It is difficult to assign a place to Italy in the array of European claimants for Turkish territory. The trade between Italian and Turkish seaports has lost the relative importance it had acquired in medieval times. Italian pretensions to Adalia Bay and its rearland are of quite recent date and the result of conquests in Libya. But beyond vaguely formulated promises for railway concessions from the Turkish government no ties bind the region to Italy. Italy however created its own sphere of interest somewhat unintentionally by the occupation of the islands of the Dodecanesia. By this act it distanced every other European country in the race for a share of Turkey.
The group of islands lying off the southwestern coast of Anatolia is now held by Italy in virtue of stipulations covenanted with Turkey at the treaty of Lausanne. According to the terms agreed upon, Italy was to occupy the islands in guarantee of Turkish good faith pledged to prevent anti-Italian agitation in Libya. Upon complete pacification of the latest territorial addition to Italy’s African domain, the political fate of the islands was to be determined jointly by the six Great European Powers.
The islands, between twelve and fifteen in number, are peopled exclusively by Greeks. Hellenic customs, language and religion have survived upon each in spite of centuries of Turkish rule. Italian sovereignty, however benevolent or likely to promote the welfare of the islanders, is disliked equally at Patmos, Leros, Cos and Rhodes. The remaining islands are relatively unimportant, some consisting of mere uninhabited rocks emerging two or three hundred feet above the sea. But to the smallest inhabited islet, annexation to Greece is keenly desired. The Italians were hailed as liberators from the Turkish oppression by the hardy fishermen who labored under the impression that their island homes had been rescued in order to be annexed to Greece. Their disappointment was expressed in mass meetings at Patmos and Cos in 1913.
Racial and historical considerations add their weight to the linguistic claims advanced by Greeks in Greece and the Dodecanesia. As sailors the islanders have maintained to this day classical traditions of Hellenic maritime activity in the region. The islands in fact constitute lands of unredeemed nationality whose natives are without a single exception akin to the continental Greeks.
This fact combined with a distribution of a numerically preponderant Greek element along the western coast of Anatolia makes the Ægean a truly Greek sea. Structurally the coast lands encircling this body of water are identical. In the east as in the west they constitute the warped margin of a subsided area. Identity of land and peoples has given rise to Greek claims on western Turkey. Greece, therefore, keeps in line with other European nations in expecting a share in the inheritance of the moribund Turkish state.
The claim is historical no less than economic. The association of the Ægean religion with centuries of Hellenism and fully one millennium of Byzantinism is by no means severed in modern days. For the second time in its glorious history the ancient city of Athens has become the social, political and intellectual center of the Greek world. In one and the same prospect the Greek capital can point with pride to the Hellenic splendor exhaled from Anatolian ruins and to her modern sons achieving daily economic victories over the Turk in his own land.
In this spectacle of nations lying athwart each other’s path the clue to the adequate settlement of the Turkish problem may be found. Turkey is before anything else a roadway—a bridge-land. As soon as this point of practical geography is recognized it will be easy to provide international legislation in which the claims of interested powers will be harmonized. But no solution of the political problem involved can ever be attained without full consideration of its geographical aspects. Failure to recognize this would leave the Eastern Question in the hopeless tangle in which it has lain for over a century.
As the seat of through routes Turkey and its railroad play a great part in international transportation. Hence it is that the Turkish lines, with exception of the Hejaz railroad, are controlled by financiers grouped according to nationality. At present the majority of shareholders in each of the concessions belong to one or the other of the great European powers.
The American Geographical Society of New York