Cretan Muslims
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Cretan Muslims (Greek: Τουρκοκρητικοί Turkokritiki) were a religious group of Crete that came about as a consequence of the Ottoman rule on the island between 1645-1908 (see below for clarifications on the dates), principally through conversions of local Cretan Greeks to Islam. They were expelled from Crete in 1923 (see Treaty of Lausanne) and their descendents can be found today in Turkey and several other Muslim countries. Many of them continue to natively use the Greek language.
[edit] History
During the 17th century, the Republic of Venice was pushed out of Crete by the Ottoman Empire, in a war that ended with the conquest by the Ottomans of Candia (1648-1669). Crete remained part of the Ottoman Empire for the next 210 years.
Unlike other Ottoman provinces, the fall of Crete was not accompanied by a large influx of muslims. A minority of the population (local Greek notables) converted to Islam, so that the Cretan ruling class would remain Greek-speaking. It is estimated that during the early 19th century, Greek converts to Islam might have been as high as 45% of the island, but the number rapidly declined to 9% when the Greek War of Independence had as an effect those remaining Muslim Cretans to re-convert to Greek Orthodoxy. The majority of contemporary estimates calculate the number of Muslim Cretans remaining at the eve of the 20th century at 30,000, 9% of the island's population. Most of those Muslims were local Greek converts who spoke Cretan Greek, yet at the dawn of Greek nationalism, the Christian population labeled them "Turks" [1] [2]. Their descendants are still found in several Muslim countries today, and principally in Turkey (numbering over 200,000).
Between 1821 and 1828, during the Greek War of Independence, the island was the scene of repeated hostilities. Most Muslims were driven into the large fortified towns on the north coast and both the Muslim and Christian populations of the island suffered severe losses, due to conflicts, plague or famine. In the 1830s, Crete was an impoverished and backward island.
As the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II, had no army of his own, he was forced to seek the aid of his rebellious vassal and rival, Kavalalı Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt, who sent a series of troops into the island. As of 1832, the island was administered for two decades by an Albanian from Egypt, Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha (who was to become a Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire later), whose rule attempted to create a synthesis between the Muslim landowers and the emergent Christian commercial classes. Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha's rule has been generally cautious, pro-British, and he has tried harder to win the support of the Cretans (having married the daughter of a priest and allowed her to remain Christian) than the Cretan Muslims. In 1834, however, a Cretan committee was already set up in Athens to work for the union of the island with Greece.
In 1840, Egypt was forced by Palmerston to return Crete to direct Ottoman rule. Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha angled unsuccessfully to become a semi-independent prince but the Cretans rose up against him, once more driving the Muslims temporarily into siege in the towns. An Anglo-Ottoman naval operation restored control in the island and Giritli Mustafa Naili Pasha was confirmed as its governor, though under command from İstanbul. He remained in Crete until 1851 when he was summoned to the capital, where at a relatively advanced age he pursued a successful career.
Religious tensions prevailed on the island between Muslims and Christians and the Christian populations of Crete revolted twice against Ottoman rule (in 1866 and in 1897). In 1866, the rebels initially managed to gain control of most of the hinterland although as always the four fortified towns of the north coast and the southern town of Ierapetra remained in Ottoman hands. Ottoman approach to the Cretan question was that, if Crete was lost, the next line of defense would have to be the Dardanelles, as indeed it was the case later. The Ottoman Grand Vizier, Mehemed Emin Aali Pasha arrived in the island in October 1867 and set in progress a low profile district by district reconquest of the island followed by the erection of blockhouses or local fortresses across the whole of it. More importantly, he designed an Organic Law which gave the Cretan Christians equal (in practice, because of their superior numbers, majority) control of local administration. At the time of the Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878, there was a further uprising, which was speedily halted through the adaptation of the Organic Law into a constitutional settlement known as the Pact of Halepa. Crete became a semi-independent parliamentary state within the Ottoman Empire under an Ottoman Governor who had to be a Christian. A number of the senior "Christian Pashas" including Photiades Pasha and Adossides Pasha ruled the island in the 1880s, presiding over a parliament in which liberals and conservatives contended for power. Disputes between these led to a further insurgency in 1889 and the collapse of the Pact of Halepa arrangements. The international powers allowed the Ottoman authorities to send troops to the island and restore order but the Sultan Abdulhamid II used the occasion for ruling the island by martial-law. This action led to international sympathy for the Cretan Christians and to a loss of any remaining acquiescence among them for continued Ottoman rule. When a small insurgency began in September 1895, it quickly spiralled out of control and by the summer of 1896, the Ottoman forces had lost military control over most of the island. The insurrection in 1897 led to Turkey declaring war on Greece and inflicting a heavy defeating on it. By March 1897 however, the Great Powers decided to govern the island temporarily through a committee of four admirals who remained in charge until the arrival of Prince George of Greece as first governor-general of an autonomous Crete, effectively detached from the Ottoman Empire, in late December 1898. Turkish forces were expelled in 1898, and an independent Cretan Republic, headed by Prince George of Greece, was founded.
The island's Muslim population lost heavily from these changes though some remained in Crete until the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations in 1924. From the summer of 1896 until the end of hostilities in 1898 the Cretan Muslims remained under siege in the four coastal cities and there was considerable ethnic cleansing in the eastern part of the island (Sitia; Estiye for the Turks), which has been well-documented, aside from the Ottoman and other state archives, also by some well-known authors like Henry Noel Brailsford and Pierre Mille (the French Kipling) who were present in the island at the time. [3] Pleas for help from the western powers were consistently ignored and many had to flee to Anatolia, through a chain of events which were later to lead to lasting analogies, for the Turkish mind, between what took place in Crete and what was pursued in Cyprus before 1974 [1], [2], [3], [4].
Subsequent waves of emigration followed as the island was united by stages with Greece. Even in Turkey, some descendants of this population, continued to speak a form of Cretan Greek dialect till recently.
In 1908 the Cretan deputies declared union with Greece. But this act was not internationally recognized until after the Balkan Wars in 1913. Under the Treaty of London, Sultan Mehmed V relinquished his formal rights to the island.
[edit] Notable Cretan Muslims
- Husein Husniadis
