Gotse Delchev Quotes

At its largest, the Ottoman Turkish Empire included all of the Middle East, most of North Africa, much of Russia, and Europe right up to the walls of Vienna.

Duke of Cumberland

Greece had always coveted Anatolia which was a part of the Ottoman Empire but had been in antiquity a Greek dominated area. Further, people of Greek ethnicity and culture, who hundreds of years ago use to be the vast majority were after the hundreds of years of Ottoman rule and migration were then the largest minority in Anatolia. After the Turks lost the First World War as a consequence of their allying with Germany, and had been stripped of its Arab territories and was determined to keep the territories that they still had. Also, Turkey had just undergone a revolution and the old order was displaced. Venizelos and the Greeks saw this as an opportunity to get back Anatolia and sent a military invasion force to land at Smyrna (Ismir to the Turks), the largest city of Anatolia where despite the Greek minority in all of Anatolia, Greeks were a small majority in Smyrna and many of the ethnic Greeks not only aided the Greeks once they had landed but participated in atrocities against the minority of Turkish Muslims of Smyrna. The Ambassador was then trying to rationalize the heavy hand with which the Turks dealt with the indigenous Greeks many of whom were guilty and many of whom were not.

Turkey, even a century later, takes great offense at the terms “holocaust” or “genocide” to describe the death of so many Armenians. The censor newspapers and jail academics who even want to have conferences to study the question. This is in great contrast to Germany which faced its genocidal killings squarely and built a society and government structure to never forget it and always focus on preventing a reoccurrence,

Sharif Husain was the leader of the Hashemite Tribes who had agreed with the British to lead a Hashemite Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks in exchange for the Hashimites to have their own independent state—Jordan. This also explains the close relationship between Jordan and Britain. The notion of enslavement to the British illustrates a blind spot that the Ottoman Empire had in its waning years. The Ottoman Sultan had the power of life and death over everyone in the empire, and Istanbul appointed all public officials for all jurisdictions, and made laws that applied to all. The Hashemites would instead have their own nation, make their own laws and would by subject to British foreign policy to the extent that the British guaranteed their independence from the Sultan and the Ottomans. They regarded it as freedom and not slavery.

The Turkish revolution was by historical standards relatively bloodless as compared especially with other republican revolutions like the United State and France. However, the revolution that brought Ataturk to power was a relatively mild one in terms of the immediate changes that unlike many revolutions which produced instant radical change. In Turkey, the radical change took place in the years after the revolution when Ataturk with hardly any bloodshed produced compulsory public secular education, scientific elevation in society, separation of mosque and state, gender equality including universal voting, change to western dress, elimination of the caliphate, speech and press freedom, and many others including changing the entire language to use the Latin alphabet instead of Arabic. No nation in history has gone thought more social and cultural change and modernized so fast as Turkey after its revolution. The result is the most modern and successful Islamic country in the world.

Martin, then a young sailor had set forth from France to fight the Japanese in World War II. By the time he arrived in the Pacific, the Japanese were defeated and France was again trying to dominate Vietnam. It was a radicalizing experience for him.

For his seditious activities he was sentenced to penal servitude for life. He escaped and came to America where he entered politics

Aleksei Maximovitch Peshkov

The historical relationship between Greece and Turkey is as complicated as any. Ypsilantis was born in the Greek section of Istanbul, then the Turkish capital and became the military commander of the cultural Greeks in the Istanbul Turkish area in the battles between the two nations and cultures for control and dominance of the culturally Greek areas of the Ottoman Empire. So geographically he was a Turk, but always identified with Greece.

Bulgaria was under the control of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Levski always made it clear that Muslims were welcome in the Bulgaria that would be created after the Revolution. Most Muslims did not believe him, and many could not understand the concept of a nation without the Sultan who was the political AND religious head of Islam the world over. Essentially for many Muslims there can be no such thing as separation of church and state. To two cannot be distinct.

1st Earl of Beaconsfield

This quotation illustrated the extreme polarization between the current fundamentalist Muslims, and the Muslim modernists and the West. Kamal Ataturk, the great leader and stateman who is the father of modern Turkey, is castigated by the author for leading the new Turkish parliament to depose the Caliph – the civil and religious autocrat, one of whom reigned from after the death of Muhammad till his abolishment in 1924. Most of the rest of the world credits Ataturk with being one of the great leaders of all time—one who led a democratic revolution which transformed Turkey into the only Muslim secular democracy, requiring pubic secular European type education for all children, giving women the right to vote (before the U. S. even), adopting a European alphabet and dress, and outlook on life—creating most remarkably a total cultural revolution with virtually no loss of life. No revolutionary leader, before or since has led so extensive a political and cultural revolution, and it was a bloodless revolution. Turkey, into the 21st century, was by far the most powerful, industrialized, scientific and modern nation of Muslims in the world and others were far behind. Yet many Islamic theologian still castigate Atatork for his great achievements as being against the will of God.

This statement was more than a proverb but a popular political doctrine as well which had for years destabilized the Balkans. From the Serbian point of view, if a Serbian family moved to Bosnia or another country, their family land and their decedents were Serbian and under the governance of Serbia. Where there were enclaves of Serbs, they and the Serbian Government considered that land Serbian. This attitude even widely prevailed into the 21st century and led to the U. S. War with Serbia over the Serbian attempts to control parts of neighboring countries where Serbs were in the minority. The Serbs were not unique in this respect. Germany, in WWI, had seized territory from France because there were large enclaves of Ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland. The Ancient Romans likewise asserted the protection of Roman Citizens anywhere in the known world.