Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/153

 *pire went back with relief to its peacetime pursuits. An unsurpassed commercial opportunity lay ahead of Asia Minor, for the Russian collapse had put an end to the great export of wheat from the South Russian ports. Constantinople, its population swollen by the Allied military and naval forces, now looked exclusively to Asia Minor for its sustenance. Western business men had followed the Allies into the capital in large numbers, and money was available in such quantities as Constantinople had never known. The Empire having been "liberated" from the "Ottoman blight," American capitalists abounded in the capital, all of them anxious to get in on the ground floor of the boom. Under the Allied aegis, Western trade faced a prodigious opportunity and the peasantry of Asia Minor lost no time in seeking whatever small share of the melon might fall to them. The spring of 1919 found them back at the handles of their rude, ox-drawn plows.

But there were Greek battleships anchored among the Allied men of war in the Bosphorus, and a Turkish guard was quartered in the great mosque of Ayiah Sophia in Stamboul. Ottoman Greeks in the capital had gone wildly nationalist, finding their hero in Mr. Venizelos, the man who had brought Old Greece into the war. The Oecumenical Patriarch at the Phanar had turned likewise toward Mr. Venizelos, the deliverer of the "unredeemed" Ottoman Greeks. But Balkan wars break when the snow melts in the spring. Through the winter of 1918-'19, the Anglo-French command maintained an outward peace in Constantonople.

Three British high commands held the remnant