CHAPTER SEVEN in Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks, 1913–1923. Ed. George N. Shirinian. New York: Berghahn Books, 2017.
Found in Translation
Eyewitness Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia as Reported by Greek JournalistKostas Faltaits
Βρέθηκαν στην Μετάφραση
Αφηγήσεις Μαρτύρων Των Σφαγών στη Νικομήδεια Οπως Εξέθεσαν Από Τον Έλληνα Δημοσιογράφο Κώστα Φαλτάιτς
Professor Ellene S. Phufas
Introduction
The translation of original historical documents involves a number of complex issues. It becomes even trickier when the translation is intended to serve a wider purpose than simplyproviding information. In this case, I refer to the translation of These Are the Turks –First–Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia by Kostas Faltaits (November 1921 trans. E. Phufas and A. Tsilfidis). This work was originally a collection of eyewitness accounts of survivors in a vernacular Greek documenting their experiences during the genocidal frenzy that occurred in Nicomedia, in today’s Izmit region in 1920 and 1921. The translator must consider the background and experiences of the author, the historical milieu of the era, the often obscure meaning of words that are rarely found in contemporary usage, the emotional costs and issues involved for both the survivor and the translator, the need for accuracy, and the goals of the translation, whether personal, social, or academic. This chapter will begin by focusing primarily on writer and war correspondent Kostas Faltaits and his background, and then discuss how his experiences in the Greco-Turkish War influenced his outlook and insight in light of the devastating events of the time. It continues by showing how his collection of first person eyewitness accounts in These Are the Turks: First– Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia, as well as other unpublished journal writing, intersect and influence the translation of such documents.
Translation: A Theoretical Framework
Traditional translation models have focused on sentence-level translations and grammatical deep structure respectively. However, translation falls far short of the meaning level when the translation is isolated at the sentence level. A more complete and semantically comprehensive translation suggests that an overall text and contextual approach is far superior for transmitting meaning and symbolic sense. According to Keenan, the factors that play a role in formulating a culturally, semantically, and symbolically satisfying transition of a text are the overall textual components, how sentences are interlinked, and how they depend on one another in a stretch of a text. All these factors were taken into consideration in the translation of the seminal work of Kostas Faltaits’ These Are the Turks: First-Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia.
As translators, we were already familiar with the tragic genocidal frenzy of the era of the ethno-religious genocide perpetrated by Turks against non-Turkic Ottoman subjects, among them the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. We again familiarized ourselves with the region in which the Greek journalist and ethnographer Kostas Faltaits was embedded with the Hellenic Army. Upon his arrival in Turkey in March 1921, Faltaits participated in the Asia Minor campaign as a war correspondent for the Embros [Forward] newspaper. He described the battles that the Hellenic Army was engaged in at Nicomedia, Proussa, Ousak, Ada Pazar, Eskişehir, Karamusal, Kütahya, etc.
In many cases, we (the translators) were unable to locate many of the sites as describedby Faltaits, as they had been renamed, disappeared completely, or had their names changed to Turkish-sounding words. Translation requires not only a facility with word for word translation, but also historical research in order to bring to life the names of long lost communities that were deliberately obliterated in the Greco-Turkish War.
A seasoned journalist and writer, Kostas Faltaits had hardly arrived on the scene of the massacres in 1920 when he came across survivors, whose harrowing eyewitness accounts of wholesale atrocities against innocent civilians aroused him to set down on paper all that he heard. The result is that some months later, after returning to Greece, the collection of accounts was published and then translated into French in preparation for the Paris Peace Conference talks.
Before beginning any translation of a historical text based on events in a cultural milieu that varies greatly from the experiences of the translator/s, it is an obligation on the part of the translator/s to become familiar with the context of the times and the identity of those who play a role in the narrative, and to gain an understanding of the purposes and goals of the author and/or narrators. As a starting point, let us introduce Kostas Faltaits, the author. The following section provides a brief outline of Kostas Faltaits’ professional background and his experiences leading up to becoming a war correspondent in Asia Minor during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22.
Background of Kostas Faltaits: The Anguish of an Eyewitness to Eyewitness Survivors
It is now more than a century since the start of a series of significant events that shaped and defined the course of Greece’s History: the First Balkan War and the liberation of Thessaloniki, the Second Balkan War, World War I, the annexation of Crete to Greece, the Asia Minor Campaign, and more. Kostas Faltaits found himself at the vortex of many of thesehistorical events, and thus his name has been added to the list of early modern war correspondents. Risking his own life in many situations, Faltaits laid the foundations for younger journalists to work in more humane conditions.
Constantine (Kostas) Faltaits became a leading journalist, writer, and pioneer researcher of the period from 1913 to 1944. He was born in Smyrna (now Izmir), Asia Minor, in 1891 and raised in Skyros. He graduated from the prestigious Varvakeion School in Athens, and then studied law and literature at the University of Athens. After receiving his Doctor of Laws degreein 1910 at the age of nineteen, he began his career in journalism, a field that attracted him from a very early age. He continued to work in journalism until the end of his life, in 1944.
He worked for numerous newspapers and magazines, such as Acropolis, Forward, the Free Speech, Athenian, The Parnassus, The Free Man, The Bouquet, and Naval Greecepublishing news articles, articles of folklore, historical and ethnological studies, novels, short stories, poems, translations, and so on. He used a variety of names, including pseudonyms such as “F.”, “K. F.”, “Costas”, “Faltaits”, “Danaos Marcellus”, “Costas”, and “a Greek.”
The First and Second Balkan Wars
During the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Faltaits served in the Naval Fleet of Greece, on the destroyer battleship Averoff. He took part in the Battles of Elli and Lemnos, in the Straits of the Dardanelles, and on other islands of the Aegean. During this period, Faltaits was already working for the newspaper Acropolis, sending descriptions of the navy and its battle operations, which according to Acropolis publisher Vlassis Gavriilidis, “are admired by the best of our writers, for their poetic strength and objective veracity.” These descriptions were published in a variety of communiqués, which Kostas Faltaits signed as “F,” “K.F.,” “Danaos,” and “Costas Faltaits,” and were republished in 1915 in the Acropolis.
In 1919, The Chronicles of the Battle of Elli was published, which was honored with the Excellence in Humanities award.
The Asia Minor Campaign
In April 1921, Kostas Faltaits arrived in Turkey to observe and report on the Asia Minor campaign, as a war correspondent for the newspaper Forward. He accompanied the Greek army as it battled the Turkish forces at Avgin (better known as the Second Battle of Inönü), Izmit, Bursa, Ousak, Ada Pazar, Eskişehir, Karamusal, Kütahya, and so on.
In August of the same year, following the Battle of Sakarya, he was injured during an air raid. His last correspondence from the war front of the Asia Minor campaign was in November 1921 from Kopru Hisar.
Immediately after returning from the battlefront in November 1921, he wrote and published Autoi einai oi Tourkoi – Aphegemata ton sphagon tis Nikomideias [These Are the Turks: First-Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia]. The book was translated into French by the Greek Foreign Ministry the following year (1922) and used by the Greek government in support of Greek policy in negotiations with international organizations.
The Private Journal of K. Faltaits
Perhaps the best source of information about how the Asia Minor campaign and the genocide of the Asia Minor Hellenes affected Kostas Faltaits psychologically is his journal of notes, which remains unpublished; only a small part has so far been transcribed. From these autobiographical notes, his disappointment and rage about the handling of the issue by the Greek state becomes tragically apparent.
Faltaits believed that the Greek state acted as if the territories of Asia Minor were not Greek and arrived as a conquering power. In the journal entry of August 26, 1922, he stated:
“The Government has fallen since yesterday. It was a government of indifference to anything that concerns us in the Asia Minor issue. No sense of emotion drives it. What is required in order to win the Anatolian War? The love of the struggle. To consider it Our ethnic struggle. The state, however, had considered it a colonial struggle and was never able to discern that it was our own struggle for God and country. Their actions were not motivated by incurring pain for the struggle. No desire was planted in the people for the struggle.”
He saw that the Greek state refused to do the obvious (such as motivating Kemal by threatening the Turks, who lived on Greek territory).
“Monday, August 29, evening
Alas, how many of all the rulers and the military officers only consider their own security when they think about the salvation of a people, and how fearful they are that they might receive a diploma of misconduct from Europe by threatening to slaughter a couple of hundred Turks of Macedonia in order to save hundreds of thousands of Greeks!”
The sense of urgency and frustration can be clearly seen in another of Faltaits’ entries when he relates his experience in a town near Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor:
“Today, Saturday, August 27 the other children of my uncle and aunt came too. They were all talking loudly and angrily. They were upset with Hatzianestis and Stergiadis. Good thing they realized that they had to leave. Uncle, however, stayed behind to guard the house. To do what with it?
I was told that Stergiadis told people not to leave because there was no risk. This man boarded a ship, however, ready at any moment to be first to leave.
I speculate that populations who were tricked in this way by those who had secured safety for themselves would all have been saved if Stergiadis himself felt he faced the same risk, unable to leave, while the population was at risk.
In the afternoon I ran to Staff Headquarters together with the head of the evicted homeless residents, Mr. Hatzigiannis. With great reluctance they allowed us to enter.
I announced to all my very real fears about the populations, and I said that the people are being reassured that they can stay without anything happening to them and that the General Staff should have told them to leave overland to Çeşme [a port on the Aegean coast].
They told me that they cannot do anything, and that the people could not be saved.
I started sobbing.”
Another excerpt displays Faltaits’ increased exasperation with the Greek authorities:
“In the evening I had told Lachanokardis [the editor at Embros] to write about how the Greeks could be saved. What was the way? To immediately telegraph to Smyrna that the populations should not believe that they can be saved by Kemal and to listen only to that which will be announced to them. That they do not have any hope and they cannot do anything else but to go overland to Erythrea [at the time a town on the Erythrean Peninsula, now called Karaburun Yarımadası in Turkish].
For days now I cry out weeping at Mr. Lachanokardis to write about the question of Erythrea and he does not want me to. I tell him to write to bring Venizelos. He does not want to.”
We can only imagine the anxiety and frustration that Faltaits experienced in dealing with his editor, knowing what he knew of the Kemalist ulterior motives. He realized that the army had no “plan B” to exit the Asia Minor campaign. [Indeed, he had proposed exit from Erythrea, a proposal that was even mentioned by senior officers of the Greek army.]
“August 26 [old calendar]
With the former Chief of Staff Mr. Gouvelis, Faltaits recollects the following:
Sharing in my pain, he spoke to me about the reasons for the defeat last March at Eskişehir … by the stupid indifference, the criminal sickness or laziness on the part of Mr. Gounaris’ resolve [Greek Prime Minister]”
Faltaits continues to describe what was said during the conversation by asking the general if he knew about Erythrea, the area from which refugees fleeing from the Turkish army would escape by sea:
“What is that?” the General asked surprised.
“I wanted to ask you, my General, if there is any plan by the Staff regarding the administration of the Erythrean peninsula in the event of our army’s defeat,”Faltaits responded.
“Of course not,” the general replies. “We have not had any cause to consider that.”
Stunned, Faltaits then writes about his exasperation with the fact that the Greek military had not formulated any contingency plans in case the army was forced to abandon its positions in Asia Minor, leaving the Greek civilian population at the mercy of the Turkish forces. An increasingly anxious Faltaits could see that both the Greek government and its political and military apparatus were dangerously unconcerned and ill prepared to manage their occupation of Asia Minor and to protect the Greek and other Christian minorities there.
Faltaits made a final point about the reasons leading to the disaster of 1922. He saw that the news publications of the time did not inform the Greek public truthfully about the actual developments in Asia Minor and even characterized the testimony of survivors as being “exaggerated.” He noted that the indifference on the part of the general public regarding the situation in Asia Minor was changing, in that people were starting to realize that danger was approaching, and it was a danger that could affect everyone. At the same time, the concern was not what it should have been. Newspapers were more concerned with other matters and were filled with stories of inane and silly issues instead of focusing on the very real threats to the Greek people, both in Asia Minor as well as in the homeland. Even the newspapers he wrote for did not want to publish anything about the tragic events in Asia Minor.
At one point he described his editor’s stunning reaction to General Chadzianestis’indifference to the Erythrean escape route.
“But Erythrea is the salvation and the honor of the motherland at this moment,” Faltaits told his editor.
“I’m not at all interested about the salvation and honor of the homeland. I am only concerned as a journalist what Chadzianestis says to the Army,” the editor replied.
Lachanokardis then angrily tossed the articles Faltaits had written about the massacres that followed the capture of Smyrna into the dustbin.
“They are lies,” he tells Faltaits.
“Passengers on board boats in the harbor of Smyrna who could see the massacres told methese things!” Faltaits responded.
“The government denies all. It says almost nothing of this has happened.”
Faltaits then asks the editor whether any government officials have been to Piraeus (Port of Athens) to find out what happened from those who had arrived before denying the reports of massacres. Of course we know the answer was a chilling “No!”
Faltaits then notes the following in an eerily predictive entry:
“We will become like the Armenians and the Jews who are without a homeland and there is nobody to wake up the Greek soul.”
From this small sampling of the private notes of Faltaits, we can see emerging a profound level of frustration and horror at the indifference and deliberate desire to avoid facing reality on the part of the military, government officials, and the press alike. There can be little doubt that these experiences motivated Faltaits to undertake the collation of his written material—interview notes, descriptions, and so on—and publish the book which he titled These Are the Turks: First–Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia later in the same year, 1921.
These Are the Turks: First–Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia
While in Asia Minor, Faltaits was embedded with the Hellenic army. He was thus in the right place at the right time to encounter the survivors who made it to the Hellenic lines. The descriptions of what the survivors witnessed are breathtakingly brutal and emotionally laden. Faltaits did not find it necessary to embellish, change, delete, modify, or mollify the words that he heard and took down on his writing pad. We can only imagine his immense sorrow and speechless anger upon hearing the words that tumbled out of the mouths of the massacre survivors. A civilization of several millennia completely lost. A whole people reduced to tatters and fragments of themselves. A people exposed to a brutal heinousness that few can begin to imagine. Faltaits carefully noted the words and unflinchingly categorized and put into order the notes he collected. Published in late 1921, the chronicle shocked Greek readers with the full and sordid details of how Turks annihilated Christian populations in different areas of Asia Minor. As the author’s son, Manos Faltaits, writes in his introduction to the book: “It was pure genocide.”
Here is where the crossroads of past and present intersect for Kostas Faltaits: his experiences of incompetence and ineptitude on the part of the official Greek establishment colliding with the brutal reality of the battlefront and innocent victims he encountered in 1921. The only escape for his existential torture was to publish as many of the accounts as he could. Included in the book is a very brief foreword, in which Faltaits attempts to summarize the rationale for the book. He does this masterfully. After obliquely describing the arrogance of British officials in dealing with the survivors, he slams us with reality. An excerpt:
“In the province of Nicomedia—a region of almost 45 Greek villages and towns with almost 40 Armenian villages and towns, and about the same number of Circassian ones—there is nothing left today except ashes and ruins, and the 100,000 human beings slaughtered in the most heinous ways that the history of humanity has ever shown us, and the endless corpses of human skeletons that are scattered in the mountains, in the fields, in the forests, and in the ravines of Nicomedia tell us in a brutal rhetorical form who the Turks really are.”
As if ensuring his readers of his objectivity and sensitivity, a mark of the consummateethical man he was, Faltaits writes:
“The narratives that are published in the pages of this book, the contents of which have been verified with great care, portray an inadequate image of the great tragedy of Nicomedia, an image, however, in all its inadequacy, that can cry out to us the following again and again: ‘“These are the Turks.’”
Due to the nature of translation as a tool of communication, the “crossroads of past and present” referenced above must also be breached by the translator. Almost a century has passed since the tragic events occurred that resulted in the publication of this book. As we know,translation involves much more than a language operation. There must be a sense of knowing the writer, of knowing about the events, of having a certain level of familiarity with the cultural and political environment of the time, and so on. I venture to say that many other factors also play a role in communicating an accurate sense of what the author desired when he compiled this book for a Greek reading public. What was shared knowledge at the time is not even known today. An example is the names of towns and regions in Asia Minor, once commonly known but now largely forgotten. In 1921, towns, regions, and other locales in Asia Minor had been known for hundreds of years, in some cases millennia. Today, few original names remain; they were wiped out and replaced with Turkish-sounding names when the Kemalists formed the modern Turkish state. Here below is an example of a toponym: Konzes, which does not even exist today—I cannot find any reference to its past—in a chapter titled “Konzes.” The reader will also notice the changes in other place names as well:
“On the right shore as we enter the Gulf of Nicomedia [today Gulf of Izmit] the burned out ruins of Greek Konzes are found now.
A miracle of beauty, gentility, and happiness, 220 Greek well-to-do and kind families lived in Konzes, and in summer it served as a holiday home to the wealthy residents of Nicomedia, of Ada Pazar, of Bahtsezik (Bahçecik today), of Kiouplion (Küplü today), of Eski-Sehir (Eskişehir today), and even of the capital, Constantinople (Istanbul today). The fruit grown in Konzes were among the most famous sold in the markets of Constantinople, and its waters were among the coldest and most refreshing that could be drunk. A seaside paradise, with its tall and well-built homes with its ancient Byzantine mosaic Church of Saint Gregory, Konzes was the joy of the Greeks and the envy of the Turks in the surrounding villages.”
The book is replete with names of places that have been changed, and which the translator must note. In fact, while many Armenian and Assyrian place names were also changed, etymologist and author Sevan Nişanyan has noted that 4,200 Greek geographical locations have been changed in Turkey, the most of any ethnic minority.
Any author’s writing style must be respected as much as possible, and the writing style of Faltaits is such that it would be senseless to alter it. He effortlessly transitions from a description of a place of beauty to the stark and dark reality of the visual, then to capture the voice of a survivor. The translator must respect the style – the flow, the balance, and the movement of the writing such as it is. In the description of Konzes above, the reader can visualize the beauty of a place which at the time had been known throughout the region for many years. Faltaits thenabruptly switches to the plural “we” to capture the personal vision of reality as seen from the ship:
“…we could see all of Konzes and the carnage on the beaches of the Gulf of Nicomedia. We froze to a standstill as we looked on in horror facing the ruins and the ashes of razed Konzes because the strong odour coming from the ruins and cinders of homes was evidence that the corpses of the unfortunate inhabitants of Konzes had not yet completely decomposed. From the information given previously to me in Nicomedia by K. Theodorou and a few other survivors from the catastrophe in Nicomedia, I will attempt to provide here a somewhat watered down representation of the catastrophe.”
The narrative of the survivor begins thus—no introduction and no time for the reader to transition to the first person account. Faltaits seems eager for the survivor, K. Theodorou, to speak, and the reader can only listen to his words interspersed with Faltaits’ brief comments, so that the reader knows every detail of the interaction:
“I came down to the café of Th. Moschos on that morning—it was the 18th of February 1921—K. Theodorou, a married, well kempt man of 60 years of age was saying—and I saw Jemal of Nicaea, wearing a leather military uniform with an angry dark face watching there from outside.
‘“Sabaahlaerolsum,”’ I said to him even though I did not really want to say good morning to him.
‘“Sabaahlaerolsum,”’ he said and pretended to be looking away somewhere else with indifference.
Inside the café there were three or four armed Turkish peasants grabbing the store property while the cafe owner Th. Moschos had lit the fireplace and was trying to prepare coffee for them.
‘“Why are they doing that?”’ I asked him in Greek.
‘“Be quiet or we’re in for it,”’ he said. ‘“Have they surrounded Konzes?”’
And he continued bending over the fireplace…I started to leave but one of the Turks, Husni Aga from the neighbouring Turk village of Lasi, grabbed me by my chest and said:
‘“Take off your clothes.”’
He was an acquaintance so I thought he was kidding. That’s why I chuckled.
‘“What are you laughing at Giaour (infidel)?”’ he said and started searching me.
He took 15 liras I had with me, my watch, my pipe, and then he said:
‘“Take off your shoes.”’
I took off my shoes, he put them on and threw away his clogs, and then again he ordered me:
‘“Take off your pants.”’
My pants were patched and the Turk preferred my underpants and shirt which were new. Jemal who was looking on shouted:
‘“Take them.”’
In this chapter. K. Theodorou describes his experiences with the Turks, and later explains how he escaped and reached safety with the Hellenic army. With them, they march and he describes it thus:
“The Hellenic battalion continued 4 kilometers west towards the road to Karamusal and observed the land covered with corpses, men’s and women’s clothes, hands, feet, noses, ears, and fingers.”
The chapter does not end with commentary by Faltaits. It ends instead with a brutal and frank assessment by the survivor, L. Theodorou:
“On that road the Turks had executed those they had captured in the most brutal way and when the Hellenic Army battery left Konzes, the Turks returned and burned it down.”
This is a pattern that the book follows from start to finish. We as translators respected that brilliant design as much as was possible. One exception is remarkable in its uniqueness: the chapter titled “The Armenians” differs in that Faltaits includes no introduction and ends with no commentary. It is an amazing interview (or rather a conversation) he had with the Armenian Metropolitan of Nicomedia, Stephan Hovakimian. In fact, his Eminence directed the conversation, and Faltaits followed along quietly, respectfully, and thoughtfully taking down every word. The following shows how Faltaits recorded the start of the meeting with the Metropolitan, a man who somehow survived a hell of his own and was determined to tell of the hell that others had experienced and not survived:
“He welcomed and received me with the most gentle and sincere of manners, just as people of more chivalrous times would when meeting with a visitor at their premises, and he offered me a mulberry from the plate he was eating from.”
Then, when Faltaits asks the Primate to speak about the history of his people, he responds:
“You want the history of my flock! A history exists, indeed a very long history, however, a flock doesn’t exist any longer.
Of the 80,000 Armenians belonging to my ecclesiastical diocese of Nicomedia, 70,000 have been lost. And of the 10,000 of us who returned, the Turks found ways to reduce this number as much as they could.”
The reader can imagine the two men sitting there in a room with a table and chairs, and the journalist saying: tell me of your people. He may have not known all the monstrous details of the Armenian Genocide. But certainly the Metropolitan did. He was surprised at being asked the polite and simple question which could have been asked at a dinner party in a more pleasant time. Yet Faltaits does not gloss over this incident, does not make excuses for asking, but rather directly allows the Metropolitan the opportunity to speak from his heart, even while stunned that the facts of genocide may not have reached the ears of Faltaits (although we know that Faltaits knew that the Armenian people had been all but annihilated). This is a powerful example of how the translator of such documents must be attuned to subtle issues far beyond a familiarity with the language being translated.
Bibliography
Catford, J. C. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Faltaits, Kosta. The Chronicles of the Naval Battle of Elli. Published sequentially in Navy of Greece Journal, 1919.
Hartmann, R. Contrastive Textology. London: Longman, 1980.
Keenan, E. L. “Logic and Language.” In Language as a Human Problem, edited by Einar Haugen and Morton W. Bloomfield, 185–94. London: Butterworth Press, 1973.
Nida, E. “A Framework for the Analysis and Evaluation of Theories of Translation.” In Translation Application and Research, edited by R. W. Brislin, 47–91. New York:Gardner Press, 1975.
Notes311
Notes
1. Autoi einai oi Tourkoi – Aphegemata ton sphagon tis Nicomedias [These Are the Turks – First Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia]. Published in November 1921; translated into French in 1922; first English edition to be published in 2016 by COSMOS Press.
2. E. Nida, “A Framework for the Analysis and Evaluation of Theories of Translation,” in Translation Application and Research, R. W. Brislin. (New York: Gardner Press, 1975), 47-91; R. Hartmann, Contrastive Textology (London: Longman, 1980); J. C. Catford, A Linguistic Theory of Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
3. E. L. Keenan, “Logic and Language,” in Language as a Human Problem, Einar Haugen and Morton W. Bloomfield (London: Butterworth Press, 1973), 184-94.
4. This section is adapted from Anna Faltaits’ essay, written in Greek, retrieved August 27, 2013, from http://arxiokallari.blogspot.com/2012/03/blog-post_8363.html.
5. The author expresses her gratitude to the family of Kostas Faltaits and the Faltaits Library in Skyros, Greece for allowing the use of the unpublished notes from his diary in this chapter(August 26, 1922).
6. George Chadzianestis (1863–1922) was a Greek artillery officer, lieutenant, and leader of the Greek Asia Minor Campaign Headquarters from May 1922 until August 24, 1922. Upon his return to Greece, he was found guilty at the “trial of six” surrounding the events of the Asia Minor disaster and thus sentenced to death and executed on November 15, 1922. Aristides Stergiadis (1861-1949) was a Greek politician who served as High Commissioner of Smyrna from 1919 to 1922. He abandoned Smyrna on a British ship and lived out his life in Nice, France.
7. Interestingly, only one news story from the battlefront in Asia Minor was ever published in Embros, a royalist newspaper. It is an incredible article documenting the horrors the Greek victims were experiencing at the hands of Kemalist soldiers. A mother relates her experience in this brief excerpt: “at the summit of the Kran Mountains I wrapped myself and fell asleep weeping for my dead child and left it in the forest. Ten days later I went back and saw my dead child. Flies and worms had infested my child’s body and all around there I could see Turkish soldiers sitting around and oiling their weapons.” This excerpt is from These Are the Turks—First–Hand Survivor Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia by Kostas Faltaits.
8. Eskişehir (Dorylaeum in the ancient Greek era) was the site of the Battle of Kütahya–Eskişehir during the Greco-Turkish War.
9. “Geographical Name Changes in Turkey,” and note 14, Wikipedia, retrieved August 28 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_name_changes_in_Turkey#cite_note-Tesev-14.
See also Nisanyan’s online Index Anatolicus, retriebed August 28, 2013, from