Download PDF | Kevin Featherstone, Dimitris Papadimitriou, Argyris Mamarelis, Georgios Niarchos - The Last Ottomans_ The Muslim Minority of Greece 1940-1949 (New Perspectives on South-East Europe) -Palgrave Macmillan , 2011.
379 Pages
Preface
It takes little imagination on the part of the foreign reader to recognise the sensitivity attached to the fate of a Muslim minority in Greece, especially as the bulk of its members proclaim their ‘Turkishness’. There are few case studies that might be written relevant to Greco-Turkish relations that are more politically sensitive. The minority has constituted the ‘enemy within’ for many Greeks and a ‘repressed’ minority to most observers from Turkey. Since the 1980s, their plight has been highlighted by a number of international organisations concerned to protect human rights. In the following decades, successive Greek governments have sought to address their condition. They became ‘a cause’ to fight over.
Yet, the history of this minority has been barely studied in a serious, academic manner. This is curious, given that the history surrounding their position has frequently proved contentious. Of particular interest here, are the actions and experiences of the minority during perhaps the most momentous decade of recent Greek history: the 1940s. This was a decade that witnessed the events of the Second World War - invasion followed by brutal occupation — and the Greek Civil War — with brother against brother. What did the minority (or its component communities) do during the 1940s? How did they react to invasion, occupation, and civil turmoil? What explains their response?
The present study seeks to address these questions and to attempt to fill an important gap in the historiography of the minority and of Greece and Turkey. The focus is not a general history of the period. The narrative of the book follows a chronological sequence, but it is structured around a set of key dimensions to contextualise the response of the minority.
The starting point for this project had been an apparent puzzle. Despite many reasons to expect the contrary, the minority had in fact remained passive and disengaged from the tumultuous events of the 1940s. The initial question to address, therefore, was a deceptively simple one: why? The instinct was to locate the minority in a wider geo-strategic setting of GrecoTurkish relations, affected by the discourse of the minority as a strategic resource. With the progression of the fieldwork, however, it became more and more evident that the position of the minority had to be placed in its local context. Rather than being clouded by the grand politics of geostrategic relations, this was a puzzle that had to be answered locally. As such, other themes arose that could be better approached through the lens of political sociology, studies of nationalism, of war and occupation, etc. These led us to delve into issues of identity, of the cohesiveness or otherwise of the ‘minority’, of social structure and geography, of the local conditions that might sustain a more assertive reaction, and of Communist politics. As such, the ‘puzzle’ became enlarged and it cut across disciplines and literatures. Telling a ‘dog that didn’t bark story’ is complex in itself. Though some might, inevitably, have questioned the veracity of the puzzle fewer would have easily predicted the path needed to explain the non-response.
The book stems from research conducted over several years by the authors and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the main public funding body in the UK in this academic area. The grant awarded by the AHRC (AH/D502616/1) allowed for extensive travel to obtain archival materials and personal interviews. The authors wish to express their appreciation of the award: the present study would have been impossible without it.
The research has taken the authors into new and challenging academic areas. Mamarelis and Niarchos brought to this research a specialist background in the local history of the Civil War and in minorities and GrecoTurkish relations (respectively), drawing on their doctoral theses. The core of the present project stemmed from a natural confluence of their interests. For Featherstone and Papadimitriou, by contrast, much of this terrain was uncharted. Their background is in political science. Moreover, to some extent, the authors were entering established areas of modern Greek studies, dominated by figures rightly regarded as iconic. The task of crafting a case study that would contribute to the hinterland of historical and social studies on Greece and the region that had thrown up such luminaries was daunting. Friends said we were courageous, though they might have been more direct and said foolhardy.
To some, on both sides, there may be wariness that three Greeks (and a Brit) endeavoured to write a history of the Muslim minority. Rather than accepting such suspicions as legitimate, however, the authors invite the reader to examine not only their findings, but also the rigour with which they have endeavoured to obtain evidence to support their arguments. The empirical sources are extensive and diverse: they encompass previously unseen archival material from Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, the UK and the US as well as a vast range of local publications and personal interviews. At the core of our research endeavour has been our commitment to activate and cross-check all available sources.
Moreover, some may question the usage here of the term ‘Muslim minority’, rather than that of ‘Turkish minority’. No position is taken on the identity of the minority today. But the evidence of the 1940s strongly suggests that there were several, conflicting identities held within the minority. Moreover, the tension between a modernist ‘Kemalism’ and more traditional Ottoman norms and values on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War indicates that identification with’Turkishness’ was somewhat problematic. The designation in the book’s title of ‘The Last Ottomans’ is intended to convey not only the historical derivation of the minority, but also the cultural transition underway within the minority at this time. This is a bygone age and it should not be confused with present day assumptions.
Over the course of the research, some of the findings have been reported in various settings and valuable feedback obtained. Presentations have been made in Birmingham, Cambridge, Columbia, King’s College London, the LSE and Yale universities. The research has also been reported to several conferences. Of particular interest was a public seminar organised in Komotini, Western Thrace, in June 2008. This enabled the authors to outline their research to the local community and to obtain valuable feedback from it. This connection with the locality (and all its inhabitants) had been an important priority from the outset.
In a study of this scale, we have incurred many debts. A number of people and institutions have provided much-needed help and support. First and foremost are those who allowed us to interview them about their personal recollections of life in Western Thrace in the 1940s. Sometimes these interviews were on a one-to-one basis, whilst others took place in groups. Often their own family members and friends were interested to hear of this neglected history. We are very grateful to Vasilis Bornovas, Abdtilhalim Dede, Ali Hiiseynoglu, Agapi Kandilaki-Yfanti, Charalambos Kontogiannis, Antigoni Papanikolaou and Konstantinos Tsitselikis who, from their own different perspectives, helped us to understand this complex community. In addition we would like to acknowledge the support of the ‘Western Thrace Turks Solidarity Association’ of Turkey which facilitated our contacts with émigrés. Our special thanks go to its Chairman, Erol Kasifoglu, and its Secretary-General, Recep Ustiin.
Our archival research in Bulgaria and Turkey benefited tremendously from the support of Dr. Stefanos Katsikas and Burcu Culhaoglu respectively. Without them, important evidence relating to this story would have escaped our attention. We have also benefited from the comments and advice of many friends and scholars. Philip Carabott (KCL); Thalia Dragona (University of Athens); Renée Hirschon (Oxford); Abby Innes (LSE); Stathis Kalyvas (Yale); Sevket Pamuk (LSE); Stefanos Pezmazoglou (Panteion); and, Sotiris Rizas (Academy of Athens) each read earlier drafts of at least some of the chapters. In addition, John Breuilly (LSE); John Hiden (Bradford); Martyn Housden (Bradford); and Jennifer Jackson Preece (LSE), offered invaluable guidance. Special thanks are due to Umut Ozkirimli (Bilgi University) for his advice and support. Most of all we would like to extend our gratitude to Vemund Aarbakke (Aristotle University, Greece) and George Kazamias (University of Cyprus) for their patient review of our drafts. The input of each of these colleagues greatly improved the quality of the study. Any errors that remain are the sole responsibility of the authors. Eleni Xiarchogiannopoulou (LSE) provided expert research support for the project.
Our respective universities provided welcome support for this project. Mamarelis and Niarchos were employed as Research Fellows by the LSE.
Featherstone benefited from sabbatical leave from the LSE and from the support of its Hellenic Observatory. Papadimitriou worked on this book during two spells of sabbatical leave from the University of Manchester spent at Princeton and Yale respectively.
The tolerance and professional support of the team at Palgrave in the production of this manuscript is much appreciated.
It is impossible to name all those who have helped us. On a personal level, to conduct the research as a team - with its members each contributing their different strengths - has been an unqualified pleasure. At the same time, the project has imposed on those around us. As we finish this endeavour, we wish to record our appreciation of the love and support offered by our families and friends. The book is rightly dedicated to them.
Introduction
1.1 An historical puzzle: the Muslims of Western Thrace during two wars
In the aftermath of the First World War (WWI) and a compulsory exchange of population, a sizeable and specific minority of Muslims were left within Greece, as a legacy of the old Ottoman Empire. Located near the northeast corner of Greece (Western Thrace), they found themselves in a rapidly changing society — ‘foreigners’ in a re-defined homeland. The region as a whole, however, had experienced repeated changes of authority and borders as a result of the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Bulgarian and Greek nationalisms. As such, it had been the land in-between conflicting irredentist aspirations. The Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, alongside the Greco-Turkish population exchange, provided (through the principle of reciprocity)! guarantees for the ‘Muslims’ of Western Thrace, recognising that they had a distinct identity and may be vulnerable to new threats. In the inter-war period, they represented about a third of the population of their region. With the onset of the Second World War (WWII), the Balkans were once again plunged into instability, which continued after the ‘peace’ with the arrival of Tito in Yugoslavia and the eruption of the Greek civil war. These separate events sustained not only an instability of authority, but also generally re-awakened ambiguities of identity, the assertion of rights, and new disputes about states and borders.
Not withstanding these conditions, the Muslims of Western Thrace remained overwhelmingly passive and detached from the conflicts of WWII, the Greek civil war and the struggles over borders. Looking back at this formative period of twentieth-century history, the ‘non-response’ of the minority appears as an historical puzzle. Like Orthodox Greeks of the same age, Muslim men had been conscripted into the Greek Army to stop Mussolini’s invasion and many appear to have fought bravely. But, after the defeat of Greece, this vulnerable minority passively accepted its own marginalisation. It suffered badly under a brutal Bulgarian occupation, but it showed little resistance. It did not form a resistance or insurgency organisation of its own and very few of its members willingly joined either the Communist or nationalist forces. Some took the exit option and fled as refugees to Turkey, though this was not without its own problems. Moreover, Ankara — for its own strategic reasons — opted not to publicly raise issues as to the fate of the Muslim community of Western Thrace for most of the 1930s and 1940s.
The case contrasts with that of others. In Epirus (north-west Greece), for example, a substantial number of Chams - an Albanian ethnic minority — were seen as supporting Mussolini’s invasion and many later collaborated with the Axis.” None of these responses were very evident for the Muslims of Western Thrace. Further, in Macedonia at the end of the occupation a Slav minority pursued a separatist agenda supported by Yugoslavia. By contrast, in Western Thrace, the Muslim minority did not (nor was it prompted to do so by its ‘kin-state’ Turkey). Moreover, for their part, the Greek Communists had earlier sought ‘independence’ for both Macedonia and Western Thrace, later modified to a call for ‘full autonomy’ for their minorities. Yet, the Communists prioritised Macedonia, rather than Western Thrace and this circumscribed their engagement there.
A number of questions thus arise for the case study of the Muslims in Western Thrace. Why did the minority remain passive and disengaged from the conflicts? Why did Turkey, as the kin-country, not take up its cause more strongly? Why did the resistance movement - and the Greek Communists, in particular — fail to develop a stronger relationship with this ‘oppressed’ minority? More generally, what were the effects of occupation and civil war on the minority’s orientation and existence?
A number of factors that help to explain the outcome in Western Thrace could reasonably have been expected to have led to a different historical course. Several can be highlighted here. The region had undergone successive changes of regime - all those continuously resident in the area over the age of 30 had lived through four different sets of rulers — and Bulgaria’s occupation in 1941 was but the latest manifestation of competing irredentism. Rule over the region was thus hardly settled. Moreover, for its part, Turkey, as the Muslim minority’s ‘kin-country’, under its new leader Mustafa Kemal (soon to be ‘Kemal Atattirk’) had, in its ‘National Pact’ (Misak-1 Milli) of 1920, called for a plebiscite in Western Thrace to determine its fate (Aarbakke 2000: 25; Clark 2006: 98-99; Yildirim 2006: 25, 33). Though Turkey and Greece had later signed a ‘Friendship Pact’ in 1930 and embarked on a new era of rapprochement, when the Axis attacked the region, Ankara did not feel bound by any of these understandings and, instead, acted as an independent (and unpredictable) agent. Then, and later, Turkish nationalists saw the Muslims of Western Thrace as ‘outside Turks’ (Dig Tiirkler).4 Gains might have been identified for Turkey — a state built on nationalism — had it accommodated itself more with the Axis Powers and sought territorial rewards for doing so.
In 1922, the Muslim population had been in the majority in Western Thrace and had held 84 per cent of the land (Oran 1994). They had formed the social base of the hegemonic power — they were the millet-i hakime (sovereign nationality) in the Ottoman system while Orthodox Greeks were the millet-i muhakkime (dominated nationality) (Oran, 1994). Now, many of those remaining in Western Thrace in 1941 suffered glaring economic and social inequality from the new local majority of the Greek Orthodox, though not necessarily of all the in-coming Greek refugees. This reversal of fortune made the minority a potential resource for conflict and insurgency.> For their part, the Greek Communists — pressed on the matter by their Bulgarian counterparts — clearly shared something of this assessment in their earlier declarations on the region. However, their later ambivalence and inconsistency in this respect introduced further complications into the local strategic puzzle.
Moreover, the geography of the region — and the population distribution of the Muslim minority —- may be thought conducive to resistance and guerrilla activity. The Rhodopes were certainly inaccessible, though they lacked sufficient depth to allow a guerrilla force to attack and hide. On the other hand, the insular and closely-knit Muslim communities would have offered the potential for local insurgents to melt-away, lost in anonymity, if there had been a local will to do so. The failure of a Communist-led guerrilla force in the civil war to attract local support would later prove the importance of this point.
The passivity, disengagement and marginalisation of the Muslim minotity in the 1940s is essentially a two-part puzzle, covering the factors relevant to the occupation during WWII and the struggles of the subsequent civil war. The primary task of this book is to address this puzzle and the explanation offered covers a range of factors — both those signalled already, as well as others.
In order to set the case study in perspective, Chapter 2 considers a number of background aspects. These centre on the relevance of geography and demography; of nationalism and the spread of Communist ideology; of the consequences of the Treaty of Lausanne; and of the legacies of inter-war politics and social norms. As such, the chapter begins to examine what kind of minority the Muslims of Western Thrace can be said to be. The present study is not conceived as primarily a case of nationalism (lapsed or otherwise) or of national identity. However, much of the subsequent discussion will be better understood if the underlying conception of a ‘nation’ and of its ‘identity formation’ is clarified. For these purposes, we accept Walker Connotr’s formulation of a nation being composed of a group who believe they are ancestrally related (1994: 212). In this context, a national minority is one that shares a sense of nationhood (a common past and future) with, in this case, an external kin-state. Importantly, Walker Connor warns that ‘national consciousness is a mass, not an elite phenomenon’ and this study seeks to delve into the 1940s as experienced at the grass-roots level (1994: 223).
Smith, with his ethno-symbolist approach, goes further. National identity, he argues, is ‘the maintenance and continuous reproduction of the pattern of values, symbols, memories, myths and traditions that compose the distinctive heritage of nations and the identification of individuals with that heritage and those values, symbols, memories, myths and traditions’ (2000: 796). The extent to which these conditions apply in the case of the Muslims of Western Thrace will be explored in subsequent chapters.
Following Chapter 2 as a scene-setter, the subsequent narrative develops in a broadly chronological fashion, to allow the story to unfold, whilst structuring the analysis around key themes. Chapters 3 to 5 present the case study of the Muslim minority during the WWII, from Mussolini’s attack and the Bulgarian occupation of 1941 through to the withdrawal of Bulgarian forces in October 1944. Chapter 6 covers the interim period between the end of the WWII and the 1946 elections, a period shaped by significant ambiguity of authority and low intensity conflict. Chapters 7 and 8 then extend the study to the escalating violence of the Greek civil war.
The study inevitably touches on a number of social science dimensions relevant to the historical explanation. These range over political sociology, international relations, and studies of nationalism. The Muslim minority of Western Thrace was located within traditional, agrarian settings divided between isolated mountainous villages and lowland communities in villages and towns, with either a homogeneous or heterogeneous character. How did this setting impact on the minority’s response? Previous studies of war and of civil war have highlighted factors that favour (and discourage) resistance and insurgency. How far is this case consistent with them? From an international relations perspective, the minority was identified with a ‘kindred’ state: Turkey both projected and accepted a role as guardian of those left behind by the retreat of the Ottoman Empire. What strategic conditions affect how states take up the cause of their kin communities abroad? Finally, the vulnerabilities and suffering of war confront issues of identity and of inter-communal relations. How did the Axis occupation and the Greek civil war affect the self-identity of local Muslims, their sense of common cause or ‘groupness’ and their relations with other ethnic groups? What were the foundations of national identity and of nationalism underpinning these orientations? These questions provide a frame within which the unfolding case study is structured and the findings on each of them are considered in the Conclusion.
1.2 Positioning the case study
Before turning to the case study, some readers will welcome a discussion of how it fits into the existing literature on the subject and also, later, of how the present study was conducted. One of the main preoccupations of this book was to build upon, but greatly extend, the scope of the existing literature on the region and the minority. No other published work, in any language, has confronted the ‘puzzle’ that has been identified here and the historiography of the Muslim minority, in general, is very limited.
There are, however, diverse literatures that relate to the present case study, albeit from different perspectives and foci. There is a sizeable general literature on the Axis occupation and on the civil war, with recent attention being given to the sociology of civil conflict, the strategies of the main protagonists, and the impact of the British and US intervention in Greece.
Scholarly focus on the regions of Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace is more limited by comparison, although a number of significant contributions have been published over the past decade.’ Yet, in this literature the coverage of the particular case of the Muslim minority has been very limited and fragmented. More general studies on the position of the Muslim minority have lacked adequate detail for the 1940s and have been predominantly placed within the wider context of Greco-Turkish relations.® In recent years a number of scholarly works have focused on the violation of human rights in Western Thrace? and on the social anthropology of the Muslim minority,!° but their scope has not been extended back to the period of the 1940s. Even the most significant study of the minority by Aarbakke (2000) mainly focuses on post-1974 developments and contains only limited coverage of the 1940s. More recently, the publication of the memoirs of Mihri Belli (Captain Kemal) (2009) and the book by Ali and Htiseyinoglu (2009) have provided some important insights into the local history of that period, supplementing the incomplete and highly partisan account offered by Batibey (1976).
Despite recent additions, however, significant gaps still remain in our understanding of the historical, social and political context that shaped the position of the Thracian Muslims in the middle of the twentieth century. Indeed, this period was a key phase: it came just before the Greco-Turkish conflict over Cyprus erupted in the mid-1950s. This was a conflict that would place the Muslim minority within a new discourse of contending nationalisms and strategic interests and a new equivalence with the Orthodox minority of Istanbul. As such, it is important to determine the experiences and orientations of the Muslim community of West Thracian minority before the new conflicts took over. Addressing such gaps can also serve to challenge popular Greek discourses of the minority based on the suspicion of it being ‘the enemy within’ or too-ready Turkish assumptions of its unequivocal identification.
1.3 A note on sources and methodology
Any historical case study poses questions of access to relevant and reliable material. These problems are exacerbated when: many of those directly involved have died; the community under study has become subject to a highly-charged discourse as the ‘enemy within’; the memories of those who survive from the period may be tainted by subsequent events and experiences; and, archive material is not easily accessed and the information it provides is often partial, missing events or conditions at the local level.
The present study set out to overcome these challenges by seeking to cross-check accounts from whatever sources were available. Fortunately, in the course of the research, a substantial amount of empirical material in varied forms was collated. The types of source-material used in the study are, in the main: information from national archives in Greece; Turkey; Bulgaria; the UK and the US, to capture all three regional players and the international powers relevant to the local situation and security in the area; local archives; local newspapers (in both Greek and Turkish language); and personal interviews, across ethnic or political divides, with some of those directly involved in the events of the 1940s in Western Thrace. Separately, each source carries inherent problems of validity and reliability; in combination, however, the risks are significantly reduced.
With respect to the archive material utilised in this study, it was perhaps inevitable that the main bulk of the information would come from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Athens and its Diplomatic and Historical Archive (AYE). The records of the Ministry’s Directorate of Political Affairs were the most relevant as it was, and remains, the main agent of the Greek government in managing ‘minority affairs’. The vast majority of this material has never been utilised before. The material is, of course, limited for the 1941-44 period, but it is vast for that of the civil war. Altogether, the information facilitated a chronology of events in the region, as well as the evolution of Greco-Turkish relations before and after WWII. In the context of the civil war, it also displays the suspicion of the authorities towards the Muslims of Western Thrace.
A number of other Greek archives were accessed for the study. The General State Archives (GAK) in Athens, Kavalla and Thessaloniki (and, to a lesser extent, those in Alexandroupolis, Komotini and Xanthi) offered fragmented, but sometimes in-depth, information on Western Thrace in the 1930s and 1940s. Notable collections are the Archive of Foreign and Minority Schools in Kavalla, which provides invaluable insights with respect to the education of the minority and the Xanthi Prefecture Archive (the file on the 1940s is located in Thessaloniki), which contains useful material on the civil administration of the Muslim community. A substantial part of the archive of the Directorate of Army History (DIS) has already been published in edited collections. The material here allowed the tracing of the operations of the Greek National Army (EES) both during the 1940-1941 war against Italy and the course of the civil war. Further reference was made to the archives of the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA) in Athens (particularly the archive of General Vrettos) and Thessaloniki (particularly the ‘Archive of Bulgarian Occupation in Macedonia and Thrace’ and the archive of Harisios Vamvakas); the archives of Eleftherios Venizelos (at the Benaki Museum, Athens); the National Statistical Service (Athens), the Vovolinis Archive and the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI) in Athens and the Institute for Balkan Studies (IMXA) in Thessaloniki. Though more fragmented in their coverage, these sources proved important for both the pre-war era and the 1940s.
It was important to the study that it was also based on information obtained from archives in Turkey. Unfortunately, access to such state archives is frequently tightly restricted, particularly for foreign scholars. Crucially, the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were denied to outside investigators. Whatever the motive for this, the consequence is that serious, balanced research is made highly problematic. Such hurdles are antithetical to the desire that Turkey’s place in Europe be properly understood. With access to the Republican Archives in Ankara (BCA) restricted, the only alternative was to use local partners. Via this route, the material obtained for this study was extensive, though it is not possible to completely verify the extent to which it provided full coverage of government policies and actions. The material covers the ‘high politics’ of the period only limitedly, but it was invaluable for its account of the educational and immigration issues affecting the minority in Western Thrace. Access was obtained to the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul (BOA) and these proved relevant to the coverage of the Balkan Wars, WWI and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-23. Interesting insights into the position of the Western Thracian Muslims amidst a collapsing empire and the advance of Balkan nationalisms were revealed.
A broader picture was also provided by the access obtained to the Bulgarian Central State Archives (CSA) in Sofia. This material provided a very different account of events from the one presented by the Greek authorities. In addition to the invaluable information on the policies of the Bulgarian government in the area during the first half of the 1940s, the contents revealed a fascinating insight into the mindset of Bulgarian officials in Western Thrace. Hence, the apparently widespread discontent of non-Bulgarians in the area against the policies of the occupying forces rarely registered on the radar of the Bulgarian administration. The tone of the reports from the newly conquered territories in both Eastern Macedonia and Western Thrace is largely one of routinised administration, of ‘business as usual’.
To counteract the pitfalls of relying on a history written at the governmental level, the case study presented here also utilises a wide range of local material. This allowed a deeper understanding of how the various communities at the grass-roots level viewed the events of the 1940s. The material included a number of Greek language newspapers: such as Proia (Morning News), Eleftheri Thraki (Free Thrace), Proodeutiki (Progressive) and Ergatikos Agon Thrakis (Labour Struggle of Thrace). Alongside these, the local Turkish-language newspaper, Trakya (Thrace), was extensively used. A particular insight into the attitudes and activities of local Muslims loyal to the Greek Communist forces during the civil war was provided by the newspaper Savas (War — Struggle) which is frequently quoted in Chapters 7 and 8.
Beyond the regional and local perspectives, the case study frequently draws on the reports housed in the archives of the British and US governments, as two international powers with a crucial role in the fate of the area. As is often the case with historical research on Greece, the Public Records Office (PRO) in London has been a major source of information for this study. In particular, the archives of the Foreign Office, the War Office, the Cabinet Office, the Government Communications Headquarters and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) shed light on the position of the Muslim minority within the context of Greco-Turkish relations and the British response to its evolution. An unlikely, but very illuminating, source with regards to the nationalist movements in the wider region of Thrace during the nineteenth century have been the Parliamentary Papers of the House of Commons.
On the other hand, the archival material uncovered in the National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland (NARA), USA was rather limited with regard to the local Muslim community in Western Thrace. More significant was the evidence on the activity of the US security operations in Evros (during WWII) which, nevertheless, was rather peripheral to the core focus of this study. This early form of US engagement in wartime Europe is, indeed, a fascinating topic requiring further investigation.
Alongside the national, local, and international archives, the study has relied on the testimony of individuals (on both sides of the religious divide) who experienced the events of the 1940s in Western Thrace. In total, nearly 60 separate interviews (with more than 90 interviewees) were conducted in Western Thrace, as well as with émigrés in Istanbul, Uzunkoprii, and Izmir. Overall, the interviews obtained covered different sides of the ethnic and political divides. Yet, it is not possible to estimate how well such interviews reflected the attitudes and experiences of the local population of the 1940s. Indeed, one lacuna that remains here is a full account of the experiences of the Bulgarian population who settled in (and were later evicted from) Western Thrace during WWII. That said, the present study has benefited enormously from the interviews that were obtained. The interviews were semi-structured in their format, balancing the checking of information obtained from other sources with the personal recollections of the interviewee. The majority of the interviews were conducted on a one-to-one basis, although a number of them involved larger groups. Given local sensitivities these interviews were not recorded and the identity of those who contributed is protected. For more details on the background of the interviewees, the reader is referred to the Appendix at the end of this book. The direct quotes included in the narrative that follows were reproduced from the notes of the interviewers, who remain fully responsible for any inaccuracies. The accounts offered by the interviewees allow the ‘grand’ historical narrative to be connected to the experiences of those who lived through the events. Of course, oral history contains its own research viruses as a result of the lapse of time and subsequent events clouding the memory. Again, evidence from such sources has been cross-checked with that obtained from archive material written in the relevant period.
The study that follows has thus confronted many conventional research challenges, as well as some particular to the case and the problems of access and sensitivity. Inevitably, the documentary material will be incomplete. Interviewees may offer a partial account. History is written in the present, shaped by the personalities of the authors and of contemporary conditions. Set aside these constraints, however, is the fact that the case study is based on extensive evidence from multiple sources, many of which can be re-examined by a sceptical reader. Hopefully, these features have reduced the risks and may increase the confidence in the portrayal that is offered.
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