



Produced by Turgut Dincer and Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)








  HELLENISM
  IN
  ASIA MINOR

  BY
  DR. KARL DIETERICH

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
  BY
  CARROLL N. BROWN, Ph.D.
  The College of the City of New York

  With an introductory preface by Theodore P. Ion, D.C.L., and
  a brief article on Hellenic Pontus by D. H. Oeconomides, Ph.D.

  This publication is due to the generosity of
  EURIPIDES KEHAYA of New York

  PUBLISHED FOR THE
  AMERICAN-HELLENIC SOCIETY
  105 WEST 40TH STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y.

  BY
  OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN BRANCH
  35 WEST 32ND STREET, NEW YORK
  1918

  COPYRIGHT 1918
  BY THE
  OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
  AMERICAN BRANCH

  THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
  RAHWAY, N. J.




CONTENTS

                                                  PAGE

    I  A SURVEY OF HELLENISM IN ASIA MINOR             1

   II  HELLENISM IN ASIA MINOR—By Karl Dieterich,
         of the University of Leipzig, translated by
         Carroll N. Brown, Ph.D., of the College of
         the City of New York. With a preface by
         Theodore P. Ion, D.C.L.                       8

  III  HELLENIC PONTUS—A Résumé of its History, by
         D. H. Oeconomides, Ph.D.                     56

       AMERICAN-HELLENIC NEWS                         63




A SURVEY OF HELLENISM IN ASIA MINOR


Asia Minor is the country which, more than all others, recalls the
highest development of Hellenic civilization. Its deeply indented coast
formed a chaplet of Hellenic democracies which reached out into the
interior and actually attacked the Persian civilization, upon which
they imposed their own stamp. These democracies constituted the first
rampart of the civilized world of that time, holding back Persian
barbarism. Their history is one of continual struggle between these
two civilizations, a struggle that was terminated at Salamis and at
Platæa, where the Persian ambitions were definitively buried and Greek
civilization saved.

The wise men, the thinkers, the philosophers, that these democracies
produced, were numerous, and the influence of their teachings was very
great. These even today are radiant with a sublimity that has never
been excelled.

It was in this Greek element and among the populations Hellenized by
them that Christianity first germinated. It was the Greeks of Asia
Minor who first offered their blood for the triumph of the new faith.
The foremost Church Fathers, John Chrysostom, Saint Basil and very many
others, were born there or taught there.

Throughout the Middle Ages the Byzantine-Greek civilization flourished
in these lands. It formed the most powerful barrier against the wave
of barbarism which threatened to inundate the civilized world. The
desperate resistance offered by Hellenism permitted the West, by its
contact with Byzantine Hellenism, to acquire those requisite elements
which have formed the basis of Western civilization.

When the powerful tide of Turkish invasion, coming after so many
other barbarian inroads, completely submerged Greek culture there,
the Hellenic idea which this element represented was so strong that
it survived everything. It was in vain that the fierce conquerors,
as the tradition states, cut out the tongues of the inhabitants in
order to cause this people to unlearn its language; it was in vain
that they carried away their children to make of them fierce and cruel
janissaries, who became exterminators of their own people. The Hellenic
idea, the attachment to national traditions, was never submerged.

As soon as the fury of the conqueror was somewhat appeased, and at
a time when that part of the Balkan Peninsula where Hellenism first
arose and from which later it radiated over the then known world all
the brilliance of its beauty was no longer showing any sign of life,
the Greeks of Asia Minor founded the first Greek school of modern
times, that of Cydonia (Aïvali). This school produced the first real
ecclesiastics, the first genuinely educated men. Smyrna, called by the
Turk himself “the infidel city,” because of its preponderant Greek
element, followed her example. The graduates of these schools formed
the nucleus from which the idea of the Greek renaissance sprang forth.
From this source have come the men that have sacrificed their lives and
their fortunes in order that Hellenic culture, which seemed forever to
have disappeared, might again be revived.

It is this country of which we are going to study the ethnological
composition.

Its boundaries are, on the north, the Black Sea; on the east, the
Russian frontier traversing the snow-covered mountain range of the
Taurus and Antitaurus and continuing to the Gulf of Alexandretta; on
the south, west and northwest, the Mediterranean, the Ægean Sea and the
Sea of Marmora.

Its area is 534,550 square kilometers; it is traversed by numerous
watercourses and is one of the richest countries in the world. If well
administered, it could support tens of millions of inhabitants.

It is divided for