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Your heart must have been gladdened last weekend. You know, dear listener, we here in Great Britain celebrated Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee. For an outspoken monarchist like you, Eamon, you must have been in seventh heaven. You must have just been overjoyed.
Absolutely. As an avid monarchist myself, whether in the West or in the Middle East, wherever there is monarchy, I believe there is always stability. This is what I always say. I can't deny that I myself was watching some of the splendor of the pageantry, and I was moved to tears on occasion. There's something very moving about the sense of history. You're an American who just want to yearn back to the days when you were ruled. Yes, it's true. A penitent American.
Right, well, we've got a big episode today with lots to cover, so let's get straight into it. ♪
Right, dear listeners, today, having flitted around the edges of the Ottoman Empire for most of this season, we're going straight to the jugular, straight to the heart of that empire, to Istanbul, or Constantinople if you prefer, and to the epic historic conflict between Turks and Greeks, a conflict most painfully manifest today on the divided island of Cyprus.
the invasion of which by Turkish troops in 1974 was yet another egg in the face of the declining British Empire, one of the defining events of the Cold War period, and a living witness to the ongoing clash of civilizations in the Middle East. Turkey and Greece, Greece and Turkey, it's the epic battle, perhaps the battle to end all battles. Absolutely. I mean, you can't have Turkey without having Greece poured over it.
Goodness gracious. It's the battle to end all battles when the holy and pious Orthodox Greeks, like reincarnated Achaeans storming the battlements of a Turkish Troy, finally regain control over their greatest city and most outstanding sign of their election by God. Constantinople, the new Rome, the navel of the world.
inaugurating the return of the Roman Empire, the return of Jesus Christ, and the apocalyptic end of the world. What do you think, Eamon? Muslim jihadists aren't the only ones obsessed with fever dreams of the end times, let me tell you.
I tell you something, I've never seen a city besides Jerusalem which had so many prophecies told about it, like Istanbul or Constantinople. We're going to get into all that sort of stuff. We love it here on Conflicted. We love going back deep into time and even eschatology long into the future. But now that we're zeroing in on Turkey, Amy,
You're going to say, oh, you know what? I'm actually a direct descendant of the Osmanli dynasty. And my great grandfather was Pasha the Sanjak of Rumelia or something like that, right? No, no. You know, my DNA states that I'm 9% Turkish. And that is due to my Turkish grandmother. You had a Turkish grandmother? Yeah. She was half Turkish with some Greek mix, Kurdish mix. It's a very strange mix. She was born in Konya, Turkey.
Konya? Yeah, Konya. Ah, home of the whirling dervishes. Was your grandmother known for her whirling, Eamon? Only if she's whirling, I mean loaves of bread before she cooked them in the oven. Now, Eamon, as you know, I like to add something from the present day whenever possible as an entryway into each episode's discussion. And for this episode, my goodness.
There is a huge number of current conflicts involving Turkey and Greece that we might draw upon. Right now, a massive struggle over gas rights in the Aegean involving Libya and France as well. Turkey currently manipulating NATO for maximum geopolitical benefit over Ukraine and Russia and all that stuff.
The economic collapse that's happening in Turkey with huge inflation and the possible downfall of President Erdogan as a result, which I could press you on because you assured us in season two, Eamon, that President Erdogan's stewardship of the economy there was excellent. But I don't want to talk about that now. And just this morning, news reports are saying that President Erdogan is demanding that Greece demilitarize its Aegean islands.
while accusing the United States of threatening Turkey with its military bases in Greece and elsewhere, which may have something to do with Turkey's upcoming presidential election only a year away. I don't know. Anyway, I don't want to talk about any of those things. I want to talk about something else. The reconversion into a mosque from a museum
of the greatest building ever built anywhere on the planet, Hagia Sophia. Ah, yeah. The Hagia Sophia, as the Turks would pronounce it. The Hagia Sophia, that's right. Yeah. This is one of the most contentious issues, and it definitely was used as...
Basically a theater. It was completely a political spectacle in order to shore up Erdogan's political image as the savior of Islam, as the protector of Islam, as the leader of the neo-Ottomans. As you know, and of course, Lakin, I mean, you can tell us more about the history of the Hagia Sophia as a church.
But the Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque in 1453. 1453, absolutely, yeah. The infamous year when the Turks finally conquered Constantinople. And then in 1935, the great Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, turned it into a museum. Indeed. Indeed.
The whole idea is that Ataturk wanted to put a stop to Greek claims on the Hagia Sophia. So, okay, if I keep it as a mosque, there will always be this outcry all the time, you know, well, it is time for it to be returned to the Greek Orthodox Church. So he decided, make it a museum, make it a secular monument. So that's it. No one can claim it. Muslims, Greeks, no one.
Well, that all changed in March 2019 when President Erdogan formally announced his intention to change the museum back into a mosque, which then formally happened in July 2020. Friday prayers were said there inside Hagia Sophia for the first time in 86 years. This is a kind of a dividing line. Hagia Sophia, is it a secular museum or a religious place of worship, a mosque?
Orhan Pamuk, the famous Turkish novelist, he said, Kemal Ataturk changed Hagia Sophia from a mosque to a museum, honoring all previous Greek Orthodox and Latin Catholic history, making it a symbol of Turkish modern secularism. He said it loud and clear. Kemal Ataturk changed it into a museum as a symbol of Turkish modern secularism. Well, President Erdogan has said that that was a very big mistake.
So, Eamon, you have it, a question perfectly symbolizing the clash of civilizations we've been discussing throughout the season. Is Hagia Sophia a museum or a mosque? Well, if you ask my honest opinion, and this is just a personal preference, for me, I look at the Hagia Sophia and just next to it is the Blue Mosque.
And I see that the Blue Mosque was built by the Ottoman sultans because they were finding it rather difficult to pray in a place which was full of the icons of Jesus and Virgin Mary. So they built that mosque specifically for that. So if they were not comfortable praying in the Hagia Sophia, then why not return it back to being a church? Right.
for the Greek Orthodox. No, seriously, because... Amen, always with the outsider perspective. Look, there is already a monument to Islam there, which is the Blue Mosque. And you could restore this as a church for the Greek Orthodox. And you end up with a
Perfect symbol of coexistence. Well, you see, Erdogan is giving voice to a pre-modern conception of history where Islam was triumphant and the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 1453 was God's will. The secularists are saying, no, no, we need to be modern. It's a modern story where religion is something...
old, moving forward, secular, scientific, rational modernity, perfectly symbolized by a museum. Whereas you, Eamon, you have a postmodern narrative. You just wish everyone to get along. All religions are equal. Everything's relative. Christians can have their church. Muslims can have their mosque. And, you know, why do we need to fight about it? Well, I'm sick of conflict, Thomas. I want people to get along. I'm
That's why we are here, unconflicted. Okay, okay. I'll give you that much. Right, we're meant to be talking about the Cold War. But my goodness, we do meander, don't we, Eamon? And in our last episode, we talked about India's first successful nuclear test, Operation Smiling Buddha, in 1974.
And in this episode, we're talking about an event from that same year, Turkey's invasion of the island of Cyprus in 1974, an island that is still divided to this day between a Greek-speaking republic in the south and a Turkish-speaking republic in the north. The only Turkey recognizes that Turkish-speaking republic.
But to explain that invasion properly and to put it in the right context, we have to go, as we always do, back much further into history, back to the rise of Islam and to the epic contest between the new caliphate and the age-old Roman Empire. And I'm calling a spade a spade here. It wasn't the Byzantine Empire. That's a slur. It was the Roman Empire. The jihad of jihads. If I'm not mistaken, Eamon, ISIS and other maniacs,
are still sort of fighting that jihad, aren't they? It's all about bringing down Rome. Oh yeah, for them, Rome referred to Europe and any territories that were under the domain of the Roman Empire, whether in the East or the West. And they do truly believe in the prophecies of Islamic eschatology that...
Not only Constantinople will fall, but also Rome, the second city within Christendom, will fall too. I see. So they're extending the prophecies to include the city of Rome. I'm not sure that's how it was understood originally, but that doesn't matter. The point is, is the epic contest between the Caliphate and the Roman Empire, the Great Jihad, lasted 820 years, from the Battle of Yarmouk along the Syrian-Jordanian border in 636,
to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. I cannot overstate how important this struggle was to world history, not to mention just how cool it was. I love the idea of this endless contest between the Arab Muslims and the Christian Greeks. It's not considered polite to say so these days, but jihad, the military struggle to expand the caliphate, was a fundamental part of early Islam.
And the final conquest of the Roman Empire, of its glorious capital city, Constantinople, had religious and even apocalyptic meaning for Muslims throughout those eight centuries. 822 years. And within these 822 years of persistent, continuous struggle,
49 attempts at conquering Constantinople itself. Oh my God. As if they were obsessed with it. They were obsessed with it. The march lands between the two empires became fixed and stretched diagonally from ancient Cilicia, you know, where the Turks
of Adana is today. Basically to the present day Turkish-Georgian border. So this was sort of diagonal line across the Taurus Mountains, across the Anatolian plain. And military incursions into Anatolia became a religious, almost ritualized part of Islam for centuries. - Yeah, yeah, many caliphs actually, like I mean, used to say that one year I go to the Hajj,
And one year I crossed the Taurus Mountains. That's right. It was like the counterpart to the Hajj. The Hajj and the Jihad against the Romans were the two great kind of caliphal rituals. Absolutely. And, you know, just to give a sense of how important this contest was in the imagination of Muslims, and especially how important the building, Hagia Sophia, was, I found a couple of quotes.
both from the 13th century, both from Persians, actually. One says, Oh, Hagia Sophia, that great temple. Oh, the wonders and antiquities in the Hippodrome. Constantinople is greater even than its name. May God make it an abode for Islam by his grace and generosity. God, the exalted, the willing. Ha!
Yeah, because don't forget the prophecies. They were ever so present in the back of the minds of these Muslims. Yes, I mean, the fighting went on and on. And in general, the Byzantines were able to defend the line. Even for a couple of centuries, they managed to conquer a bit of Syria back from the caliphate. But eventually, that march land, that border, which the Arabs called al-Awassam, this border remained essentially unbreached
until the year, the key year of 1071. - Ah, the Battle of Manzikert. - We did discuss the Battle of Manzikert in episode two, the one on Azerbaijan, when we talked about the arrival of the Oghuz Turks onto the scene of the Middle East.
Well, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Seljuks, Ogu's Turkish confederation, overran Anatolia. Islamdom reached the Bosphorus. This is, in fact, the context for the Crusades, where the Roman emperor called upon the pope in Rome to help him throw off the Seljuks and retake Anatolia. But, you know, it didn't really work out like that. Yeah.
They were very unwelcome guests. Let's put it this way. Those Catholic pests. Anyway, we don't have time to tell the whole story, which is a pity since it's the greatest story ever told. But eventually an upstart Turkish warlord called Osman rose up.
gained leadership of all the other Turks, and founded a dynasty named after him, which we call the Ottomans, which gained control of Anatolia, managed to cross over the Bosphorus, and slowly, slowly conquer all of southeastern Europe, until finally, in 1453, Osman's great-great-great-great-grandson, Mehmed II,
conquered Constantinople. Ayman, describe what this would have meant to Muslims at the time, and in fact, what it means to Muslims to this day. I can tell you that the Muslims who were living in the 1450s were totally demoralized, you know, and for very good reasons. First of all, they just recovered two centuries ago from the biggest calamity ever befell them, which is the Mongol invasions.
and at the same time they lost Andalusia. There was a very little sliver of land in Granada and that's it, that's all what is left of the great Muslim civilization in Spain. So at the time they felt that their civilization was almost gone and then suddenly out of nowhere the news came that Mehmed II conquered Constantinople and it's now in Muslim hands and the prophecy has been fulfilled.
the Muslim historians of that era could not have written with more jubilation and in a more awe of what really happened. So it was a real shot in the arm for Islam's sense of confidence, sense of sort of self-esteem. Absolutely. So the conquest of Constantinople in 1453
couldn't have come at a better time, let's put it this way, for the Muslims. Well, what about today, though? I know the Greeks still remember 1453 as a great tragedy, but what do Muslims today think of that year, 1453, and that epic achievement, the conquest of Constantinople? Does it factor in Islamic historical understanding today? Yeah, because as a young man growing up in Saudi Arabia,
The reality is that there were only two sultans of the Ottoman Empire that we knew their names and we knew their biography: Mehmed II and Suleiman the Magnificent. The two greatest Ottoman sultans, really. Indeed. And why? For their conquests. So the fact is that there were dramas, there were school texts of a drama, of a theatrical drama about the conquest of Constantinople.
And, you know, the great characters that fought that war from Genoese mercenaries, you know, from the Janissaries, the Ottoman, you know, stormtroopers, if you can call them this way. The huge Hungarian cannon. And the Hungarian cannon, Urban, you know, of all people. I think it's important to really try to give a sense of the Ottoman state and how it understood itself. I mean, it called itself the eternal state.
The Ottoman Sultan claimed an extraordinary range of titles. He was the Sultan of Sultans, the Khan of Khans, Commander of the Faithful, Caliph, i.e. successor of the Prophet, custodian of the three holy cities, and also Emperor of the Romans, Roman Caesar. That was one of his titles. So in terms of the grand historical narrative of all the Abrahamic faiths,
The Ottoman Sultan was truly the universal emperor. He united in his person all the realms, all the kingdoms. He was the protector and guarantor of all faith in the one God. Oh, yeah.
And that is why the Ottomans created the system which called the Millet system, which came from the Arabic word "millah". Because you see in the Quran it says "millata Ibrahim" which means "the faith of Ibrahim". So it is understood not to be a traditional religion, you know, in the traditional sense with rituals, but more of teachings like, you know, faith from the teaching point of view.
But in the Ottoman Empire, it became ultimately really a signifier of your subjecthood, because the Ottoman Empire based the identity of its subjects on their religious tradition, and the millets were almost like state subjects.
departments where they comprised judicial courts and things. So a Christian, an Orthodox Christian, would go and seek legal redress in his own courts, which were run by the Orthodox Church in that case. This system exists to this day, actually, in some Arab countries which were ruled by the Ottomans.
For example, there were three recognized millets in our faith besides Islam. So Islam, of course, basically is, you know, at the top of the food chain. And then you have the three other religions, three other millets. You have Judaism, you have Christian Armenians, and you have Christian Greeks. They were actually called, it was called the Roman millet.
literally a millet room, the Roman millet, which was the Orthodox church and all Orthodox Christians, whatever their ethnic background. So Serbs, even Arab Orthodox, there was the Armenian millet, which actually included all non-Orthodox Christians, the Syriac Christians, the cop,
They were within the Armenian millet and then the Jewish millet, which obviously was for the Jews. The reason for this system to exist and having all of these religious communities having their own different kind of courts and tribunals and arbitration committees and all of that is because the divorces, the marriages, inheritances,
and intracommunal transactions, all of these were going to be difficult to be done according to Sharia only. You can't impose Sharia on Copts in Egypt or on Armenians in the Eastern Anatolia. I mean, that's why they were given the rights to have their own courts so they can have their own marriages, they can have their own divorces, they can have their own inheritances, and they can transact among themselves.
So the court system for them was essential and that is why the millet system was there because there was no secular model
modern nation state as we discussed before Thomas there was no secular state at all there was nothing like a modern state there wasn't sort of the rule of law in the way we understand the rule of law this one law for everyone all people equal under the law it wasn't that way at all it was a traditional patrimonial hierarchical system where each religious community governed itself
to a large degree. For example, the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, the chief prelate of the Orthodox Church, was essentially given secular rule over the room millet, over the Roman millet. All Romans
were under his rule, because the sultan thought, well, the whole empire is under my rule, especially Muslims, and I delegate that rule to the patriarch to rule the Roman Christians. I think the point, though, moving forward, is it means that in a pre-nationalist age, the citizens or the subjects of the Ottoman Empire
Empire did not identify with their nation, with their ethnos, with their language, that sort of, they identified with their religious tradition. Okay, so moving on, you know, basically the hundred years after the conquest of Constantinople, basically 1450 to 1550, let's say, everything changed. And I mean everything kind of everywhere. Early modernity, as it's called, you know, the modern world was born.
The main thing that happened in that century is that the three what are called gunpowder empires were established. Now, we have talked about the end of all three of these empires in this season of conflict. Now we're talking about the period of their formation. The Ottomans, they conquer Constantinople in 1453. They reach their territorial peak in 1566.
So in that hundred years, they become one big gunpowder empire. The Safavids in the same century conquer Iran and create the second big gunpowder empire, the Safavid Empire. And from 1526, the Mughals conquer India, establishing the third great gunpowder empire.
empire, the Mughal empire. So you have three huge empires controlling the whole world from basically Algeria to Bangladesh and from Hungary to Yemen. They're religiously Muslim, culturally Persianate, dynastically Turkic, and politically Mongol. This was really the world. And the establishment of this imperial zone
you know, changed everything and it's the theater, becomes the theater against which Europe begins its ascent to power. You know, Europe and specifically Christendom here was only, you know, in Europe. I mean, it was only, like, I mean, in a corner in Europe. And they felt that because the Ottomans were encroaching, you know, from, you know, the Balkans and, you know, going all the way to the gates of Vienna.
So the Habsburgs, the Russians and everyone basically were really, really frightened of this new empire. And therefore the Europeans were looking for how do we bypass this great empire so we can conduct trade with the East without having to go through them and having to pay significant amount of money to them. Just like today's Europeans thinking, how do we get rid of Russian energy and how do we get rid of
paying so much to the Russian Empire. It's true. I mean, the Ottomans actually closed off the Mediterranean to non-Ottoman shipping to some large extent. And yet, as you say, the Europeans then needed to find new trade routes, which demanded that they explore not just the sea, but the oceans, which had never really been done properly before. This required the Europeans to develop sophisticated naval technology to allow them to explore the oceans.
In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India via the Cape of Good Hope around Africa. So this is the other great thing that's happening during this very pivotal century. At the same time, Greek intellectuals who were fleeing the Ottoman conquest brought their literature, ancient Greek literature and learning with them to Italy.
This gave a new Greek flavor to the growing movement, you know, known as Renaissance humanism and injected Western Europe with new ideas or with a new way of developing intellectually. You know, this led to the Reformation in the 16th century, the scientific revolution in the 17th century, and the Enlightenment in the 18th century. So the Ottoman conquest and the establishment of these gunpowder empires
had a knock-on effect in that way too, leading to the development of Europe. - There you have it, Europe.
facing an enemy armed with two frightening weapons. One was the massive cannons they used and their gunpowder. And the other frightening weapon was the Janissaries. You know, European boys kidnapped from Europe, from the Balkans and other places and brought up to be the crack troops of the Ottoman Empire, the Janissaries. So the Janissaries
with the aid of the canons were the scourge of Europe. So Europe and European kingdoms and European royal families, I mean, had to come together and to try to really explore more scientifically how to counter the Ottoman advances and how to actually build better canons to counter the Ottoman canons. And that led
further and further towards not only competition between the great European powers, but between them and the Ottoman Empire. And that led to many inventions, the Renaissance coming in with greater scientific discoveries and openness towards embracing science and, of course, openness towards exploring the oceans, as you said.
And you have the recipe for a great power to rise. Yes. So these wars were like an engine for technological development in Europe. And they also forged the modern European state, a centralized, bureaucratic, military state able to prosecute war on a big scale, first to defend itself from Ottoman aggression, and then to push the Ottomans back to some extent and reclaim some of the lost lands for Christendom.
Overnight, Dunkin's pumpkin spice coffee has sent folks into a cozy craze. I'm Lauren LaTulip reporting live from home in my hand-knit turtleneck that my Nana made me. Mmm, cinnamony. The home with Dunkin' is where you want to be.
All right. So that's a little breathless, sweeping description of the rise of modern Europe. But this whole episode is supposed to be about Cyprus. Yeah. So let's spend a moment and talk about Cyprus. So the first thing to know about Cyprus is that Aphrodite was born there. Wow.
Oh, I didn't know that. Did you know that? Oh, no. Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She was born in Cyprus, and there was an ancient Greek sanctuary to her honor on the island of Cyprus. So Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, the whole shit show passed through Cyprus. But in the early Islamic period, a near miracle happened. It's called the condominium. So
The jihad of the caliphate against the Roman Empire is raging. But somehow, by some miracle, the island of Cyprus was shared between them. They agreed to rule Cyprus jointly between the Roman emperor and the Muslim caliph. And taxes were distributed equally to both sides. And for many hundreds of years, Cyprus was this place of weird Muslim Christian peace. Did you know that, Eamon?
Oh, yes. I knew about the condominium arrangement and it's all due to trade. No one wanted to kill the golden goose. Oh, Cyprus was important for trade. Oh, yes. No question. Trade, industry, products, you know, food, everything you can imagine. The ports were very important. And so the two empires decided not to destroy it. Its wealth then must have encouraged Richard the Lionheart because he conquered it during the crusade.
which began several centuries of so-called Frankish rule on Cyprus. And then the Venetians grabbed it. And then finally, in 1571, the Ottomans conquered it and incorporated it into their empire. The millet system applied to Cyprus as it applied to the rest of the empire, of course. So its Christian inhabitants were governed by the archbishop of
of Cyprus. Now this is important for the 74 Turkish invasion. So the Archbishop of Cyprus became a very important political figure on the island.
Anyway, in 1878, Britain invaded Cyprus, and it became the first Ottoman province controlled by the British Empire. At the time, the Cypriots, the vast majority of whom were Greek-speaking Christians, by and large gave the British their support. And this is because they expected the British to arrange for Cyprus to unite with their fellow Greek speakers in Cyprus.
the kingdom of Greece. But where did this country come from? There we were talking about the Ottomans and their sublime eternal state. But what is this kingdom of Greece? Well, it came as a result of the Greek Revolution. The Greek Revolution of 1821. Absolutely. The first
first successful national uprising that resulted in a major province of the Ottoman Empire becoming an independent kingdom. Yes, so right, as I said, Greek learning traveled west after the Turkish conquest, and this learning contributed massively to Renaissance humanism.
But then in the 18th century, networks of Greeks across Europe, you know, merchants, traders, etc., brought back Enlightenment ideas to their fellow Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. So Greek ideas went west, and then they came back 200, 300 years later to the Greeks there. Until then, the Orthodox Christian inhabitants of the empire, and especially the Greek-speaking ones, called themselves Romei, Romans. That's how they understood themselves. They were Romans.
But in the meantime, Western Europeans, like the English, the French, they'd sort of adopted ancient Greece and especially ancient Athens as the semi-mythical font of their own new modern civilization.
And Greek speakers began adopting that story for themselves as well. Now, this led Greek national self-identity to be split, just like I often say that Muslim self-identity is split between a Greek, a Hellenic identity rooted in the idea of ancient Greece and a Roman identity rooted in the history of the Christianized Roman Empire of the East.
Anyway, with these new nationalist ideas, the Greek Revolution broke out in 1821. This is a massive oversimplification of what is a fascinating and complex story. But revolt broke out among Greeks throughout the European half of the Ottoman Empire. I mean, all the way from what is today Romania, obviously Greece, in Thrace, in Constantinople itself. So the Greeks were spread out all over the place.
Revolt broke out and was quickly suppressed everywhere except in the southern half of modern Greece, the Peloponnese, Attica, where Athens is, that part of the country, where the rebels managed to really hold their own. To fight them, the sultan in Istanbul reached out to a longtime friend of the podcast. You know who I'm talking about, don't you, Eamon? Oh, yeah, Muhammad Ali of Egypt. Yes, they called Muhammad Ali of Egypt.
He sent his son Ibrahim to crush the Greeks. He was fresh off crushing the first Saudis. Do you remember? Yeah, that's why there is so much affinity between the Saudis and the Greeks because they both felt the Turkish wrath through the power of Muhammad Ali and his sons Ibrahim and Qunsuk. It is amazing how Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim come up again and again in these podcast episodes. I mean, they were so important. So,
So Muhammad Ali sends Ibrahim to crush the Greek uprising, and Ibrahim would have done it too. But then Britain and France decided to intervene. They destroyed Ibrahim's fleet at the famous Battle of Navarino, and eventually in 1932, the Kingdom of Greece was proclaimed. It was a very weird thing.
It had a German king from Bavaria. It was a puppet of foreign powers. But nonetheless, it was independent of the Ottoman Empire. And it was this Greek kingdom that 50 years later, when the British took Cyprus, the Archbishop of Cyprus, speaking on behalf of the island's Christian majority, made it clear that he expected Cyprus to unite with it.
But nonetheless, 50 years later, after the British took Cyprus, the Archbishop of Cyprus, speaking on behalf of the island's Christian majority, made it clear that he expected Cyprus to unite with the Kingdom of Greece, a policy known as Enosis, Union, a notorious policy that would in time lead to the 1974 Turkish invasion. But Thomas, why would you think the British would give up this strategic policy
prize in the Eastern Mediterranean, which overlooks the Levant, and it will become a useful, useful place for the British to launch the invasion of Egypt, and later they would be able to control the Suez Canal from. Why would they do that? Well, they in fact wouldn't, Eamon. So the British declined the archbishop's suggestion of uniting with Greece and kept Cyprus to itself. Now, then the world ended.
I'm talking about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. We've told that story a hundred ways already across several episodes, but this time we're going to tell it through the prism of one of the greatest men of the 20th century and certainly the greatest Ottoman of the 20th century,
Ataturk. Go for it, Eamon. Ah, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Do you know that he was born of all places in Thessaloniki? He was born in modern-day Greece. He was born in 1881 in Salonika. Indeed. And the irony is that while he came from humble means, he was orphaned at a young age, and nonetheless, he thought
through his intermittent education, he excelled to the point where one of his teachers was calling him perfect, Kamal, you know, which is the Arabic word, it's an Arabic word lent to Turkish. So he then finally finds his way through into the military academy in Istanbul, graduates, and one of the first battles he will engage in, guess against who?
The Italians in Libya. Indeed, in Libya of all places, which we talked about in the last episode. He was one of those who fought against the Libyans on behalf of the Ottomans before, of course, the Ottomans surrendered Libya to the Italians.
Then he was stationed in many different places. He participated in the War of the Balkans. And when World War I began, he was in Bulgaria. By that time, he was already many years into being a member of an underground revolutionary military movement that wanted to overthrow the monarchy and the sultan.
Well, it was certainly an anti-monarchical secret society of military officers, a bit like the one that the young officers movement that Nasser was a part of, the young officers movement that Gaddafi would be a part of. It's funny, Ataturk in a way paved the way. He joined this secret society of military officers who were part of a long gestating reformist movement within the Ottoman Empire.
Indeed. He really wanted to emulate France. I mean, he was an admirer of European secular renaissance. And he said exactly this: "There are many cultures, but there is only one civilization, and that is Europe." Yes, he was definitely a pro-westerner in the sense of wanting the Ottoman Empire to reform along European lines and to become a secular modern state like European states.
So World War One breaks out. That's where we left out of Turkey and Bulgaria. He's he's assigned to Gallipoli. He commanded the Turkish forces at Gallipoli, a tremendous victory. And then he was sent to eastern Anatolia, where he trounced the Russians. And eventually he was in charge of the Seventh Army fighting the British in Syria and Palestine. Yes, but that campaign was doomed because he was under equipped.
And the British, of course, were overwhelming the Turks, not only with their forces, but with the auxiliary Arab forces that were accompanying them. Which we talked about in previous episodes, the episode on Syria, the episode on the Hashemites. After the war, the Ottoman Empire, which was on the side of the Germans, it lost.
It was occupied by the victorious allies. And Ataturk becomes a founding member of the Turkish national movement. So this aimed at securing Turkish national sovereignty. And to that end, it opposed the sultan, Mehmed IV, because they considered him a collaborator with the allies, because he was actually willing to negotiate some kind of truce with them. The truce in question is the infamous Treaty of Sèvres.
Actually, the Treaty of Sèvres, what it did is to completely dismember the Ottoman Empire into many zones of influence from Levant and Iraq, which was divided between the British and the French. You have the Armenians taking a chunk, the Georgians, the Soviets taking a chunk, and you have the Italians taking a huge chunk as well as the Greeks. And the rump Ottoman Empire, the remaining rump,
would be just a puppet state for the Europeans. The treaty did not abolish the Ottoman Empire, but yes, it greatly reduced its territory. So the sultan agreed to this. The Ataturk found this to be totally unacceptable. At the same time, the treaty put the Aegean city of Smyrna, which is modern day Izmir, and the surrounding region under Greek protection.
It called for a plebiscite to determine whether Smyrna and its environs would stay in the empire or join the Greek state.
Now, this really got Ataturk's blood up because the Aegean coast of Turkey, as it now is, is very economically and strategically important. There were a lot of Turkish speakers in the area, although arguably the majority were Greek. This is a big showdown. It's called the Greco-Turkish War. The Greeks had invaded and occupied Smyrna the year before, and following the treaty,
The Greeks began marching inland to conquer as much land as they could, even in their dreams, maybe Constantinople itself. The Greeks were really fired up. They're going to finally get it back, you know. But it didn't work out that way. Indeed, because of the fact that
But Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gathered the remnants of the Ottoman army, united them in coherent, coordinated units, and started what is now known as the Turkish War of Independence. Exactly. And they...
trounced the Greeks, they pushed them into the sea, burning down Smyrna. Well over 100,000 people, civilians, were killed in the process. Ataturk has been accused of masterminding that effort. Obviously, Turks contest this, but it seems pretty clear that he did that.
It was very brutal. The Greeks remember it today with great sadness. In fact, it happened 100 years ago this year. The burning of Smyrna, the expulsion of one and a half million Greek speakers from Asia Minor, from Anatolia, and at the same time, a half a million Muslims from what is now Greece to Turkey. There was this incredible exchange of populations, really intense.
extinguishing 3,000 years of Greek inhabitation of Asia Minor. It's called the Asia Minor disaster in Greece, and it really reverberates to this day. This war of independence is what cemented
Mustafa Kemal's legacy and legend, and that is why he was given in later years the title of Ataturk. Ataturk actually is not his surname. Ataturk is a title given to him by the Turkish media at the time, and it means father of the Turks. Father of the Turk. As we said, Ataturk was dedicated to Turkish sovereignty and independence, but he was not anti-Western. Quite the contrary. He was anti-traditional.
and staunchly pro-Western. He just didn't want Western countries to bully Turkey or boss it around. And to this end, following his victory in the Turkish War of Independence, he established a very rigorous revolutionary regime in Turkey.
Basically transforming Turkey into a modern secular nation state. As we've said in the past, he abolished the caliphate. He launched a policy of Turkification. Everyone becomes a Turk. He abolished the Arabic script and introduced the Roman alphabet.
He banned traditional costume, forced everyone to wear Western dress. He liberated women to some large extent. He, in one big galloping go, transformed Turkey from a traditional patrimonial Ottoman hierarchical state into a modern state, and in so doing, became the model for all of the great
modernizers that we've talked about this season from Reza Shah in Iran to Nasser in Egypt to all of them. Ataturk was the first. When it comes to Ataturk's reforms, they are viewed with mixed feelings in Turkey even today. The urban populations love him so much.
The rural, not so much. They are grateful for his victories and for the founding of the republic. They are not so grateful for what they consider to be an attack on faith, which he did, and the banning of Arabic, even as a liturgical language.
You know, the adhan, the call to prayer, actually, was done in Turkish for many years because, you know, of Mustafa Kemal's reforms. In the Arab world, however, no, he is universally despised and hated. Really? Yeah, for two reasons. The first is because he got rid of the Arabic script.
and the adoption of the Latin script and for even trying to get rid of as many lone Arabic words in the Turkish language. That's right. He purged the Turkish language of Arabic words. Indeed. So, you know, they saw this as
a rabid anti-Arabism. It was. Yes, it was, rather than any attempt at modernization. I'm trying to be fair to him. I mean, from his own point of view, that he experienced defeat in the Syrian campaign at the hands of not only the British, but the Arabs too. So he might have some valid reasons, but he, of course, went too far in his anti-Arab sentiments.
And so he is hated, as well as the fact that they believe that he went too far in attacking fundamentals of Islam as a religion, including basically the teaching of the Quran and the call to prayer in Turkish. - Well, rushing to the end here, we can quickly summarize the Second World War period. Turkey was neutral.
Until the very end of the Second World War, when it joined on the side of the Allies, luckily for it. And after the war, the Soviet Union actually started a big military buildup in the Black Sea and the Caucasus, intending to, you know, not necessarily to conquer Turkey, but certainly to force its will upon it. But the Americans sailed to the rescue and Stalin backed off.
Now, Greece, you know, ultimately we're talking about a conflict between Greeks and Turks in Cyprus. So Greece in the Second World War was conquered by Germany. And after its liberation by the Allies, the country fell into a terrible civil war between communists and anti-communist royalists. And the royalists won, obviously.
So both countries fell within the orbit of the West. Both countries joined NATO in 1952, and it was understood that perhaps by being in NATO, their age-old rivalry, the rivalry between Greece and Turkey, the rivalry between Greeks and Turks would be laid to rest, except for Cyprus.
And I started this episode saying, in order to understand what happened in 1974 in Cyprus, you have to go back to the beginnings of Islam. You have to go back to different narratives of Constantinople, of Greekness, of Turkishness, of what these things mean, because they all played out in a big and very tragic way on the island of Cyprus beginning in the 20th century.
As far as post-World War II Cyprus, we could say that the inhabitants of the islands were divided between 80% Greek-speaking Christians
and 20% Turkish-speaking Muslims. And the island was ruled by the British. Throughout all of this, throughout the First World War, the Second World War, throughout all of these things, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it had remained peacefully within the British Empire. Indeed. And they had two massive bases there, military bases on the island. The British did. Yeah. Now, I say peacefully, but in the early 1950s,
an anti-British nationalist movement was founded on Cyprus. This is called the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters, or AOKA, which was dedicated to the cause of Enosis, union with Greece.
So the leader of EOKA was a former officer in the Greek army, a hero of the Greek resistance to the Nazis. His name was Yorgos Grivas, and he was working with the Archbishop of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, to oust the British.
Aeoca thought, we've got to get rid of the British, and once we get rid of the British, then we can unite with Greece. So to that end, a guerrilla campaign of increasing brutality against British agents in Cyprus began. The British counterattacked. The Greek government was secretly providing armaments to Aeoca. It grew bloody.
This sounds very much like what happened to the British, you know, during their mandate over the Israel-Palestine territories. Yeah, very similar. Yeah, the same, like, you know, I mean, what happened in the Malaya, what happened in Kenya. Oh, my God. Like, I mean, it's always the same story. I mean, the British fighting insurgents. It's true. You know, the end of the British Empire was forced.
full of these, well, what about India? The last episode, the partition in India. The British Empire ended with calls for partition, with calls for ethnic cleansing, it was really difficult. - Yes, but what about the 20% inhabitants of the island? The Cypriot Turks were really nervous about union with Greece because
In the island of Cyprus, they are 20%. They will have 20% of the season parliament. They will have some influence. But if they are part of a much greater Greek population, their influence would be completely diluted and they will have no say whatsoever. They were afraid of that.
that. And that is why they were advocating for something else completely different from the policy of union with Greece. They were advocating for Taksim. Taksim is yet another Arabic loan word into Turkish, sorry, Ataturk.
which means partition. So they advocated for partition. Yeah, so the Greeks were advocating union with Greece. The Turks were advocating partition between Greeks and Turks, two separate states, very similar to the Palestinian situation and the Palestinian debate that had gone on a few years before. You know, the Turks had reason to be afraid. I mean, Cypriot Turks I'm talking about. Intercommunal violence broke out between the Cypriot Greeks and the Cypriot Turks.
And it was really mainly the Greek majority attacking the Turkish minority. The Turks, I think, rightly feared for their lives. Indeed. And I think the sentiments, unfortunately, among the Greek Cypriots were rather unkind
inflammatory and poisonous towards the Turkish inhabitants of the islands. They were viewing them for some reason as invaders, even though they were there for hundreds of years. And they were always viewed as if they were non-indigenous to the island. One can see this more widely. There was still a lot of tension and violence between Greek speakers and Turkish speakers inside Turkey. Many hundreds of thousands of Greeks still lived in Turkey.
And there were pogroms in Istanbul against Greek communities. So the Greeks in Turkey felt like they were being attacked, rightly, by Turks. In Cyprus, this spilled over, Greeks attacking Turks there. It was a very sad story, the sort of story that we're familiar with here on Conflicted. Well, in the end, in 1960, in London, Greece and Turkey and representatives from both Cypriot communities agreed a compromise solution.
Cyprus gained its independence and would have a Greek-speaking president, but it would have a Turkish-speaking vice president, and each would have the power of veto. 30% of government ministers would be Turks. This was the compromise. At the same time, the British would retain their two big military bases on the island, and Greece and Turkey would station army contingents of their own on the island to guarantee its independence.
The first president of independent Cyprus was the archbishop Makarios. And if that sounds weird, remember the Ottoman legacy. Churchmen were the ethnarchs, as they were called in Greek, of their people. People were guided by religious leaders.
Most of the archbishop's appointments to the government were AOKA members, still passionate about Enosis, and most Turkish-speaking ministers were still aiming for Taksim. So the solution that was brokered in London soon broke down, and fighting broke out again in 1963, requiring UN peacekeepers to get involved. And we're really talking about deaths in the hundreds.
population displacements, burning down of villages, I mean, serious violence. - Poor Father Makarios. The man really wanted, as we say in Arabic, to hold the stick from the middle and to please everyone because he wanted the whole of Cyprus to be united, but also at the same time not part of Greece.
That, in the end, did not please anyone. It shows that you cannot please everyone. Yeah, he was looking for a neutral solution, neither Enosis or Taksim.
which got everyone's backs up, actually. Now, the big thing that happened in 1967, in Greece, a military junta came to power in a coup. Now, that's a huge story in its own right. But for now, the new Greek regime in Athens supported Enosis, union with Greece, a Cypriot union with Greece, and Archbishop Makarios was standing in their way.
In 1971, Aeolca comes back and begins paramilitary operations on Cyprus again, this time though largely fighting other Greeks, Greeks who were opposed to Ennosus. The Cypriot National Guard was allied with the Junta in Athens, and all of this culminated in 1974 to a coup against Archbishop Makarios, sponsored by Greece.
carried out by the Cypriot National Guard, and a new passionately pro-Enosis government was installed in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. Turkey was not pleased. No one was pleased to some extent, except, you know, Greece. But nonetheless, I think that coup
really got rid of Makarios, but also got rid of any chance of peaceful coexistence on the island. Turkey called on Britain to fulfill its obligations and to intervene to protect the island's neutrality. But Britain, you know, this is 1974, Britain just was not in the mood. It refused. So,
Turkey invaded. So the prime minister of Turkey, Bolent Ecevit, decided that now is the time. It's now or never. If we don't intervene, there could be the possibility or the probability of ethnic cleansing on the island and that the Turkish minority there were really in peril. Or at least that's what he said and that is the narrative of the Turkish government at the time. So the troops were sent
and they established beachheads, and they started pushing the Greek military and Ioka militias all the way back to what we now know as the separating line between the two. The green line. Another green line. Yeah. We have Belfast, and we have, goodness, how many other? Talking about Belfast and Ireland, like, I mean, another island, you know, where the British were there, and, you know, it went into, well, poop. Yeah.
How many partitions now have we had with Kashmir, Palestine, now Cyprus? Yeah, Yemen, it was partitioned between north and south. So yeah, talk about it. So reality here is that the Turks, when they established that green line, it became the line through which
you know, Greeks in the north will flee south and Turks in the south will flee north. And I would say like a transfer of population happened quite quickly actually. - It was a sad echo of the transfer of populations after the Smyrna disaster in 1922, where both sides swapped population. And that's largely where it remains. 30% or so of the island, a Turkish Northern Republic,
internationally recognized Republic of Greece centered in the south of the island with the Greek speakers. And it was a real war. It lasted several weeks. The Greek army got involved. There was serious fighting. It was a real war. And the consequences of that war remain with us to this day. Now, I think
coming to the end of this very long, very twisting episode of Conflicted, that it's ironic that during the Middle Ages, when the jihad against the Eastern Roman Empire was at its most persistent, the island of Cyprus was peacefully ruled by a neutral condominium where power was shared equally by both parties. And yet now, the island is bitterly divided between two fiercely nationalistic ethnic communities.
nationalism, Eamon, nationalism. It is the problem. You're a big supporter, but nationalism, it just brings chaos wherever it comes. Thomas, Thomas, Thomas, how many times I have to tell you, it's not the nation state. It is the absence of monarchy.
Well, we've come full circle. We started with Queen Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee, and here you are once again haranguing me about the need for a monarch. So you think that a monarch, a king of Cyprus, would solve the problem of Cyprus? Yes. They could have proclaimed King Macarius. And...
An archbishop. You mean a caliph, then. One man to unite within his person, secular and religious authority. Dear listener, thank you for listening to this long and complex episode of Conflicted. I think, if nothing else, it's done a great job of setting up our next episode, which is a story of ethnic, intercommunal, sectarian violence and chaos, compared to which Cyprus was a walk in the park.
I'm referring to, of course, that beautiful land on the other side of the Levantine Sea, Lebanon. A reminder that you can follow the show over on Facebook and Twitter at MHConflicted. And for a deeper dive on some of the subjects we cover here on Conflicted, head over to Facebook and search Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group. There you will find other fans of the show engaging in heated debates, enlightening conversations, and just generally geeking out over Conflicted-related topics.
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Bea Duncan. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Production support and fact-checking by Talia Augustidis. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.