Ottoman History Podcast - The End of Ottoman Crete

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

with Uğur Z. Peçe hosted by Sam Dolbee | In the 1890s, Ottoman Crete descended into communal violence between its Christian and Muslim inhabitants, abetted by foreign powers and Ottoman officials alike. In this episode, Uğur Z. Peçe explains how this conflict--which he calls a civil war--came about, what it meant in people's intimately connected everyday lives, and how it shaped the end of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, Cretan refugees resettled elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire became a key part of various protest movements including boycotts. Uğur speaks with us about these topics while traveling through present-day Crete, considering, among other things, the unexpected connections between the Eastern Black Sea and Crete, the island's distinctive landscape, and snails.         « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. Five years ago, I took an overnight bus from Istanbul to the eastern Black Sea city of Rize with my friend Ur. I am Urzekeri Apece. I am an assistant professor of history at Lehigh University. In the middle of the night, there was an argument about whether the bus would stop to allow travelers to pray. When the driver objected, an older woman complained, Pursa Yunanistan Dil. This isn't Greece. The bus stopped. I kept thinking about that line the whole trip. We went to Uruz home village amidst the tea trees and fog and green. On the map it's called Gunesu, but most

everyone called it Potomia, the old Greek name in honor of its once roaring river. I found myself struggling to understand the regional accent, as cha became sa, just like with my Greek friends. It wasn't Greece, but it had some resemblances. And this is a special episode because those cicadas and goats you hear in the distance? Definitely in Greece. Crete to be exact. It might seem far away from the eastern Black Sea, but in other ways, it isn't. In Rize and among his family, Uur is called by his middle name, Zekaria, which his grandfather gave him. At the time of my birth, which I don't remember obviously, my grandfather read into my ear,

because this is the tradition in many places in Turkey, in many families in Turkey, that you are born and someone around you reads into your ear your name with a prayer. So that was the name that was read into my ear by my late grandfather in a village of Rize. And in Greece, he went by the Greek version of that name, Zaharias. When I started visiting Crete, spending time in Crete, spending time in Greece, other parts of the country, that name came back only with the Greek version Zaharias, which made me see the Greek name.

It's not only Ur's name that brings together Turkish and Greek. It's also Snails. The word used in both the Eastern Black Sea and Crete is not the standard Greek Saligari or Turkish Saliongos, but rather something else, Hohli. Snails in both places are called hohli. The word snail in Greek is saligari, and usually it is only in Crete that the word hohli is used. And the village that I was born in,

Symbalaxi is a Turkish speaking village, but with a lot of words from Greek, mostly Greek, but from other languages as well, used in especially daily language in things related to the kitchen, food, cuisine, field, mountains, and snail was one of them, Hohli. In this episode we talk about Ur's new book, Island and Empire, out now with Stanford University Press. The book explains how civil war in the 1890s led to the expulsion of the island's Muslims and how those refugees ignited a broad social movement in the Ottoman Empire.

But on another level, this episode is about why these places with the same name for Snail and the same name for Ur might seem so deceptively far apart. Stay with us. The first people in Crete whom I heard call Ur Zaharias were two of his friends from Hanezi in the eastern part of the island. They had invited us to the village's summer festival. Cars were parked for quite a distance on either side of the twisting, hilly road leading to the village. But even from where we parked, we could hear the music, and we started walking faster. Yorgos and Popi met us there underneath a mulberry tree. We listened to music students sing folk songs,

and then we moved over to the town square. We ate delicious food prepared by an army of volunteers and Yorgos Pordis Raki from a water bottle into plastic cups that the wind kept blowing over. He told us about the towns in Turkey that he loved, like Alechata. He told us that we could say Mashallah in Crete and it would be understood, provided we pronounced it Masala. I I started reading about Crete through literature, first of all, and I encountered novels and writings by Nikos Kazantzakis, who himself was born in 1883 during the time of Ottoman rule in Crete in the city of Iraglio, which was the most populous city in Ottoman Crete and today as well. And the book that really had an impact on me and that stayed with me for years is the one named in English, Freedom and Death. The Greek title is different, Captain Myhalis. And this is the book that Kazanjakis released in 1953

toward the end of his life. And the novel takes place in his native, Heraklio. In the book Heraclio is called Megaleo Castro, the great castle, after the imposing Venetian castle that the Ottomans had great difficulty conquering in the 17th century. In parenthesis I should say the Ottoman conquest of Crete in the 17th century was arguably the last major Ottoman conquest and it was completed in a period of 26 years, making it one of the longest sieges in recorded history. So the novel takes place in Kazanjaki's hometown, Irakliyon. There are very interesting characters and the novel itself is not, I would say, known for its nuances. It is in a way represented, one of the works of

a nationalistic view of history, Cretan history specifically, but Greek history in general. So we have in most of the book two oppositional forces on the one hand, Christian Cretans under oppression by the Ottoman rulers and attempting to free themselves from the oppressive Ottoman rule. And on the other hand, we have the representatives of the Ottoman state in Crete, usually bad guys like the soldiers, like the aghas, the powerful notables and landholders. One particular detail really stayed with me which is the relationship between Captain Mihalus and Nuri Bey, a Muslim Turkish written notable. And in the earlier pages of the book Kazanjakis describes a scene in which these two figures meet and they become

blood brothers and they take an oath letting their blood in the name of Christ and Muhammad. So this is the oath taken by Nuri Bey and then after that, Qabda Ali Mihajli follows suit and he takes an oath in the name of Christ and Muhammad and they become blood brothers. This is to me really striking because even though the novel is in certain ways representative of nationalistic understanding of history, in details like, it also offers really an interesting insight into intimacy in a place that is imagined to be very sectarian throughout the 19th century and early 20th century. And this notion of intimacy is a central notion to my book and of how I see violence in Crete between Christians and Muslims or Greeks and Turks because these categories are especially in historical writing, contemporary writing,

used interchangeably. Kazanjakis' book takes place in his native Iraq, Bria, and in the critical year of 1889. This is a critical year because in 1889, the Ottoman state abrogated the privileges that it had granted to Crete in the 1860s. I should say a few things about the 1860s privileges. In 1866 there is a major uprising in Crete against Ottoman rule by groups of Christian insurgents and it becomes one of the most debated incidents in European diplomacy. And European states are also mobilized and there are talks about intervention on behalf of Greece, on behalf of insurgents who wanted Crete to be part of Greece.

The Ottoman state also takes this uprising very seriously. Istanbul sends Mehmet Emin Ali Pasha, one of the architects and one of the major figures of Tanzimat, to the island. Mehmet Emin Ali Pasha is the person who prepared Islahat Fermanı in 1856, the Edict of Reform that for the first time established legal equality between Muslims and non-Muslims in the empire. Istanbul sends Mehmet Ali Pasha to Crete and he devises a reform document known as Organic Law dated 1868. With this organic law, Christians of Crete

get strong representation in the administration of the island. And thanks to this document, semi-constitutional document, the island experiences a period of peace for about 10 years only after the outbreak of the war with Russia in 1877. There is another uprising in 1877. At the end of this uprising, the Crete question becomes really significantly a European question as well. In the Treaty of Berlin signed in July 1878, there is one article, specific article dealing with Crete, Article 23, which asks the Ottoman state to implement the reform measures of 1868 in Crete. And that also connects the issue of Crete to other provinces of the Ottoman Empire in

which demands for reform were made. For instance, the Berlin Treaty also mentions the possibility of applying the reform project that was implemented in Crete in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, primarily Macedonia. Only several months after the Berlin Treaty in July 1878, in October 1878, there is a pact signed between the Ottoman state and the representatives of the Cretan revolutionaries who instigated the uprising against the Ottoman administration in 1877-78. This is an important document known as the Pact of Halepa that puts Crete on a very different trajectory than the rest of the Ottoman Empire. This is the start of the Hamidian period in

Ottoman history and Hamidian period is widely known to be a period of autocracy and a period in which reforms of Tanzeemat were disregarded. But in Crete, a different type of trajectory is in the making. With this treaty, Crete gets a parliament, it gets elections, we have different political factions in Crete. In the other parts of the empire, we have the suspension of the parliament. We have the suspension of the constitution, Kandun Esasi, so to speak. But in Crete, there is this constitutional document sanctioned by the European powers that stipulates that the Ottoman state should implement a wide variety of reforms to give certain privileges to the island. One of them is the appointment of a general governor on a term of five years with the condition that if he is a Christian subject of the Ottoman Empire, his deputy would be

Muslim. If he is a Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire, his deputy would be Christian. Native gendarmerie is established. Greek becomes the official language of the courts and also the parliament in Crete. Certain tax privileges are granted to the island. Amnesty is provided to the revolutionaries or rebels according to the Ottoman state. And the Pact of Halepa initiates this period of quiet in Crete during which a number of Christian Ottoman governors are sent to rule the island.

Only after 1889, these privileges granted by the Pact of Halepa in 1878 are abrogated and the island once again is thrown into turbulence. And it is in this turbulent moment that Kazanjakis' novel, Freedom and Death or Captain Mihalis starts. Could you talk about the demographics a little bit and how many Muslims, how many Christians are they living in different places? Are they living together? What does it look like? There's a census in Crete in 1881. This is the last official census when the story of my book starts in the 1890s. According to that census, around 300,000 people living on the island and one-third of this number is Muslim and two thirds Christian. There are three major cities in Ottoman Crete in the 1890s.

The most populous one is Iraqlio in the east, Kandia in Turkish. There is in between Iraqlio and Hania in the west the city of Rethymno, which is the smallest of these three cities. There is Hania in the west, which is the second largest city, which is also the administrative center of Crete. In these three cities, the majority of population is Muslim. And in the countryside, throughout most of the countryside, we have either mixed villages of Muslims and Christians,

or villages that are in close proximity to one another. So we don't have a situation in which Muslims are inhabiting only certain sections of the island and Christians are living in the rest of the island. And these cities are not big cities. When I say Muslims were the majority, people might think that Muslims were actually mostly living in the cities. These are smaller cities and the interesting fact about Crete is that before the civil war, most of the Muslim population lived in the countryside. This fact goes against the general pattern in the Ottoman Empire, not only in the Mediterranean region in the islands, but also in

the Balkan provinces as well, which is Muslims were generally or urban population and the countryside you would have in certain regions pockets of Muslim population, but they would be always in the minority. In Crete though, Muslims before the civil war, more than half of the Muslim population lived in the countryside. The passage you talked about from Kazanzakis, more than half of the Muslim population lived in the countryside. The passage you talked about from Kazanzakis, it's one of intimacy, but it's also a bloody scene. And of course, what transpires in Crete in the 1890s is even more bloody. When the Ottoman state abolished the privileges that it had granted to Crete in 1878 through the Pact of Haleppa in 1889, there was a period of unease and discontent in Crete because of the abrogation of these privileges.

In my research, one of the archives that I spent a lot of time in is the one in Hania in Crete, in is the one in Hania in Crete, historical archives of Crete. And this is a modest two-story building and there I spent about five months and some of the most interesting papers I found there were about the correspondence of the insurgents or rebels who started the fight against the Ottoman state in 1895 following this period of unease and turbulence and discontent in the wake of the abrogation of the island's privileges in 1889. One thing that really struck my attention in those correspondences was that the rebels, the insurgent chiefs, were very much into following what was happening in other parts of the Ottoman Empire,

especially in Istanbul after 1896 and before 1896 in parts of Anatolia. And here I'm talking about the Armenian massacres, you see a certain point which is made over and over again. That is, this is the right moment to get together, to reorganize, to get some supplies and arms and ammunition from wherever we can, from the committees established in different parts of Greece and here I have to say that there is a quite an active Cretan diaspora in Greece after several episodes of violence in Crete throughout the 19th century leaving the island for Athens or the island of Syros in the Cichlades and establishing themselves and making themselves into a vocal diasporic community

really invested in the affairs of their island. So the insurgents when they are contemplating a new uprising against the Ottomans they have in mind the support to be received from this active vocal Cretan diaspora in Greece. They are very much informed about the extremely negative standing that the Ottoman state, which were stopped short of fulfilling the goal of union with Greece with the intervention of the European states, this time in 1895, the time and the circumstances were on their side to achieve what their insurgent ancestors failed to do. In the book you make a point of calling it civil war. What does that term mean to you and what does that signify? In Greek

and Turkish historiography, the period of violence in the 1890s in Crete is usually seen through the eyes of the state. In Turkish accounts, the main description of the violent events in the 1890s suggests that it was a rebellion against a lenient Ottoman administration. In Greek historiography on the other hand, the story is told as a story of revolution, a heroic revolution against an oppressive state. Both of these accounts produce an understanding of violence that is very much tinted with the gaze of the state. And the recounting of events in the 1890s is basically leading to a story of morality. Good versus bad. Heroes of Greek historiography are the criminals and the rebels of Turkish historiography. For me, civil war first of all suggests that we have a conflict between groups who are intimately familiar with one another.

Christian Cretans and Muslim Cretans. And if you look at how the contemporaries saw this violent episode in Crete in the 1890s, there is plenty of evidence that they saw it as an example of a civil war which later on in historiography went unmentioned. The Ottoman Turkish did not at the time have a word that corresponded to civil war. In Turkish today we have the term itzavash, internal warfare, which did not really exist in the 1890s in Turkish. In Meşvaret that was the leading young turk publication in Europe, in Paris, there were articles some of which were written by Ahmet Rıza, some by other exolic figures. We come across a lot of reports about Crete. They followed the war, the civil war in Crete carefully and in one of the articles, they

described the conflict as a war between Vatan Kardeşleri, brothers of the same land or brothers of the homeland. In Greek, in various accounts by contemporaries, we come across the word emphyleon either emphylios svaragmos or emphylios polemos more commonly emphyleon in Greek refers to civil war and this is how the civil war in Greece after World War two was named emphylios polemos. As a word it's interesting because emphyleon literally means within the race so it suggests that in Crete people who were at loggerheads were of the same race. So in a way we have this intimate

understanding of the conflict, a conflict between people who are intimately familiar with one another. But on the other hand interestingly this is perhaps a way to claim Muslims of Crete as part of the larger Greek race. And in various European accounts you have the terms, for instance, civil war, la guerre civile, vulgar grig, denoting the same set of violent events in Crete. When we were in the southwest of the island, we decided to hike to a beach beside an ancient ruin. We started off later than we probably should have, and ended up hiking during the hottest part of the day. I blame the kalokito keftedis, zucchini fritters that we ate for lunch. Clinging to Shade as we hiked over the red rocks, I asked Ur what he thought about the landscape, and how the

people he wrote about would have understood it, or used it, whether an Ottoman soldier from Sivas or a local revolutionary. How do you think an Ottoman soldier from Sivas would respond to this environment? I think he would be awed in awe of this environment, but also probably very frightened because he would be here on a mission to track down some outlaws I guess that his commanders told him about and he would be aware of the fact that there would those rocks behind those cliffs. More at ease with this landscape. How would the rebels use the landscape?

As a shelter, too high to see better, to have the vantage point, that intimate knowledge. And they would know that they would be safe with the villagers nearby if they sought any help or shelter. And there are goats, mountain goats, so I don't think they would go hungry for a long time. Olive, snails, grapes, sultana grapes. Figs! Hi there. Are we ready to step into the sun? You first.

Okay, I go first. After more sweat and goats and fig trees, we finally reached the village ruins and there, under a carob tree, about 20 people were sitting on either side of several picnic tables. They had put their watermelons under a nearby spring to cool. We refilled our water bottles from the spring. And apparently we looked longingly enough at the fruits that when the family cut them open the matriarch insisted on giving us a slice as we sat nearby in the shade.

If you travel in Crete today, if you go in any directions, you would be met with amazing expanses of olive trees. In certain locations, miles of olive grows meeting you. So olive for thousands of years has been the main precious gift of environment to the people of Crete. And during the time of civil war we have incidents in which islanders are subjected to extreme violence. We don't have the exact figures, but we have more than 2,000 people murdered, massacred in the civil war. We have an unknown number of houses burned down, demolished, cemeteries destroyed. And in addition, we have millions of trees uprooted, burned down or cut down. One of the personalities I mentioned in my book, Hadhrim-i-Halisi-an-Naris, he was a commander in chief of the Kidonia region in the western part of the island on the foothills of the White

Mountains. In May 1897, in the midst of the civil war in which a number of villagers were burned down either by Christian insurgents or Muslim irregulars and oligarchs were destroyed, he addresses a note to his fellow islanders and in that note he mentions that the trees are more than ephemeral possessions belonging to our generations alone. They belong to the motherland and our children. He's basically trying to stop the people of his region from attacking and destroying Muslims olive trees. After the civil war, in 1906, Antonio Yanlaris, he's the nephew of the chieftain Hadjimihaliz Zianaris, published a study in which he gives us the figure that about 1 million olive trees in the entirety

of the island was destroyed during the civil war. And this 1 million when I first came across this figure, I thought it was such a staggering figure. The civil war was not only a conflict that took its toll on human beings and human-made structures and buildings, but also on the environment. On an island which was estimated to have about 7 million olive trees, 1 million of these trees were destroyed in the space of couple of years. And the motivation behind that was very much related to the life cycle of an olive tree. It depends on the region but in Crete olive tree takes about 15 years to grow and give

fruit. So, if you are a villager, Muslim villager in this case, having certain amount of olive trees, let's say a modest amount of 20 or 30 and if you see that more than 80% or in certain parts 90% of your olive trees were destroyed, it will be very hard for you even if you survive the civil war and the peace is re-established on the island, it will be very hard for you to remain on the island and wait for 15 years for your olive trees to give fruit again. The destruction was a calculated destruction and it aimed to dislocate the villagers and it ended up achieving this purpose. The overwhelming majority of the Muslim villagers

from different parts of the Cretean countryside had to leave the island for good after 1898. AC What are the other political changes that occur as a result of this conflict? And also, how does it relate to Greece? BG Rural Muslims of Crete, they experience displacement a couple of times. First as internally displaced on their own island. So what happens is that either as a result of cutting off their olive trees or for fear or for thinking that there would be revenge attacks for assaults perpetrated by Muslim irregulars on Christian villages. There is an atmosphere of panic gripping the inhabitants of the Cretan countryside. So they run into the cities, mostly Iraqlio in the east.

At some point in 1898, the city's population is doubled with the arrival of refugees from the inland provinces. They remain in the cities. They either occupy the houses left by the Christian inhabitants of the cities because while we have the exodus of Muslims from the interior of the island into the cities, we also have the flight of Christians of the cities of the island to other parts of the island, either to the interior or in certain cases to parts of Greece by ship. So these Muslim refugees, these destitute refugees, in certain cases occupy these houses emptied by their Earth's wild Christian inhabitants.

In certain cases they live in the streets. They do not want to leave the island and go to unknown, unfamiliar lands in the empire. Their demands, as we see in many instances with petitions written by their representatives, their demands are to be relocated back into their villages after the end of the civil war. But they're also aware that they need constant protection until the scars of the civil war are healed. And they write numerous petitions to European admirals, to European consuls, in whose hands was stored Crete's fate. European consuls see the matter differently. Alfred Bilioti, the British consul, in his reports he is pretty sympathetic to the plight of refugees. He writes to his superiors but he is well aware that there would not be any assistance provided to the refugees

so that they would be safely relocated into their villages and their destroyed houses would be rebuilt and they would be compensated for the trees that they had lost. This would require a lot of money, this would require a lot of work and it would require a lot of time and there is no interest really on the part of European states to do that. When we look at the European diplomats writings, they see the emigration of Muslim refugees who are internally displaced away from the island as the best solution to the refugee problem. They did not actively make this happen but they facilitate the flight of Muslims to other parts of the empire. They see it as a way of conflict resolution.

Since assistance and security guarantees were not provided by the Europeans who were now in charge of governing Crete after 1897, These refugees had to leave the island. They are relocated by the Ottoman state in different parts of the empire. Most of them are relocated in Asia Minor or southern Anatolia around the region of Antalya and Mersin and Adana even. They are provided housing and they are provided some land. Smaller number of refugees are relocated in the Syrian coast. There are new settlements established exclusively for the refugee settlements near Laskia. And more than 10,000 of Cretan refugees are sent to the Benghazi area. By the early 1900s there are more Cretan refugees in

the Ottoman Empire than there are Muslims left on Crete. By 1908 we see Cretans at the center of what you call a new Ottoman mass politics. What did those mass politics look like and how were Cretan so crucially involved? Throughout the last years of the Hamidian rule, there was no mention of Crete in the public sphere in the Ottoman Empire. Newspapers did not write about that, not because they did not want to, but it Crete and what happened in Crete were among the most censored topics. The word Crete was not allowed to be used. The reading public, unless they had other connections to different channels of information, did not read in Ottoman newspapers anything about what happened in Crete.

In 1908, after the Constitutional Revolution of July, this facade of silence was shattered. In early October, three fateful days that followed one another are perhaps among the most challenging days that the CUP, Committee of Union and Progress, had to deal with. On October 5th, September 1908 Bulgaria declared its independence. Next day Austria-Hungary announced its annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. And a day after that the government in Crete announced its union with Greece. Crete at this time was still under the supervision of European powers that collectively occupied Crete in 1897 and kept it under their occupation for the following years. So the declaration of Enosis or union with Greece was not recognized by the European diplomacy.

After the announcement of the union of Crete with Greece in October 1908, we have the start of a public campaign by the CUP to make the population rally around the island which was officially still part of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP knew that it was not in a position to stop the Bulgarian independence from moving forward. They also knew that there was no taking back Bosnia-Herzegovina from Austria-Hungary. For them these two territories were long ago lost. They were not places that they had any realistic hopes of recovering. So they spent all their energy on retaining Crete as Ottoman territory and they used a variety of measures. Legally speaking,

it was officially an Ottoman territory so it was in their writing and in their public rhetoric, it was against international law to take Crete from Ottoman rule. What they asked for and what they lobbied in Europe was to make Crete again an autonomous province of the Ottoman state and run it the way it was run in the 1880s. So there are all these huge rallies throughout the Ottoman Empire. And at the center of it is Crete. Talk about what those rallies look like. The history of the Ottoman Empire is the history of protest. This is not the first time that protest is a central feature of Ottoman society.

central feature of Ottoman society. There are many important examples of protests rocking the Ottoman Empire, shaking the Ottoman streets from the 16th century all the way to the 20th century. What is new about Crete protests is that these protests are the first examples of modern mass protest in the Ottoman Empire. And they are distinguished from earlier examples of protest in several ways. First of all, longevity. These protests start in early 1909 and last almost uninterruptedly for two and a half years. Second scope, second the scope. These protests cover the entirety of the Ottoman Empire.

So we are not talking about protests that are staged in major cities alone, but also in small towns, even in villages. We have press coverage of these protests. We have petitions sent by the organizing committees of these protests. We have the coverage of these protests by European diplomats, councils and vice-councils stationed in different parts of the Ottoman Empire. Third, aesthetics of the protest after 1909 in the context of Crete crisis is what distinguishes a new protest from older forms of raising one's voice to make a claim. How did this protest look like?

How did these rallies look like? First, how did these rallies happen? In newspapers, in local newspapers, days before a certain protest is scheduled to happen, there's coverage and there's announcements. With constant coverage that lasts for days, people of a certain locality are invited to take part in a Crete protest. Second, Street Cryer, days before the scheduled protest, traverses the streets of the town and asks the inhabitants to take part in the protest about Crete. Street Cryer was a very regular and familiar figure of Ottoman towns but his mission has changed with the Crete protests and he turned into a more

politicized type of figure of Ottoman towns and the Street Crier would announce the location and the time of the protest. It would be, if we are talking about a town, it would be the town center right next to the government konak. The street crier would also utter one of the catchwords of the Ottoman protest of this time period, Kreet or Death. The protests would take place in the main square of an Ottoman town. There would be a number of speakers. There would be an organizing committee, rally organizing committee.

And they would make sure that communities living in that town would be represented by a speaker. So if you are talking about a town like Kavala, there would be a Turkish speaker, there would be a Greek speaker, and there would be a Bulgarian speaker. If you are talking about a larger city like Salonika, there would be a Turkish speaker, Greek speaker, Ladino speaker, Bulgarian speaker and most of the time an Ula, Romanian speaker as well. And they would give usually five minute long scripted speeches. They would talk about the importance of the island. They would talk about numerous Ottoman soldiers who lost their lives during the conquest of Crete in the 17th century. They would talk about the Ottoman soldiers who fell in the plains of Thessaly in the war against Greece in 1897.

They would talk about martyrdom. They would talk about the sacred duty to die for this island because that was a religious duty regardless of one's religion. So one of the things that's really important about this book and remarkable, I think, the way you describe it in the introduction is that this is about shifting attention from what was done to refugees to what they did. Could you talk about how the accounts of these protests offer a different kind of history of refugees?

The study of displacement is also a study of movement because we are talking about masses of people who are dislocated, displaced against their own will and sent away to regions that they probably had not even heard about. This story of movement is very much tied to what the states does in stopping this movement and making these refugees rooted in a new place, while acknowledging that it is of immense importance to examine how displacement occurs, what kind of new policies that the state develops for the resettlement of refugees and how the state in certain cases actually weaponizes these populations against other populations that it seemed to the state dangerous. It is also, I think, important to think about how the displaced themselves set in motion new movements.

Looking at the active roles that the refugees from Crete took part in the protests in the Ottoman Empire after 1908, I'm still talking about movement. But the movement that I am trying to emphasize is a social movement, a political movement. How refugees themselves became the movers of society in a way. It's not a coincidence that the places where refugees from Crete were resettled around the turn of the 20th century became, after 1908, the places where we have the most intense and uninterrupted type of protests. In the form of rallies, rallies people are taking to the streets, to the squares and chanting slogans listening to the speeches given by various number of speakers, but also the economic boycott especially in the second most important port city of the Ottoman Empire in Izmir

where we had more than 20,000 refugees from Crete resettled in the early 1900s. In all documents, be it Ottoman state documents, be it European consular documents, be it Greek newspapers published in Izmir, we have this constant mention of Cretan Turks or Cretan Muslims taking an active role in the boycott movement. Organizing it, implementing it, preventing people from going to Greek stores. And by looking at this movement led and superhitted by Cretan refugees themselves, I am also trying to shift the emphasis a little bit away from the Balkan Wars because in historiography we have this breaking point after the Balkan Wars the Ottoman state and the Ottoman public sphere becoming radicalized, Islamic discourse

taking a dominant position and the start of exclusionary policies against Greeks, their expulsion in 1914 for instance or the boycott against Rûm of the Ottoman Empire and of course taking this exclusionary policies taking its most lethal and extreme form against Armenians in 1915. But if you look at the protest movement and how Cretan refugees took the most active part in those movements and how they helped mobilize the remaining parts of the Ottoman society and how these rallies were events, and how these rallies were events, very much the expression of discourse that we will hear more often after the Balkan War trauma. We can think about the burning question of the historians, right? How does... how change happens in society?

Does it happen as a result of quick shocks like the Balkan War in 1912? Does it happen more slowly? We should be more attentive to the roles of people who usually have taken short shrift in historiography and who are mostly treated as passive subjects of history rather than active agents of history. Over the years I heard from my friends who are of Cretean Turkish origin that in the 1930s, 1940s, only years after their settlement in Turkey after the exchange of populations in 1923-24 especially in small towns of Asia Minor near the Izmir region they would hold some kind of secret snail-eating parties they would call their Cretan relatives their Cretan neighbors and

friends and they would not show it to other people who were not of Cretan background and they would prepare dishes of snail and enjoy them On our last night in Crete, we went to a taverna with one of Ur's old friends and some new ones. Of course, we ate snail. Hohli, both in Crete and Ur's home village of Potomia. These are the famous Hohli. Hohli. I've never had Hohli.

This is the first time. And I only had once. You have to show me a copy because I only had once. Show me. Take one also. You have to show me in the camera, because I only had one. Yes, I remember. I remember. All you want, yeah. I was resisting. Take one.

OK, with fork. Take. We talked about Ivalik, the health benefits of Coca-Cola, and many other things. I can do it. You can do that. With a stick. Oh, great, great You can do that. It was fixed. Oh, great, great.

Do I have to eat? Yes, yes. That's better. You try. Uwur had brought a copy of his book to give to his friend Efthimes and also some lokum from Istanbul. At the end of the night, we were the only customers left. Efthimes opened up the lokum and we ate some.

Then we'd offered it to the restaurant's owners and workers. They reached to our table with toothpicks and ate one, two, three pieces. They smiled with surprise, hovered over the table, and remarked about how good this lokumi from Constantinople was. Then, with effort, they removed themselves from the suites and returned to wiping tables, drying glasses, and totaling up receipts so they could go home. This is bitter. This is bitter. Urza Kariya Petshe's book, Island and Empire, is out now with Stanford University Press.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care. No, put it in the right way. Put it upside down so it becomes smooth. All of it? Yes, all of it. Yes, eat it all. Look. I put it in. Bravo!

Enjoy your meal. Thank you too.