Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone

Author:Norman Stone [Stone, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2014-06-17T04:00:00+00:00

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1 The Crimean Memorial Church (Christ Church) was rescued after 1991 by a very enterprising clergyman, Canon Ian Sherwood, who defied a challenge by his superiors to have the place deconsecrated. Raising support from British and American business, he restored the church, using the crypt to house refugees, for whose children he organized voluntary schooling. The church is generally about two-thirds full, and on the great occasions full to overflowing.

SEVEN End of Empire

END OF EMPIRE

Almost a century to the day after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, the empire faced another great disaster. The bankruptcy of 1875 alienated British and French bond-holders, though in truth they had driven too hard a bargain, and the empire had paid back the debt several times over in interest, without paying (‘amortizing’) the principal. But there was worse. To pay for this ratchet, taxes went up, and the Christians had started a rebellion. It went back to Ottoman Crete, where Greek nationalists agitated for union with Greece, although a good third of the population was Muslim, and they rose in 1866, with much massacre. Then in 1875 the peasants of Herzegovina rebelled against taxes – or at any rate against attempts to put down the smuggling of tobacco, the stock-in-trade of those parts. That rebellion spread across the border to Serbia, and it in turn spread into the lands of the Bulgarians. Here there were complications. Medieval Bulgaria had had a Balkan empire, stretching into Greece and towards the Adriatic, but it had collapsed before the Turks, who had in effect run the place through Greeks, who dominated the Church. American missionaries had arrived, and they did something to standardize or even invent the language and make people literate in it; before then, respectable Bulgarians spoke Greek. What was the relationship of Bulgarian to Church Slavonic? Bulgarian nationalism was a strange product, but it emerged.

However, the Bulgarian lands had also had to receive refugees from the earlier Russian wars, and there were Tatars and Circassians all around, joining the Muslims – Pomaks – who had lived there for centuries and on the whole had decent relations with their Christian neighbours. In the second Tanzimat, an energetic governor, Midhat Pasha, had done quite well in building up town services, but relations between the Circassian refugees and the Bulgarian locals were tense, as they were in eastern Anatolia with the Armenians. At the first hint of trouble, there were massacres of Christians by Circassians, who feared that yet again they were going to be driven into exile. News came through to Britain that ‘horrors’ were happening. It was the massacre of Chios all over again.

The Liberals were by nature divided, as the Irish Question was to show, but they could be united by an astute leader on a single issue. There was one very solid element among them, Protestant Dissenters who did not subscribe to the official Church of England. These were precisely the sort of people who would get very worked up indeed at the stories

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