Athens: Greeks vs. Turks (Greek View) Pt.2

So, we were happily driving through the streets of Athens on a bus with our guide, a fiftyish beautiful Greek lady, when she started talking about Greek history.  At first, Bos and I were giggling in the back of the bus, because (and you will remember this from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) she was recounting all the words in the world that come from Greek roots.  Just like the movie. And that includes, not just words, but also culture, philosophy, food, airplanes, cars, cats, dogs, houses, mountains, roads, rubber, fabric, basically everything!

And then she got down seriously to Greek history.  Like there is evidence of ancient settlements in Athens from the 7th millenia B.C. However, Athens was not always the most important city of Greece, because its greatest rival in antiquity was Sparta -- and the Persians.  The orator Demosthenes warned the Athenians about Macedonians back then and he was right because, in 322 B.C. Athens was conquered by them. (So you can see that the words “war” and “victory” must not have Greek roots!)

Anyway, then it started.  What do I mean?  Well, she told us the TURKS invaded Athens in 1456 and the city stayed under Turkish rule for 400 years until 1834 when the Greeks finally got it all together and beat the Turks back to Turkey and declared Athens the capital of the new country of GREECE.  But the way she put it was:

“Those 400 years were the Dark Ages for Greece.  While the rest of the world was experiencing the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, we were subjugated and in the Dark Ages. It was an awful time and now we are still trying to catch up.”  (Greek Version vs. TUrkish Version)

An aside here: In Athens guarding the tomb of the unknown soldier are military men (in Greece young men must do 2 years of military service), wearing Greek war garb.  WHat is the garb:  well, short skirts with 400 pleats (for those 400 years of domination--will they never forget?),knee socks, jaunty little berets with dangles, and pouf balls on their shoes.  And they goose step also.  They tell us these costumes were supposed to scare away the Turks.  We just thought they were “cute”.  Not really very scary.  But maybe that is why it took 400 years for them to win a war!!

And in 1923, the Turks and Greeks agreed to a “peaceful” people swap, where all the Turks in Greece were to go back to Turkey and all the Greeks in Turkey were to go back to the “Promised Land”.  Two million Greeks  “voluntarily” went back to Greece while five hundred thousand TUrks went back to Turkey.  

Our guide told us that there were 600,000 Greeks in Istanbul who stayed there, but between then and 1959, they were persecuted, their shops burned again and again, their homes burned down to the point that now there are only 2,000 Greeks left in Istanbul.