Freedom and Death

"This is a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, who is the serious modern Greek novelist. If you’re in Greece on holiday, and you have good lighting at night and no young children, this is the book to read. It’s thought-provoking and rich in descriptions. It recreates the moment of the Cretan revolution, which came later. There was a Muslim population on Crete, all of it Greek speaking, none of whom had ever been to what today we call Turkey. Kazantzakis appreciates that the Greeks have a national cause, but also that the people they’re calling Turks, the Muslims, are very human. Everyone can see what the end is going to be, that these people are going to be expelled. He is writing about people who do not have a future. So it’s heroic and also tragic, both at the same time. The story centers around the friendship of two people—a Greek community leader, who is a sort of bandit, and one of the Ottoman rulers. They had been friends, but slowly the friendship becomes impossible, because they cannot get past these mass mobilizations on both sides. Most people will have heard of Kazantzakis’s novel, Zorba the Gree k, even if they don’t know that he’s the one who wrote it. There are all the taverns named after it, there is the movie—have you seen it? It’s really good. It’s not dumb at all. It’s with Alan Bates, Anthony Quinn and Irina Papas. It’s a serious film in black and white. But Kazantzakis also wrote other books. He had this empathy toward the people who he knew were doomed. He narrated their doom and the victory of the Christians (who now called themselves Greeks). I like that subtlety, that ambiguity. He is describing for a later period what I’m trying to capture for the earlier period. This mix of, ‘Yes, the nation gives us this righteousness. It gives us rights, it gives us immunities, all these things.’ But in this particular circumstance, it came at a tremendous human cost. The nation does both things, it creates and it effaces, and Kazantzakis captured that. It happened all up and down the Balkans and across Anatolia. This process began in the 1820s and spread to the rest of the Balkans and then, later on, to Crete. It was finally resolved by the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, whereby the Christian populations of all these territories rose up against the Ottomans, created independent states that were explicitly Christian, and did away, almost everywhere, with their Muslim populations. They sent them ‘home’ to places they had never been, speaking languages they didn’t know, to what was going to become Turkey. This was the model for all the Balkan states, with some exceptions. Kosovo is still problematic today, as is Sarajevo. There was also a steady stream of Bulgarians leaving and going to Turkey, because they had no place else to go. The big exception was Albania, which some people treat as if it’s not really a model for anything—because of poverty, corruption etc. But it’s the one place in the Balkans that maintained its multi-confessional character: Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims. And it does so to this day, with relative success compared to other models. One should look more carefully at Albania, I think. Later on, in his other books, Kazantzakis has something to say about what happens up north, in Salonica, in what the Greeks call Macedonia. It’s a 100-year process, and it ends with Turkey itself. It’s the Turks who overthrow the archaic Ottoman Empire to create a national republic, modern Turkey. To do this, they used the Greek model of 1821, except in reverse. In 1922, after a failed Greek expedition to capture territory, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk mobilized the Muslim population against the Christians, expelling the Greek army, and forcing a population exchange whereby the Christians all had to leave, including the surviving Armenians, most of whom had already been killed off in 1915 . The terms of this treaty were that if you were a Christian, you had to go, no matter what your role had been. So 1.5 million people left, and there was a smaller number who came in the other direction. That was the big population exchange of 1923. Kazantzakis is describing something that was happening everywhere. As I said, the Turkish Revolution and the Anatolian war of 1922-3 were, in some ways, a culmination of the process begun by the Greeks in 1821—except now they’re the victims. Does that make sense? I’m in a lot of trouble."