Greece and Turkey

[jorje]

i hope you read this book...svoronos was a great historian(of the socialist party)and i must say nowdays greek historians of syriza( you know synostizontan) mainly accused him of patriotism... so false alarm

Exactly.
This my point about revision of historical truth.
The mob of Syriza intellectualls that survive in highly ranked public funded positions, no matter which is the government, keep on blaming everyone who disagree with them.
The accusations are the same, nationalist,patriotism,........................... .
No historical facts no data just a bias which shows the complex they have.

[jorje]

Let's see who doesn't understand.
The religious leaders were executed for their faith or for political reasons? Did the Turks start to kill Christians because they wanted to convert them to Islam? Off course not..

Saint-Martyr Constantine Hagarit was hanged because he converted from Islam to Christianity
Neomartyr Demetrios of Chios was executed because he convert to Christianity from Islam

Actually you call ''Sultan's tyranny''.
If you want me to say that they were tolerant to any religion but killing people of other ethnicity, it does not change the fact that Ottoman empire was oppressing Greek populations,Serbs,Armenians,,,,,which is happens to be Christians.
I can't remember Turks killing Turks in a large scale as they did with Christians.Also there was a head-tax upon non-Muslims,a complete discriminating policy.
Now is it more clear.

I know Svoronos,Grigoriadis Neoklis &Solon,Paparrigopoulos,Glykatzi-Ahrweiler and others.Nevertheless i can't remember the exact words of every single historian about Greek history.
you should read Herrin Judith,an expert in Byzantine topics.

''The historical origin of a group is something objective,a scientific matter.''
Agree on that.

My expression ''buying your argument'' is an American expression sometimes used in Academia, not intended to provoke or offend.It has to do with some research paper that you do not agree etc.
I am just used to say some American things from time to time.

To sum up,
Byzantium was more religious and ethnically tolerant compared to Ottoman.
I do not believe that Byzantion was a huge civilization compared to Ancient Greek , but still it has significant contribution in arts.
Ottomans were oppressing other ethnicities the majority of which, happened to be Christians.
Origins of a group is something objective and depends on known factors, though consciousness is heavily affected by other factors.
Propaganda,education,..........................
So your 4 th question
''A person's self definition about his nationality is irrelevant to his true nationality''
is answered by you and everybody here ,i think ,in the same way.
You are not necessarily what you are saying you are

[Linktothepast]

all the empires are multinational empires...anyway things that we ve discussed already...

You skipped an important part though. It wasn't our empire, we weren't the conquerors but the conquered. Many emperors weren't even Greek (even many with Greek names weren't Greek actually, they just took those Greek names). Why should i see it as a Greek empire then nowdays and not as a Roman, Serbian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Jewish, you name it? We behave as Byzantium was ours, which was not the case until almost the end of the empire (and by that time you could hardly call it an Empire btw).

In the end Byzantine Greeks were our ancestors, not Byzantine Christians! Byzantine Christians are also todays Armenians, Bulgarians, Serbians, Romanians, you name it! Hope you understand the difference.

[Adon]

Exactly.
This my point about revision of historical truth.
The mob of Syriza intellectualls that survive in highly ranked public funded positions, no matter which is the government, keep on blaming everyone who disagree with them.
The accusations are the same, nationalist,patriotism,........................... .
No historical facts no data just a bias which shows the complex they have.

Is there an insinuation here?
No gentlemen,I have no relation with any political party or group.In fact I despise them because I believe in free thought and personal responsibility.
Both of you may have the same opinion in particular topics with "Golden Dawn" or some other extreme-right group,as I have perhaps the same opinion in those topics with some intellectuals of Syriza.That's not imply neither that you are fascists nor that I am SYN.

And I'm not a paganist neither.

This discussion has gone way out of hand for me and I'm afraid that I cannot offer you the level of conversation you desire.

Peace brothers.

[Deschain]

I want to say that i feel embarassed for stopping trackign this topic , i started this with hopes to see it fill quickly. I checked it everyday to see if somebody had written anything. I just happened to come across this topic again while looking at the total post count And started reading the replies.

Let me see , you're about to feel happy at the moment! ;I have to admit that from this mutated thread i've learnt many thing (their status of being correct is debatable tho)about the Greek History , because i was quite incomplete about the greek history even though i'm into the history.

I want to thank the people that contributed maturely , almost without any patriotic or religious provocations. If you allow me, I want to restore tihs thread to its natural purpose , it's been nice to see what you greek people thought about their history.


Before starting , a note on myself : I will not involve any religious discussions that could ignite a flame war. I'm very far ,and far away to that religious ideas. But i just know and can see its impact on yesterday today and tomorrow.

About all those nationalism issues , there's a great book with criticism (and i think the book and the author quite popular considering that the Big Brother Contest's name derives from here) 1984 by George Orwell. If you read the book you understand what i'm trying to mention but if you haven't let me explain. Basically in the book , after a nuclear war the world is divided to 3 mega countries all are totalitarians. Those countries , to keep their population united and the population's morale high, they announce fake wars and conflicts.

In my opinion ; this situation is very similar (in terms of the their basis, not the results) to what we have between Greece and Turkey , and in most ex-yugo countries. As someone mentioned here before that , new countries require an aim or a reason to stand united.

In my another opinion ; the state of Greece - Turkey relationship is due to most people on both sides being ignorant and not willing to learn. They are thaught to be like this. Because if you improve yourself and attain new horizons. You're most likely to fall apart from your country's or government's fixed aims. This might be on a lesser magnitude in Greece, but in Turkey it's on excess levels in some certain regions. Could be a generalization and most people could and would be mad at this view, but it's an undeniable fact that heavily right viewed people are mostly not educated adequately, have lower income and nationalism or/and religion is their first idea to stick on. However, i don't underestimate this , not calling this bad. Still , more ignorant you are easier you are fooled. And this applies to anyone. I don't see any reason for these two countries to act hostile to each other. At least their people should not.

If you revise it, all these discussions about who's superior ( it all comes down to this, in the end) are nothing but nonsense. Because neither country is superior to any other. I see a souliton that actually everyone knows of it: education. If we blow away the subjective history , exaggerated conflicts , and stop indoctrinating the idea of "Greeks are evil , Turks are barbaras" there's no problem for having a blissful future!

[buzz]

.......

i am not proud of our educational system either...anyway a few words:

The change of the empire's capital to an area which became the new center of the empire(minor asia,constantinople,thessaloniki,old greece, islands etc) where the great majority of the residents were greeks and christians also changed the character of the empire(for example latin language which was the official language of the imperial court soon changed to native greek-heraklius period).Nowdays historians still name this empire as byzantine to separate it from its (latin,pagan)past.

the majority of the nations(people whatever) you have mentioned came to the area many centuries after empire's establishment.
The homeric battles between byzantium and nations like bulrgarians, for example the name basil the bulgar slayter says smth to you?,are very well known.Moreover many nations (serbs,bulgarians etc) established their own independent kigdoms.

Finally let's not forget that all these nations were regional nations that were influenced by constantinople but also had great linguistic,cultural and finally (at many cases)religious differencies with the empire.I hope we all know (i am not talking only about native language's differencies)about major religious conflicts between armenians(even if armenia was a regional thema of the empire) and constantinople.
The above facts don't mean that people of these nations that lived among greeks weren't assimilated by byzantines! That was happening only when they were accepting main empire's character which was the cultural character of byzantine greeks.And this was the only prerequisite for someone to become an emperor(noone cared of his origin)
We can meet this situation at all empires(ottoman,ancient roman etc but also and at recently ones french empire=>napoleon,soviet union=>georgian stalin etc).We can see this happening at almost all current royal families all over europe.
For example don't forget greek royal family,γλυξμπουργκ.They are not of greek origin but accepted the greek character of the state in order to govern it,so they learn to speak greek as native and they changed their religious belief,they are greek orthodox believers now.
So it is normal to see emperors that govern not to have the same origin that the dominant nation of the empire has.[BTW speaking of byzantine emperors we do know that many of them were of greek origin and others not...But we also don't know the origin of many emperors(nationalistic balkan propaganda usually baptizes them at will(saint cyril and methodios are also usual targets of propaganda ).]
But what was happening when an emperor was refusing to accept empire's character ?,well speaking of byzantine empire let's focus on julian's example..
He didn't only refuse empire's identity he also wanted to change it.Whenever wanted to go somewhere people booed him.He was rejected by his people and became a temporary parenthesis to byzantine empire.Finally was known as Julian THE Apostate

ps:don't let your political or religious beliefs affect your view upon history or don't let others play with your mind...

[BBS]

Saint-Martyr Constantine Hagarit was hanged because he converted from Islam to Christianity
Neomartyr Demetrios of Chios was executed because he convert to Christianity from Islam

Actually you call ''Sultan's tyranny''.
If you want me to say that they were tolerant to any religion but killing people of other ethnicity, it does not change the fact that Ottoman empire was oppressing Greek populations,Serbs,Armenians,,,,,which is happens to be Christians.
I can't remember Turks killing Turks in a large scale as they did with Christians.Also there was a head-tax upon non-Muslims,a complete discriminating policy.
Now is it more clear.
I know Svoronos,Grigoriadis Neoklis &Solon,Paparrigopoulos,Glykatzi-Ahrweiler and others.Nevertheless i can't remember the exact words of every single historian about Greek history.
you should read Herrin Judith,an expert in Byzantine topics.

''The historical origin of a group is something objective,a scientific matter.''
Agree on that.

My expression ''buying your argument'' is an American expression sometimes used in Academia, not intended to provoke or offend.It has to do with some research paper that you do not agree etc.
I am just used to say some American things from time to time.

To sum up,
Byzantium was more religious and ethnically tolerant compared to Ottoman.
I do not believe that Byzantion was a huge civilization compared to Ancient Greek , but still it has significant contribution in arts.
Ottomans were oppressing other ethnicities the majority of which, happened to be Christians.
Origins of a group is something objective and depends on known factors, though consciousness is heavily affected by other factors.
Propaganda,education,..........................
So your 4 th question
''A person's self definition about his nationality is irrelevant to his true nationality''
is answered by you and everybody here ,i think ,in the same way.
You are not necessarily what you are saying you are

My friend of course you dont remember, because it was long ago and maybe not important for you. But the Ottoman Emperor that came after the Fatih Sultan Mehmet ( concourer of constantinapole ), had the most violent massacre against heretic, paganist or whatever you call Turks, in the whole history of the Ottoman Empire. Yes maybe your people were under high taxes and oppression but these heretic Turkic origin tribes in Anatolia werent even considered as human. Anyway i wont get into whole argument here, just wanted make a correction.

[Linktothepast]

I 'm sorry but this conversation became Greek - Greek. Buzz, as i see things we have both our opinions and neither will budge, so i will also cut it because it is pointless. You mix religion with our national identity while i don't. Never mind the fact you label people as paganists, just because they are not Christians (while they can be you know every other religion + atheists - agnostics -whatever). Just from the above someone can understand you are in search of "enemies" no doubt, where there is none. So personally i 'm out.

To Deschain and BBS, thanks for your input guys and i must say i agree with Deschain 100%. As for BBS i didn't knew that either. The only relevant thing i know it is that there is a religious group called Alevites today or something in Turkey and there are still problems???

[buzz]

i just wrote historical facts nothing more nothing less...
and of course ι didn't accuse anyone of being paganist or fan of syriza 's ideology...but the copy paste i saw was a mix of truth and lies that usually someone meets at sources full of propaganda that are related to new paganists and fans of syriza party...someone that lives at greece knows very well that these voices are really noisy...anyway i salute you the conversation has nothing to give...

[jorje]

My friend of course you dont remember, because it was long ago and maybe not important for you. But the Ottoman Emperor that came after the Fatih Sultan Mehmet ( concourer of constantinapole ), had the most violent massacre against heretic, paganist or whatever you call Turks, in the whole history of the Ottoman Empire. Yes maybe your people were under high taxes and oppression but these heretic Turkic origin tribes in Anatolia werent even considered as human. Anyway i wont get into whole argument here, just wanted make a correction.

I did not know that.
I only know that there was and still is a group of moderate Muslims, called Alevi, mainly located in Tuncelli.
I have heard from Turks that Kemal was Alevi, but since those Turks were Alevi, i can't say it's true or not.

[BBS]

I did not know that.
I only know that there was and still is a group of moderate Muslims, called Alevi, mainly located in Tuncelli.
I have heard from Turks that Kemal was Alevi, but since those Turks were Alevi, i can't say it's true or not.

I dont think Ataturk was alevi, i think he might be a Jew tho. I am not saying he was, but he might be. I hope other Turks dont get me wrong, its just a personal idea, more imagination. He was from Selanik, a main city from Ottoman era that Jews were located, he was blond and blue eyed, he was a heavy drinker, very relaxed for women rights, certainly not a classical Muslim of that period. And i agree with people who will tell me, i also drink but im not Jew. Im not trying to proove he was anyway, just when you think all together, there's sth that just gives a little doubt. Anyway personally i dont care what he was.

And for the Greek-Turkish subject, i read someone asking why you guys hate us. I must tell you maybe in Eagean cost somethings happened and people hate eachother but where i was born and raised (Eastern Mediterrenean Region) people absolutely have nothing against Greeks. Or let me put it this way, nothing specificly against Greeks. For us, Bulgarian, Greek, Iranian, Syrian all the same, all our neighboring nations. I must still admit whenever Cyprus issue comes up in the news tho, it might just effect people but mostly the nationalists.

All the things i write here are my opinions and subjective, since the last thing i want is to get in to pointless disscussions. But afterall im still writing here because maybe some Greek friends will value this opinions just because its still a individual Turkish perspective even if its not the general.

Lastly, i moved to South Africa 5 years ago. And for the first time in my life i met with some Greek people. I must say the first reaction i got wasnt the friendliest encounter i experienced. But it didnt make me think anything in general still about Greeks. Infact i felt bad, i still remember thinking what the hell happened that these guys still hate me just because i am from Turkey. But later on we became friends, somehow! Realized how close our understanding of world, life, family, delicious food

Anyway in general, i am a true pessimist with the subjects of future, human and civilization. And i believe people can turn into evil with the right propaganda. It happened in history and unfortunately no gurantee it wont happen. And thinking all these, i feel absolutely no belonging to any kind of authority.

[Levenspiel]

Wow, I forgot about this topic while I was away and it has become massive.

BBS, which city are you from? We're from the same region apparently. I was born (Hassa) and grown up (Iskenderun) in Hatay, a city known for its diverse population, where churches, synagogues and people of different religions are quite usual sights. People usually are suspicious of my "Turkishness" when they see my birth place.

Our education system is TERRIBLE in terms of history especially. I never felt any natural hostility against my "different" neighbors, neither was imposed by my parents, but the school forced me to think Armenians, Greeks, Arabs and all others were enemies who are determined to destroy our land and enslave the people. it's weird because we're taught to hate Ottomans too. It's such a shame for such a large country that children are being injected to this weird mixture of paranoia, inferiority complex and false grandeur at the same time, all the time. As a kid, you're certainly affected. No way of avoiding it. Some people manage to get clean later, some don't.

Let's be honest. Everybody's educational history books are lying up to some extent. Turkish or Ottoman's were not the nicest rulers in the world, but they are not responsible for all your problems.

A few little things I noticed:
Devsirme -- the process of Christian kids being converted to Islam. I guess there's a misunderstanding here. Ottomans were choosing bright kids from the conquered lands and bringing them to Istanbul to train them as soldiers, or officials if they are talented in certain aspect. Objectively thinking, it's a brilliant system. So, it's not mass-conversion of people in a conquered city. This would be very inefficient, and they didn't really care if you were Christians or Jews or pagans as long as you paid your tributes.

Alevites -- a different version of muslim people in Turkey. They were oppressed really and have the right to claim justice for what happened. But I don't like some of alevites being so enraged, my friends included. This country was not a paradise for many other people too. Now it's time to try forgiving and to shake the hand being extended to you.

[CG]

i hope one day both nations, people, goverments will realise that they have to cooperate for their benefit.
we live in the late 2010 and most of the people from these countries have mind of 1910...
in the end there are other factors (or nations) that want to mix us in situations.
but we act like dumps in the end

[Jitem]

I dont think Ataturk was alevi, i think he might be a Jew tho

u r wrong he was budist and an allien from mars.

[BBS]

Wow, I forgot about this topic while I was away and it has become massive.

BBS, which city are you from? We're from the same region apparently. I was born (Hassa) and grown up (Iskenderun) in Hatay, a city known for its diverse population, where churches, synagogues and people of different religions are quite usual sights. People usually are suspicious of my "Turkishness" when they see my birth place.

Our education system is TERRIBLE in terms of history especially. I never felt any natural hostility against my "different" neighbors, neither was imposed by my parents, but the school forced me to think Armenians, Greeks, Arabs and all others were enemies who are determined to destroy our land and enslave the people. it's weird because we're taught to hate Ottomans too. It's such a shame for such a large country that children are being injected to this weird mixture of paranoia, inferiority complex and false grandeur at the same time, all the time. As a kid, you're certainly affected. No way of avoiding it. Some people manage to get clean later, some don't.

Let's be honest. Everybody's educational history books are lying up to some extent. Turkish or Ottoman's were not the nicest rulers in the world, but they are not responsible for all your problems.

A few little things I noticed:
Devsirme -- the process of Christian kids being converted to Islam. I guess there's a misunderstanding here. Ottomans were choosing bright kids from the conquered lands and bringing them to Istanbul to train them as soldiers, or officials if they are talented in certain aspect. Objectively thinking, it's a brilliant system. So, it's not mass-conversion of people in a conquered city. This would be very inefficient, and they didn't really care if you were Christians or Jews or pagans as long as you paid your tributes.

Alevites -- a different version of muslim people in Turkey. They were oppressed really and have the right to claim justice for what happened. But I don't like some of alevites being so enraged, my friends included. This country was not a paradise for many other people too. Now it's time to try forgiving and to shake the hand being extended to you.

Hi Levenspiel,

I was born in Iskenderun, i spent most of my life here and there but that is the place i feel connected with my heart. You share the same privilege like me to be from Iskenderun thats great At least we know we have tasted the best Kebabs and Doners on the world