In Europe (73 page)

Amid this intimate gathering it seems almost unimaginable that seventy-five years ago, at the time of the 1924 census, a quarter of the population of Istanbul was still Greek Orthodox. In 1955 a veritable pogrom took place: thousands of Muslims went into the Greek neighbourhood, shattered windows, looted and destroyed. Dozens of Orthodox churches were torched. The police did nothing. In 1974, at the time of the Cyprus crisis, tens of thousands of Greeks were run out of town again. Today there are no more than 3,000 left.

It is bizarre, but true: this little group of respectable Sunday Greeks, this remote little church, these elderly priests are all that remains of the enormous Greek Orthodox power centre that was once Constantinople, of the unique amalgam of European and Eastern culture that blossomed here for at least a thousand years.

In some ways the Ottoman Empire was like the European colonial empires, but lacked one feature: the colonial disdain with which Europe looked down on other peoples. The Ottomans were not particularly interested in whether one was a Muslim or a Christian. Jews and Christians were generally left in peace. Promising young Jewish and Christian people were sometimes converted to Islam, then given influential positions in the army or the bureaucracy. For the rest, however, the religious freedom of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Istanbul was reminiscent of that in Amsterdam. While dissenters were being persecuted elsewhere in Europe, in the Ottoman Empire they were free to practise their religion. The Ottoman borders were open to Jewish refugees, and they made a welcome contribution to the economy. When the Italian travel writer Edmondo De Amicis stopped on the Galata Bridge in 1896, he saw a motley crowd passing by: Greeks, Turks, Armenians, ‘a Muhammadan woman on foot, a veiled slave girl, a Greek woman with long, wavy hair topped with a little red cap, a Maltese woman hidden behind her black
faletta
, a Jewess in the ancient costume of her nation, a Negress wrapped in a multi-coloured Cairo shawl, an Armenian woman from Trebizond, all veiled in black …’

Almost half of that same Istanbul in which young Irfan Orga grew up consisted of non-Muslims. According to the 1893 census, almost five million Jews and Christians lived among the seventeen million Ottomans. Like the Habsburg Empire, it was a multinational. And in some ways,
particularly when it became modernised, it was perhaps more European than present-day Turkey.

The question, therefore, is: where lies the greatest barrier between Turkey and the rest of Europe? Is it actually the country's traditional Muslim character? Is it not, rather, Atatürk's staunchly nationalist and dictatorial modernisation that blocks a lasting rapprochement with modern-day Europe? Or, to put it differently: does the problem really have to do with Muhammad? Does it not have just as much to do with Atatürk?

It was nineteenth-century nationalism that put an end to the tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, and by the start of the twentieth century the tension had risen to breaking point in Anatolia. But it was only under Atatürk that ethnic cleansing was adopted as government policy. His modern Turkey was to form a strong national and ethnic unit, he considered the Ottomans’ multinationalism sentimental and obsolete, religious and ethnic diversity only undermined the country's identity and security. In the 1920s, after Greece had vainly tried to establish control over large parts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, Atatürk imposed a forced exchange between Greece and Turkey, an ethnic cleansing of unheard-of proportions: more than a million Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Anatolia were sent to Greece, almost 400,000 Greek Muslims were transported to Turkey.

Their fate was mild compared to that of the Armenians. In the course of conflicts and deportations in 1915, even before Atatürk came to power, an estimated 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians were killed, a case of genocide vehemently denied to this day by the Turkish government. Merely mentioning this genocide, the first of the twentieth century, still leads to indictments and trials. The veiling of the past, the fatal forgetting of which Primo Levi wrote, is here the duty of every patriotic citizen.

All this had – and still has – an effect on Istanbul. It is a city which, despite the overwhelming beauty of the Bosphorus, despite the tenfold growth of its population in the last half of the twentieth century, despite the influx of tens of thousands of immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, despite the Hagia Sophia and all the other evidence of 1,500 years of culture, is losing its cosmopolitan character and is in the process of becoming, in spirit, a provincial city. The Jews have left for Israel, the
Greeks for Greece, the country's political power has moved to Ankara, the merchants have been scattered across the face of the earth.

All cities tell a story, and the story of Istanbul is above all one of shifting emphases and of vulnerability, no matter how international the metropolis might seem. In 1200, this was Europe's absolute centre of power. Today it is a remote corner, a poor, rapidly expanding Third World city, a symbol of glory past, ties forgotten, tolerance lost.

IN THE CRETAN VILLAGE OF ANOGIA, THE DAY BEGINS WITH THE
crowing of roosters. A man comes by with a megaphone, trying, even at this early hour, to sell his potatoes, a whole wagonful. Then comes the clanging and bleating of a herd of goats, the shouting of a Gypsy woman with a cart full of clothing, then a car loaded with plastic buckets and basins, and then the day has truly arrived.

The old men move slowly from their houses. They carry sticks, they wear beards, black caps, stiff, heavy coats, blue jeans, every season and every age is tucked away in their appearance. The communists sit in front of their own café, where Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Stalin have their regular places on the wall. A busload of German tourists pulls in, they disappear into the restaurant which bears the sign ‘
ICH SPRECHE DEUTSCH
’, and everyone on the village square nods to them and greets them in a most amiable fashion. A skinned sheep is slung from the back of a truck, its head rolls over the ground. The old women are doing their errands. You can still see which one was the prettiest fifty years ago, if only from the way the old men treat this bent and bowed Calliope.

Fifty years ago: when they were still young, when Anogia was wiped off the face of the earth.

When evening comes the moon rises at the top of the main street like a monstrous disc. Anogia lies on the flanks of the Ida range. The houses are white and square, the streets slope down with the hillside, there is a square with plane trees, and everywhere there are tourist shops with colourful weaving.

Back behind the village is a museum displaying the naïve art of a
talented shepherd, Chrilios Skoulas. The paintings are huge: pictures of the village with all its streets, and of the painter and his wife posing peacefully in front of their house; of the painter walking through the woods in a flurry of snow, a lamb draped around his neck; of para-troopers landing in green uniforms, the shepherds and other partisans shooting them as they descend, they fall, the green uniforms tumble, the dogs lick their blood; of the village with fire leaping from every roof, airplanes, dead people everywhere, old men being chased into houses that are burning like torches, women and children being led away and the partisans trying to rescue them. And then there is a huge tableau of peace, of the men and women who finally returned, of the church with the souls of the dead floating above it.

The present-day mayor of Anogia was ten years old at the time. All he remembers is the smoke and the smell of fire. He and a group of young boys found a cave to hide in; then they roamed through the mountains with the partisans for three weeks, living on cheese and goat's milk. ‘When we finally came back to our village, there was not one stone on top of the other. There was this strange smell that we couldn't place. Then we saw the bodies everywhere, swollen bodies, soaked from the rain. No one said anything, no one wept, we stayed absolutely quiet. Talking about it now, my eyes fill with tears. But then we were petrified.’ He and his younger sister decided to go to a neighbouring village, to see if their grandfather was still alive. Along the way they saw a man lying under a felled tree, a little boy in his arms. ‘They looked as if they were sleeping.’ Weeping, they ran on. Their grandfather was still there.

The massacre of the village of Anogia took place on 15 August, 1944. The monument to it consists of an engraved plaque bearing the text of the German order: ‘Because the kidnappers of General Kreipe passed through Anogia, we hereby order that the village be levelled to the ground and that every male inhabitant of Anogia living in the village or within a radius of one mile of the village be executed.’

The general was the German commander Kreipe, who was kidnapped by partisans and British agents and smuggled off to Egypt. More than 140 people were murdered that day, most of them women and the elderly. Most of the men had already joined up with the partisans, the others had fled into the mountains. ‘But we got a lot of Germans too,’ the mayor
says.‘What did they know about the mountains around here?'The German reprisals were merciless: ten dead Cretans for every German killed.

The people of Anogia are obstinate, the children's expressions are open, and the women know what they want: their men, after all, spend a large part of the year wandering through the mountains with their flocks, and are often gone for months at a time. All this makes for a rather different view of the Second World War than that held by most Europeans. Here no one crawled or licked the dust, here there were no ‘sensible’ mayors in wartime, here there were no compromises or guilty feelings; here the people simply fought hard, and on Crete the Germans never gained much of a foothold.

Anogia was a typical partisan village, like Viannos, Kotomari and Myrtos, where the Germans committed similar atrocities. A few pictures have been preserved from Kotomari: the men of the village driven together into an olive grove; a man who tried to escape, a handsome, curly-haired young fellow talking for his life; the firing squad, the soldier out in front smiling as he aims; the corpses fallen across each other.

When he came back sixteen years later to see how things were with ‘his’ Kotomari, the German soldier who took these photographs was nonetheless welcomed with ouzo. And the mayor of Anogia says today: ‘I saw Germans crying. I saw it when they shuffled into our ambush like sheep and didn't stand a ghost of a chance. I saw that they, too, were pawns and victims. Why should we hate them, they got killed too, didn't they?’ Only in Myrtos does the retired schoolteacher refuse to admit Germans, not even German children, to his private museum. But then, the men on the square say as they shake their heads, he is suffering from a war trauma.

For the Greeks the Second World War began on 28 October, 1940, when the Italians made a vain attempt to invade their country by way of Albania. Mussolini was increasingly frustrated, for he had hardly shared in Hitler's Western European successes. His radical supporters dreamed of the return of the Roman Empire, of the conquest of Egypt, of hegemony along the eastern Mediterranean seaboard, of an empire like Napoleon's. But he also wanted to take the wind out of the Germans’ sails, particularly in their attempts to seize the rich oilfields of Rumania.

That October, he decided to take the initiative. Poorly armed, without sufficient supplies or winter clothing, the Italian soldiers marched to their defeat in the mountains. They advanced no further than about eighty kilometres before they were routed.

In spring 1941, the Germans came to the Italians’ assistance. The Third Reich could not allow its eastern flank in the Balkans to remain undefended, especially if it hoped to invade the Soviet Union. In late March, therefore, Hitler presented Yugoslavia with an ultimatum: it had to join the Axis. On 25 March the country entered the Tripartite Pact, along with Germany, Italy and Japan; two days later, the government of Dragižsa ćetković was brought down by a coup. Hitler's response was to launch Operation Retaliation. On 6 April, Palm Sunday, most of Belgrade was bombed flat. Some 17,000 people were burned alive or buried beneath the rubble. Then Yugoslavia and Greece were hastily occupied by German and Italian troops; the Germans, after all, still had to prepare for the great push into Russia. As a result, tens of thousands of Yugoslav and Greek soldiers were able to escape into the mountains, where they immediately began a guerrilla war.

Yugoslavia fell to pieces. The Italians moved into Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro. The Hungarians occupied Vojvodina. Their fascist Arrow Cross corps immediately began to massacre civilians in Novi Sad: 500 Jews and Serbs were shot or bayoneted. Croatia proclaimed itself an independent republic, led by fascist dictator Ante Pavelić. To make matters even more complicated, a thinly disguised religious war began between the Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs. The Croatian
ustažsas
(rebels) commenced with large-scale ethnic purifications, including mass executions and death camps. Tens of thousand of Serbs were their victims.

The partisan army consisted of Serbs, Croatians, Slovenians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Hungarians, Italians, Czechs and Bosnians. At the same time, however, a minor civil war was also being fought out within their ranks. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the royalist Chetniks began a life-and-death struggle with the communist partisans led by Josip Broz, otherwise known as Tito. The British historian Norman Davies summarised the situation thus: ‘The fierce determination of the Yugoslav partisans to kill the invaders was only exceeded by their proclivity for killing each other.’

And so the Balkans and Greece went to war, pillaged, starving and poor, officially occupied by the Germans and Italians, but in actual fact
dominated at least as cruelly by hundreds of competing resistance groups.

Seen from the air, Greece is mostly sea, little blue ripples with here and there an island grazed bare, a few grooves and lines in the yellowish-grey earth, at crossroads and along the coast a huddle of small white blocks, then the blue flats again, with a few fast-moving dots tying the whole thing together.