 1920 and again in March– April 1921. The Greek army had used
bands of Circassian Muslims to raid Turkish villages.
As bad as it all was, the commission, in its final report, concluded that
Turkish be hav ior in the region had been worse. While there was “credible evi-
dence” that both Greeks and Turks had committed crimes during the pre-
vious twelve months, “it appears that those on the part of the Turks have been
more considerable and ferocious than those on the part of the Greeks.” The
Greeks claimed that 12,000 of their villa gers were massacred and 2,500 were
missing.685
An International Red Cross official, Maurice Gehri, accompanied the
Yalova- Gemlik commission and produced a detailed report of his own. He
saw burning villages, Turkish corpses, and frightened civilians. The villa gers
spoke of Greek killings, robbery, and rape.
Gehri noted that the area had been occupied by the Greek 10th Division,
which comprised mainly Anatolian Greeks, who seemed especially violent.
It seemed to Gehri that they shared an ethos communicated to him by
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
Monsignor Vassilios, the archbishop of Nicaea: “The Greek army has been
much too mild in the repression. I, who am not a soldier but an ecclesiastic, I
should like to have all the Turks exterminated, without sparing one.” On a
second visit to Yalova, Gehri was accompanied by the Toynbees, Arnold and
his wife Rosalind. At Ak- Keui (Akköy), the group, despite a Greek escort,
was led by “two courageous [Turkish] boys” to the graves of sixty murdered
Turks.686 In his report Gehri concluded, “Ele ments of the Greek army of oc-
cupation had, for two months, been pursuing the extermination of the
Moslem population of the peninsula.” Gehri didn’t know whether the policy
originated with the 10th Division or the Greek high command.687
According to Rosalind, clearly shocked by her first encounter with this
brutality, the Greeks “must have killed about 5,500” Yalova-area Turks
during the previous six weeks and perhaps as many in the Gemlik area. She
implied that these were “Gehri’s figures,” though they do not appear in his
report. She described what had happened as “the methodical and diabolical
system of extermination of the whole Moslem population.” Arnold’s articles,
published at the time in the Manchester Guardian, were similar in tone, off-setting the general philo- Hellenism of the Western press during those months.
Rosalind’s notes appear mainly in a letter she sent her father, the classicist
Gilbert Murray. The letter is full of emotional description. She calls Yalova’s
Christian civilians “semi- human”: “They had ghastly bestial faces as though
they had been drinking blood; the whole crowd often seemed demoniac . . .
as though . . . changing back into wild beasts . . . that were obscene and un-
natural, and beyond belief.” The contrast to the way she described Turkish
refugees was stark:
The Turkish Women of that district dress still like the Virgin Mary . . .
exactly like the typical Italian Madonna, and there they sat . . . several
hundred of them, patiently for hours and hours, most of them with
children in their arms; they were white with terror, extraordinarily still
and quiet . . . and all around them surged this crowd of diabolical “Chris-
tians” threatening and jeering. . . . Men stood beside them, bearded,
bronzed, with again those patient suffering faces— like Holy families or
flights into Egypt— and above the beach . . . were a crowd of “Christian”
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
women, gay looking, gaudily dressed, laughing and jeering. . . . Arnold
says he has heard descriptions of that queer bestial look on the Turks’
faces during the Armenian Massacres [of 1915–16]—it is evidently a
phenomenon that goes with massacres.688
At Armutlu, near Gemlik, Rosalind discovered Greek and Turkish villa gers
who were friendly with each other. During the world war, she heard, the local
Turks had pleaded with the authorities and saved their Greek neighbors from
deportation. But during the Greek occupation, Armenian brigands had gath-
ered the Muslim inhabitants of one village in a house and thrown bombs in-
side. In Armutluoudlou women “ were requisitioned” by Greek soldiers.689
The Allied investigations appear to have had little impact on the be hav ior
of Greek troops and irregulars along the Marmara. A subsequent Allied com-
mission of inquiry found that on June 10 Greek “brigands” raided Arablar
and murdered fourteen or fifteen villa gers and abducted several women.690
According to Ankara, on June 27–28, just before the Greek army evacuated,
Christians slaughtered some 300 Turks in Izmit.691 The Toynbees reached
Izmit on June 29. Arnold wrote that he had “never seen anything so hor-
rible.” 692 Rosalind described the carcasses of oxen and cows “apparently . . .
burned alive”; a burnt kitten (the “most painful and unforgettable thing we
saw,” she recorded); the courtyard of the main mosque “strewn with slaugh-
tered pigs” and Korans “torn to bits”; the cemetery littered with sixty- five
bodies, some without hands and feet, one with a beard “like Christ’s in many
entombment pictures.” 693
The Toynbees later wrote up memos on dire events in other areas and sent
them to Bristol. Arnold claimed “groups of a dozen to thirty villages at a time
are being raided, plundered, the population massacred wholly or in part,
women violated, people of both sexes occasionally tortured. The survivors
are marched down to Smyrna as ‘prisoners of war,’ many disappearing on the
way. The rest are shipped—no one knows where.” 694 Rosalind wrote of de-
portations, mainly of notables, from in Kasaba, Manisa, Nif, Alaşehir, Salihli,
Uşak, Kula, Mamara, Akhisar, Tira, Odemiş, Barindir, Torbalı, and Aydın. But
the Toynbees, by their own admission, never visited these places. Instead they
were fed information by leading S
myrna Turks such as Dr. Husni Bey, a large
landowner who had been “completely ruined” and occasionally jailed by the
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
Greeks, and Ramzy Bey, a barrister. The Toynbees conceded that they had
not in de pen dently verified any of this information.695
Arnold recommended Greek evacuation of Anatolia and stationing Allied
troops in the area because “the native Greek population would not [other wise]
be safe.” Such insecurity, however, was “hardly a reflection on the Turk—it is
only to say that he is human and would be tempted to take revenge for the
intolerable treatment he has been undergoing.” 696 Arnold believed—or
said he believed— that the Greek atrocities were “or ga nized” from above and
that the Greeks had systematically unleashed a “war of extermination” against
the Turks throughout the areas that they had evacuated in northwestern
Anatolia.697
British officials rejected the Toynbees’ claims. Rendel described Arnold as
“notorious for virulent hatred of Greece, for passionate championship of the
Turks and for total lack of balance and judgment on any questions connected
with the Greco- Turkish conflict.” 698 It seemed the London University histo-
rian was making amends for earlier writings that had embarrassed the Turks.699
As a Foreign Office official in charge of po liti cal intelligence on the Ottoman
Empire during the Great War, Toynbee had been a strident critic of Turkey
and had aided Lord Bryce in compiling The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire 1915–16, a British Government publication documenting
atrocities against the Armenians.
Bristol, however, found the Toynbees’ claims more amenable and forwarded
them to Washington.700 In June 1921 he wrote, “The Greeks and Turks prac-
tice the same methods of murdering the civil population and destroying
cities and towns.”701 The fact that Muslims had killed “thousands” whereas
Christians had killed only “hundreds” was of no consequence; “it was as bad
to steal five cents as five dollars.” Bristol concluded that “the Christian races”
in Asia Minor “are just as bad as the Moslem races.”702 He invited American
