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To these arguments and demands the Greeks replied that, next to Krete; these are the two largest, most wealthy, and most populous Greek islands in the Aegean; that their inhabitants ardently desire union with the national kingdom; and that the Greek Government would hesitate to use them as a basis for economic coercion and nationalistic propaganda against Turkey, if only because the commerce of western Anatolia is almost exclusively in the hands of the Greek element on the Asiatic continent.
Had one taken ship with Achaeans or Ionians for the western coast of Anatolia in the year 1000, one would have expected to disembark at or near some infant settlement of men, not natives by extraction, but newly come from the sea and speaking Greek or another Aegean tongue.
There are few large cities in Syria, Anatolia, and European Turkey, where some of these people are not to be found. For their travelling purposes, and for the duties incumbent upon them as ciceroni in their own town, many individuals learn a little Turkish; and it is their pride to The Medinans generally are of a less cheerful and lively disposition than the Mekkans.
In exactly ten minutes it is in the power of every man to free himself from all the tumult of the world; the pangs of love, the throbs of ambition, the wear and tear of play, the recriminating boudoir, the conspiring club, the rattling hell; and find himself in a sublime sylvan solitude superior to the cedars of Lebanon, and inferior only in extent to the chestnut forests of Anatolia.
In the first place, though both England and France are perfectly willing to have the United States accept a mandate for European Turkey, Armenia and even Anatolia, I doubt if England would welcome with enthusiasm a proposal that she should evacuate Palestine and Mesopotamia, the conquest of which has cost her so much in blood and gold, or whether France would consent to renounce her claims to Syria, of which she has always considered herself the legatee.
They didn't worry much about us, for the heart of Anatolia wasn't a likely hunting-ground for suspicious characters. We took our passport to the commandant, who visaed them readily, and told us he'd do his best to get us transport. We spent the night in a sort of hotel, where all four crowded into one little bedroom, and next morning I had my work cut out getting a motor-car.
The enumeration of provinces recalls a sad comparison of the past and present limits of the Roman world: the raw levies were drawn together in haste and terror; and the garrisons of Anatolia, or Asia Minor, had been purchased by the evacuation of the cities which were immediately occupied by the Turks.
Across the northeastern corner of Asia Minor will be spread the words "Republic of Armenia" and beneath, in parentheses, "Independence guaranteed by the United States." The whole of Anatolia, save the Greek and Italian fringes just mentioned, will be occupied and ruled by the Turks, for it is their ancestral home.
Substantial relief from their burdens the primary though negative condition of national revival accrued to the Greek peasantry from the decay of Ottoman militarism in all its branches. The Turkish feudal aristocracy, which had replaced the landed nobility of the Romaic Empire in Anatolia and established itself on the choicest lands in conquered Europe, was beginning to decline in strength.
Through the Dark Age the Greek cities had maintained a continuous life, but Mohammed II depopulated Constantinople to repeople it with a Turkish majority from Anatolia. Greek commerce would naturally have benefited by the ejection of the Italians from the Levant, had not the Ottoman Government given asylum simultaneously to the Jews expelled from Spain.
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