The most of the adherents of the Greek Church within the Turkish empire are Greeks. They are a strong, hardy, vigorous and intelligent race. Many of them are direct descendants, without doubt, of mighty men of valor who held their own in the face of overpowering odds in the early days of Greek chivalry. In Constantinople, where some 175,000 live to-day, they stand first among the bankers and leading merchants. Greeks figure largely in Smyrna and in fact in all of the cities of western Asia Minor, while they are found as far in the interior as Marsovan, Cæsarea and Sivas. As one goes still farther east, Greeks for the most part disappear and their place in trade and commerce is taken by Armenians. It is an interesting fact that along the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where mines exist, in many instances there is a colony of Greeks close by. Tradition reports that these are descendants of the men left behind in the famous retreat of the Ten Thousand across that country to Trebizond upon the Black Sea.
These Greeks, while citizens of Turkey, it may be, for fifty generations, not infrequently refer to the king of Greece as “our king George.” Along the borders of Macedonia towards Greece they cause the sultan much trouble by their sympathy with that kingdom rather than with him. For the most part, throughout Turkey they are quiet and give little trouble by revolutionary propagandism.
In educational institutions the Greek youth show superior intellectual ability and unusual eagerness. In commercial affairs they rank second to no other race and as merchants they have already gone into all the earth. Destitute of the intense national feeling of the Armenians, they have not given the Turkish government the trouble and anxiety that the Armenians have caused. As their fatherland is outside the borders of the present Turkish empire there is no fear upon the part of the Turkish rulers that they will attempt to set up an independent government. They have not, therefore, suffered the persecution that has been laid upon the Armenians.
VI. THE ARMENIANS
When I was in Constantinople I felt the restless tossings of long enthralled nationalities awaking to the new destinies that might be theirs—Armenians thirsting for their lost country and dispersed people; Bulgarians panting and striving for freedom in a Greater Bulgaria; Egyptians claiming independence; Jews praying for a return to the land of David and Solomon; Greeks dreaming strange dreams of a greater and united Greece, yes, even of an eastern empire restored to them, with Constantinople as its centre. I saw the Turk, still defiant but apprehensive, dimly conscious that the end is near at hand, lamenting the sins of his people—such sins as that the women do not wholly veil their faces, that the men do not slay the infidels. I discerned the subtle plotting of diplomacy to guard or gain the Queen City, and so the empire of the East. Everything seemed then, as now, uncertain. It might be peace, it might be war; but all were sure that the old was breaking up, whether to make way for inrushing floods of destruction, or for better days and nobler nations, none could tell. Then I went to the most sacred and vital spot of Stamboul, not to St. Sophia, which, with all the lights and prayers of Ramazan, testified only to the degradation and defeat of the purer by a coarser faith, which had become God’s scourge. I went to the Bible House, and there first, while all was shaking about, I felt that I stood upon a rock, the very Rock of Ages. The old city had fallen because it was built upon a shut Bible; this city was about to fall because it was built upon the Koran. But here on the open Bible was being reared a city which hath a foundation whose builder and maker is God.
—Edward A. Lawrence in
“Modern Missions in the East.”
Of all the races and sects of the Ottoman empire, none except the Turks are so closely identified with the country, its progress and present conditions, as the Armenians. They have been preeminently the means and occasion for prosecuting missionary work there, and the Armenian question has been discussed in the parliaments of all Europe and even now is far from solution.