Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/179

 *munication with Constantinople was more direct than Sivas's. The Damad Ferid Government's position with respect to the country had now become so impossible that it fell on October 5 and was replaced by the Ali Riza Government which was authorized by the Sultan to hold a general election. This was a clean-cut victory for the Nationalists and two days after the new Government took office, Kemal telegraphed the Party's platform to Ali Riza Pasha in Constantinople, as the terms of peace on which the Nationalists appealed to the country.

At this junction, the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar forbade Ottoman Greeks to participate in the elections on the ground that they were no longer Ottoman subjects. This injunction was of course obeyed in the capital where Allied troops were in occupation, but a considerable portion of the Rûm community lived in Asia Minor and here, already gravely compromised with their Turkish neighbors by the Phanar's break with the Porte and by the Greek occupation of Smyrna which had followed that break, it only added to their difficulties. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what move more dangerous to its own communicants in Asia Minor the Phanar could have made. It so increased the suspicion which attached to them in the eyes of the Nationalists that hundreds of them were clapped into Nationalist jails and were not released until a Turkish-speaking Orthodox priest from Kiskin, twelve miles from Angora, announced his intention of breaking with the Phanar and participating in the elections as an Ottoman subject. He immediately undertook to effect a similar break on the part of the Turkish-speaking Orthodox churches