What made the estimating of the numbers of these Greeks in the interior so very difficult was the fact that up to a few years ago they spoke Turkish and therefore did not share in the national and racial consciousness of their kinsmen on the coast, and also the fact that they do not essentially differ in physical type from the Ottomans, who have become assimilated to the race type of the conquered people and have lost their special Turkish characteristics. This state of affairs began to change when the Greeks, with the help of their church, succeeded in introducing the Greek language in their schools alongside of the Turkish. Since then, that is, since the seventies of the last century, the national propaganda has made great progress among them, and the number of schools has greatly increased.
In the thirty cities of the interior of this region (prefectures of Aïdin and Brussa) they possessed in the last decade of the 19th century more than 400 schools with about 25,000 pupils, while the Mohammedans in their thousand schools had only 20,000 pupils. The number of pupils in each Greek school therefore averaged 60, while those in the Turkish schools averaged only 20, a disproportion which is to be explained by the fact that the Mohammedan schools are almost exclusively poorly attended mosque-schools, while the Greek schools are community-schools that are very well attended. The religious character of the Turkish educational system is just as prejudicial to the Turks as the nationalistic tendency of the Greek schools is beneficial to the Greeks. There are towns in which, in spite of the Greeks being in a minority, more Greek children attend the schools than Turkish children. So Sokia, with 180 Turkish and 218 Greek children in school; the same is true of Bigha (125:140), Alashehr (250:525), Nazilli (162:220), Menemen (220:325), Biledjik (1,100:1,113). In other towns, such, for example, as Bergama, Magnesia, Milas, Soyut, the number of the Greek pupils almost equals that of the Turkish, and in most of them the number is more than half as large as that of the Turkish pupils, even in that stronghold of Mohammedanism, Brussa, where there are something like 2,500 Greeks, as compared with 5,000 Turkish pupils, although the Greeks comprise here only ten per cent of the population. These are figures which more than anything else are indicative of the activity and capacity for education of the Greek part of the population. The intellectual superiority of the Greeks is set forth in an even stronger light when one compares the sum total of the Greek schools and of their pupils in both prefectures with that of the Turkish. For we find that even in 1894 there were 540 Greek schools, with about 30,000 pupils, as compared with 1,900 Turkish schools, with about 42,000 pupils. The slight numerical superiority of the Turkish scholars is, to say the least, entirely disproportionate to the large majority of Turks in the population.
According to recent statistics, which are, to be sure, taken from Greek sources[34] and are, therefore, perhaps a little too optimistic in their tone, the number of Greek schools has since then risen to more than 700 and that of the pupils to more than 100,000 (69,274 boys and 48,468 girls), which leads one to conclude that the Greek population numbers a million, a number which, compared with the 650,000 of twenty-five years ago, does not seem to be too high an estimate, particularly if we take into account the great increase of the Greeks through a higher birthrate and through immigration. Thus, the sum total of the Greeks in both prefectures, which have together a population of about three millions, would be about a third of this number and would, at any rate, not fall far below this.
With this rapidly increasing Greek population of the west coast and interior, the prefectures of Brussa and Aïdin, and that in the mountains of Pontus (prefecture of Trebizond) and Central Cappadocia (prefecture of Angora), which number together a million and a third more, we have not exhausted the list of Greeks of Asia Minor. There are, as a matter of fact, large numbers scattered through the interior and along the south coast, chiefly in the prefecture of Sivas and Konia, where their number in 1890 approximated 75,000. Next comes the prefecture of Adana, with about 50,000, and, least strongly Greek, the prefectures Angora (about 30,000) and Kastamuni (about 25,000). It has, however, been observed that the number of Greeks in the middle and eastern provinces is always decreasing, which is doubtless due to the fact that they wander away into the livelier and more fruitful regions to the westward.[35] These are in this way becoming more and more solid nuclei for the process of crystallization for Hellenism in Asia Minor, which is thus once more, as it did in late antiquity, shifting its center of gravity toward western Asia Minor, as though it felt that here is ever that original free-flowing source to which it now for the fourth time owes its strengthening and rejuvenation: the first being when in the last centuries before the Christian Era the native Lydians and Phrygians were assimilated; the second, when in early Byzantine times it turned back the Romanizing process which had been going on since the beginning of this era; the next, when in the 7th to the 10th centuries it averted the threatening Arabic peril, and finally when, though apparently defeated by the Turkish conqueror, it has after 500 years of relaxation again regained its vigor and strength in order to fulfill its old historical mission, which consists not in forcing its way on with the wild alarum of weapons, but through the peaceful weapons put in its power by nature, i.e., by material and spiritual civilizing agencies, that do their work quietly. This mission Mohammedanism must meet through appropriate measures in administration and education, if it desires to secure its political control even in the western part of Asia Minor, now and in the future.
III. HELLENIC PONTUS, A RESUME OF ITS HISTORY
By Demosthenes H. Oeconomides
[Among the most interesting of the irredenta regions of Asia Minor, from many points of view, is Pontus, on the southeast coast of the Black Sea. So strong is the anti-Turkish feeling in this intensely Hellenic land that a strong movement has recently arisen among her expatriated sons to establish an independent Republic of Pontus. Its mountainous inland districts have been so isolated from the rest of the Greek world and its coast regions have so strongly preserved their individuality that language, blood and national feeling have been maintained in quite a different way from elsewhere in the Greek world. It has seemed fitting that Pontus therefore should receive special consideration in this number of the American-Hellenic Society’s publications, and we are glad to present this scholarly treatise by Demosthenes E. Oeconomides, a philologian of no mean repute, who is a native of this region and has written amongst other things an authoritative treatise on the Pontic dialect entitled: Lautlehre des Pontischen, Leipzig, 1908.]
Pontus is bounded on the north by the southeast shore of the Euxine or Black Sea, on the east by the Phasis River and Iberia, on the south by the Argaeus and Antitaurus mountains, and on the west by the Halys River. The whole country has at several epochs been variously divided and has gone under different names, thus, for example, in the time of the Parthians, the region that extended from the Phasis to the Bosporus was called the Kingdom of Pontus; in the time of the Romans, preserving the same boundaries, it was called the Polemoniac Pontus. The best known cities of Pontus are Rizus, Trapezus, Kerasus, Kotyora, Oenoe, Amisos, Sinope, Inepolis and Heraclea, all of which are coast cities, while in the interior are Amasea, Paphra, Neocæsarea, Nicopolis, Argyropolis, etc. Ecclesiastically it is divided into six, or if Cæsarea be included, into seven Metropolitan districts: Trapezus, Rhodopolis, Chaldia, Neocæsarea, Amasea, Cæsarea and Colonia. Of the many monasteries in Pontus, the most important is that of Mela (now called Soumela) founded by the Athenian monks, Barnabas and Sophronios, in 376 A.D. in the time of Theodosius the Great.