0082) Excerpts of History from Grand Turk

This obscure work came out in the early 1940s.... the author, Wilfred T.F. Castle, sounds Turk-friendly (what with that title! Certainly an improvement over "The Blight of Asia"), but he might have been forcing himself, not wanting to give any excuse for Turkey to slip in with the Nazis. His heart, however, is with the Greeks and Armenians... he glosses over the massacres and the Burning of Izmir, indicating his real sympathies.

"Grand Turk," Pages 112-115

There, on the 23rd of April, 1920, the revolutionary “Turkish Grand National Assembly” (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi) met in the building formerly occupied by the local Committee of Union and Progress. Kamâl Atatürk was President. Its first act was to make clear to the world the position of the new Turkish Government. The courage of its words is astonishing:

“Thefl Grand National Assembly sitting in Ankara will preside over the destiny of Turkey as long as the Capital is in the hands of the foreigner. It has appointed an Executive Council, which has taken in hand the government of the country. Istanbul, the Sultan and the Government being in the hands of the enemy, all orders from there are automatically null and void. The nation’s rights have been violated. The Turkish nation, though calm, is determined to maintain its rights as a sovereign independent State.”

So far the patriots had been regarded as rebels by one and all. But now in May 1920 the French opened negotiations with them and concluded a twenty days truce—the first recognition by an Allied Power of the free Turkish Government, and the first step in “foreign policy” taken by Ankara. The next step was a mission to the Bolshevik Government at Moscow. It left Ankara on the 11th of May. There was no doubt that the Russian revolutionaries at first imagined that Turkey would be an easy convert—that the Turkish Nationalists would soon throw in their lot with the other Nationalist movements within the sphere of Moscow’s influence, and along with Finland, Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine, form one link in a chain of communist States—a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But Kamâl Atatürk, fighting for freedom from foreign interference, was not likely to be sidetracked by essays in doctrinaire politics. It was to be Turkey for the Turks at last, not Turkey for International Communists. Every ill against which the patriots had been struggling had arisen from foreign minorities within or from foreign interference from without, frequently from both simultaneously. Besides, there was simply no class feeling in Turkey, and scarcely any capitalism. Nevertheless the atmosphere of the Moscow discussions was friendly: neither side could afford to make more enemies, and the Turks were willing to learn from any progressive movement, anxious to obtain ideas which they could adapt to their own conditions.

The terms, if widely accepted, would have been the death sentence, not only of the Ottoman Empire but of what was now correctly described as “Turkey” [See below]


At last, as the month of May 1920 was drawing to its close, the Allies published the terms of peace which they were willing to make with Mehmet VI. A small and helpless “Ottoman Empire” was to be entirely under the supervision of the the Allied Powers; all the Arab provinces were to become Mandated Territories, and of these Syria and Iraq were to share between them a large portion of Southern Anatolia; the whole of Eastern Anatolia was to be added to the State of Armenia which had been already established in the former Imperial Russian provinces; around Izmir was to be a large Greek district; Antalya was to become Italian, together with a huge “sphere of influence”; Cilicia was to go to the French; the Ottoman capital itself was to be an “international centre” lying on neutral seaways under the control of Britain, France and Italy. Turkish Thrace was to be added to the portions of Macedonia and Thrace taken from Bulgaria, and the whole handed to Greece. The islands of Imroz and Boscaada (Tenedos) were to go to Greece. Only the immediate hinterland of Istanbul was to remain of the once extensive “Turkey in Europe”. As Hans Froembgen remarked in his Kamal Atatürk, “the Turks were to live in what may be described as a sort of Indian reservation.”

The terms, if widely accepted, would have been the death sentence *, not only of the Ottoman Empire but of what was now correctly described as “Turkey”, which, weakened beyond the possibility of independence, could only have awaited the inevitable Italian or German overtures of the coming years, or the Bolshevik pressure from the north. The collision of these interests with the Greeks, British and French would probably have provided the occasion for a premature second Great War. By entertaining the very idea of signing a treaty based on such terms, the Ottoman Government at Istanbul was branded by the patriots as a puppet government of traitors and dotards, and almost the entire Turkish nation accepted the Turkish Government at Ankara.

There was no one to enforce the terms of the treaty, in the event of Mehmet signing it. Except for the Greeks in and behind Izmir, and the Allied forces at Istanbul or on the coast, there was nobody. Even in Thrace, at Edirne itself (now claimed by Greece), there was a Turkish Nationalist army. Alike in Europe and in Asia the force of a fierce patriotism was rising like a hurricane; the Allies were not in a position to face a fresh war in the East: only the Greeks were brave enough, or foolhardy enough (or both) to join issue with the Turks. The two most courageous nations of the Near East were at each other’s throats in a moment: the Greeks being pushed on against their best feelings by politicians, the Turks defending, not Arabian or Serbian provinces for some rapacious Sultan, but their own home land for their own people.

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* Holdwater: The author will explain that Turkey would inevitably fall under the domination of Nazism or Soviet communism, but the real death threat lay with the populating of eastern Anatolia with Greeks, and western Anatolia with Armenians, both of which subscribed to a deadly ethnic cleansing campaign philosophy, in order to avail themselves of new land, combined with their racist hatred of Turkish people. As the treaty availed Turkey of only a token army, Turkey would have been dead meat in time, with the tacit approval of the Christian imperialists. Take a look at the minimized territory Turkey would have wound up with, encircled by hostile enemies. The map (which offers an enlarged version) is based on the wartime secret treaties between England, France and Russia, which is what mostly wound up as the Sèvres Treaty.

The treaty...went down to history (or to oblivion) as the Treaty of Sèvres.

The Greeks are notoriously good soldiers when advancing, and when operations began on the 23rd of June, 1920, on two fronts — the Anatolian front on the hills above Izmir, and the Thracian front towards Edirne — every movement was an advance. On the 25th of July, 1920, King Alexander of Greece made a triumphal entry into Edirne. A typical Turkish city, crowned by the glorious Selimiye mosque, it had fallen to the Russians in 1828, become Ottoman once more in 1829, again fallen to the Russians and their Bulgarian allies in 1877, was restored in 1878, became a Bulgarian town in 1913, reverting to the Ottoman Empire the same year. Now it was Greek, and so was the rest of Thrace almost up to the very walls of Istanbul. The Greeks had enforced at least one clause of the unsigned treaty. The arrival of their Asiatic forces at a point halfway towards the Baghdad Railway and the preparation for an advance on Eskishehir and Ankara would have been well on the way to, enforcing the rest of the terms on the Nationalists. As it was, the Ottoman Government of Istanbul obediently signed the treaty on the 10th of August,1920, which went down to history (or to oblivion) as the Treaty of Sèvres.

The signing of the original Armistice aboard HMS Agamemnon, guaranteed Turkey's frontiers, and Admiral Calthorp, who represented the British government, gave assurances in writing that the integrity of Turkish borders would not change.

Signed on 10 August 1920. The treaty of Sevres was based upon the carving up of Turkish land contrary to the armistice agreement between Hussein Rauf (Minister of Marine) and Admiral Calthorp. Greed by the Greeks and the absence of a true Turkish delegation also played in important part in its nullification.

The government of the Turkish National Assembly, formed earlier on 23 April 1920, rejected the Treaty of Sevres and the war of independence started by Mustafa Kemal , had prevented its application.

Lord Curzon at Sevres had said that this conference is nothing but a circus act and that the main players were the Greeks. And asked “”who is going to be the snake in this circus paradise””

Yet silly Greeks and Armenians hold true the Treaty of Sevres.

Ismet The Historian

The acquiescence of the prisoners on the Bosphorus only served further to irritate the Nationalists, who ignored the treaty. But the military position could not be ignored. The Greeks, preparing themselves for a new offensive, and a little surprised at the stern resistance of “the rebels”, would have found the Turkish attacks much more formidable had it not been for another artificial military “frontier” biting into the Turkish homeland. With the dissolution of the Imperial Russian Army in the Caucasus in 1917 the Armenians of the former Russian Empire had formed an Armenian State on the 28th of May, 1917. Some of the territory of this new Armenia was pre-war Russian country, including the capital, Yerevan, and of this a great deal had been Ottoman before 1878. The rest, captured by Russia in the Great War, was predominantly Turkish, including the towns of Trabzon, Rize, Erzurum, Bitlis and Van. This State was declared to be “free and independent” by the Treaty of Sèvres, but in the face of Turkish opposition to its expansion at the expense of Turkish territory, and Communist intrigue from its great neighbour, the new State was doomed to suffer a tragic fate. Turkish Nationalists, anxious to regain their homes and soil, advanced from the west; Bolsheviks and Tartar irregulars advanced from the east. On the 30th of October, 1920, the victorious armies of free Turkey entered Kars, which, permeated with Bolshevik propaganda, fell without a struggle. Kars had been taken from the Ottoman Empire by the Russians in November 1877: by the 7th of November, 1920, the Turks were already beyond the limits of Abdül Hamit’s dominions and in the real old Imperial Russian territory at Leninakan, then called “Alexandropol”, an important railway junction for the only line which Imperial Russia had built in the province conquered in 1877 — the broad-gauge line down to Kars and Sarikamish and its war-time narrow-gauge extension to Erzurum and Yenikoy.

(Armenia signed) a desperate treaty of peace with the free Turkish Government on the 3rd of December, 1920 — the Treaty of Leninakan


The last act of the independent Armenian Republic was to sign a desperate treaty of peace with the free Turkish Government on the 3rd of December, 1920 — the Treaty of Leninakan — by which Nationalist Turkey regained from the Armenians almost all that the Ottoman Empire had lost to Russia since 1877, including the port of Batumi (Batoum), the possession of which was disputed with Georgia, a new republic which still retained Artvin and Ardahan.

The campaign in the East was over, the Armenian Soviet Republic came into being on old Russian territory, and Eastern Anatolia was Turkish once more. The new frontier became permanent on the 14th of March, 1921, when the Treaty of Moscow was signed by the new Soviet power, responsible for Trans-Caucasia, and by the free Turkish Government. The Turks handed over Batumi to the Soviet Republic of Georgia, but by the Treaty they were well compensated with moral and material help: the two regimes at Moscow and at Ankara respectively were described as “sharing the principle of the brotherhood of nations and of the rights of the peoples to self-determination, and confirming the solidarity which unites them in the struggle against imperialism.” From Georgia the Turks regained a portion of the district of Batumi and the districts of Artvin and Ardahan.

In the West the battle had yet to be fought. On the 21st of August,1921, the Greeks attacked. In the mountain country above the Sakarya River, some fifty kilometres west of Ankara, the two valiant peoples fought almost man to man for fourteen days under the burning heat of an August sun, the Greeks attacking with reckless abandon, the Turks hanging grimly on to the heights, Atatürk now their Commander-in-Chief. By the 4th of September the critical moment had come: the Greeks were at the end of their strength. On the 12th they recrossed the Sakarya and began to retire steadily, but there was no question of the Turks immediately following up their advantage. It was not until the end of August 1922 that Atatürk was able to sound his famous battle-call: “Soldiers! Your goal is the Mediterranean! Forward!”

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