Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/152

 *erally peaceful even after the Old Greeks secured their independence in the 1820's, and there was no appreciable Greek nationalism in the Rûm community until the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 called upon Moslems and Christians alike to give up their dividing community institutions and assume the equal rights and the equal duties of Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman nation. That call, accompanied by the opening of the Parliament at Constantinople, brought Greek nationalism from Old Greece into the Ottoman Rûm community, and the Balkan Wars widened the breach which was opening between the Ottoman Government and the Phanar. It produced so difficult a situation that an agreement was finally reached in 1914 between the Old Greek and the Ottoman Governments for an exchange of minorities, but the outbreak of war suspended its operation. Until the spring of 1916 the Ottoman Government, in view of the neutrality of Old Greece, refrained from any steps against its Rûm community, but when the French command at Salonica imposed the Venizelos Government on Athens and brought Old Greece into the war as an enemy, the Ottoman Government took immediate steps to deport its Rûm communicants along the coast of Asia Minor out of the range of Allied naval activity. Like the great Armenian deportations of 1915, these Greek deportations were military in their origin but they were far better controlled throughout their course than the former had been.

After the Mudros armistice in 1918, these Greeks in Asia Minor began to flow back to what remained of their homes, and the remnant of the broken Em