In 2000, the year his mother passed away, Greek-American Alec Karys inherited a diary nobody in his family had paid much attention to, along with a gold watch his late father Pantelis had previously worn. Soon, he discovered that one of these items was far more valuable than the other.
“When I first got the diary, I wasn’t sure what it was,” said Alec, who lives in Boston. “When I looked at the date, I didn’t really know the history. But then I started to read, and it all started to evolve as we uncovered what was going on in this little gem.”
Alec’s father was 46 when he was born, and as the youngest of six children, Alec joked that his sisters claimed to have raised him. Now 79, the Bostonian spoke about what he remembers of his father during his childhood.
“He didn’t display his emotions in life, [as] he was a stoic,” he said. “I didn’t really get a sense of his feelings or deeper emotions growing up.”
However, hidden in plain sight in an unlocked top drawer of Pantelis’ bedroom dresser was a window into the profound inner world of a soldier and the stark outer world of the bloody Asia Minor Campaign. What came into Alec’s possession in 2020 was his father’s account of being at war, as well as scores of poems he penned along the way. These reveal Pantelis’ angst and suffering as he marched through a conflicted state and wrestled with his own state of conflict.
“I never thought of him as being sentimental; however, apparently, buried inside him, back in his early years, on the verge of adolescence and adulthood, deep emotions filled my father’s soul, particularly evident in his poems, which are found throughout the diary,” said Alec.
With the help of Gregory Kontos, the founder of Greek Ancestry, a Greek genealogy consultancy based in Athens, Pantelis’ original diary has now been reproduced with English translations into an book titled Diary of a Soldier in the Asia Minor Campaign, 1919-1921. This features all of the young soldier’s original words in Greek, along with his poems.
“When I started to read the diary, I realized it was an important date in history, and at that time I hadn’t yet realized the significance of it being a first-person account. I wanted to find a way to share it with my family, and as it was focused on an important event, I wanted to aim for wider distribution,” remarked Alec.
“I was really touched by what I discovered,” he added.
The lead up to the Asia Minor Campaign
The e-book begins with a thorough explanation of the germinal events that led to the Asia Minor Campaign, as well as some of Pantelis’ personal history, neatly composed by Gregory.
He writes: “Pantelis Karatasakis was born in 1898 high in the mountains of Arcadia in the small village of Granitsa (which in 1927 was renamed to Nymfasia), which, together with the even smaller village of Gkiousi, hosted a population of 528 people at that time.”
He further wrote:
“Those years were not easy. Only one year prior to Pantelis’s birth, Greece had been humiliated in a brief military aggression—the so-called “Unfortunate War”—against the Ottoman Empire, leading to another moral disappointment of the population, after the 1893 bankruptcy. More and more, a demand for overall political, economic, military and state reforms was simmering, especially in urban centers. The monarchy was also targeted for its constant interventions in military and foreign affairs.
That general disillusionment with the established political system led to the Goudi coup in 1909 and the eventual invitation to the experienced politician and then Prime Minister of Crete, Eleftherios Venizelos, to take the office of Prime Minister of Greece. Venizelos rejected that proposal, however, and came to Athens, founded a new party (“Party of the Liberals”” and won the 1910 elections.”
Gregory goes on to explain the disagreement between King Constantine I and Venizelos over whether Greece should participate in the First World War. Venizelos argued that Greece should join the Entente Powers, while Constantine supported neutrality, a position favorable towards the Central Powers.
This difference of views led to a national schism and eventually a civil-war-like climate in Greece which saw the displacement of Constantine. This gave Venizelos and his supporters a clear run.
Gregory writes:
“As the First World War came to an end in 1918, the future of Europe started to be negotiated. In August 1920, Venizelos reached the zenith of his diplomatic success with the Treaty of Sevres, which was agreed between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty granted to Greece Eastern Thrace (up to a few kilometers away from Constantinople), as well as the islands of Imvros and Tenedos. Moreover, it offered Greece temporary sovereignty rights over the area of Smyrna.”
“The “Great Idea” of a Greece extending to all the areas where significant Greek populations resided had been realized thanks to the diplomatic genius of Venizelos. Nevertheless, the great diplomat was surprised when, in November of the same year, his party was crushed by the united opposition, and not even he himself was elected.
Shortly after this, the opposition organized a referendum for the return of Constantine, writes Gregory, adding that the “liberals abstained, Constantine returned, and Venizelos left the country.”
When Constantine returned to the throne in Greece, he made a historic decision which Gregory tell us “was to mark not only the outcome of the war, but also the future of Hellenism: expand Greek control over not only the area of Smyrna but also deeper into Asia Minor.”
At the close of May 1921, Constantine arrived in Smyrna. Pantelis had arrived with his unit the day prior. A few days later, the army began its advance eastwards.
The contents of Pantelis’ diary
Pantelis’ patriotism and admiration for the king may have been a product of where he grew up, explained Gregory. “Historically it was the urban population that supported Venizelos, and Venizelos came in 1910 to a Greece that was half the size of what it was in 1920, so all the newly acquired, liberated land, were all for Venizelos – including Crete, his homeland.”
Gregory added: “But then in ‘old Greece’ they were more supportive of the king, because there was this socio-cultural-economic gap, and a distance between the rural areas and the urban middle upper classes who supported Venizelos. He represented something that rural Greece was not familiar with.”
Pantelis’ patriotism and royal persuasion shine through in the early poetry he writes:
“The day has dawned and it is cool, nightingales are singing of how bloody years pass by without return. Sun, please glow brighter, and my moon, please shine; the sky’s board I want you to paint with divine delight. Bells, please ring out, as heavens celebrate, for Constantine has come with glory and pride.”
Alec remarked on this aspect of his father’s character and linked it to the emotive richness of his poems.
“One of the things I was questioning was ‘why was he writing this?’ He was not authorized to create a diary for military history, [so] he was doing it for himself,” Alec revealed. “He separated the emotional stuff in the poems. Some people who read it felt that those poems were letters to his mother. People I know said they have read the poems and they brought on tears. They are really emotional.”
He continued: “We tend to forget how young he was, born in a small, remote village. This had to be shocking. When you’re reading it you realize he wasn’t thinking he was going to survive.”
The Asia Minor Campaign was Greece’s ultimate effort to end the Asia Minor affair by military means. It was the pursuit of the Kemalist army and its complete crushing, an effort that had begun in the spring of 1921.
However, after a series of battles between the Greeks and the national resistance movement in Turkey under Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), the Greeks, demoralized from having spent a great deal of time on the defensive and failing to persuade the British for help, were decisively beaten by the Turks at the Battle of Dumlupinar.
The Turkish forces took back many positions they had previously lost to the Greek army, including Smyrna, an ancient Greek city which was still populated by many Greeks during the time of the Asia Minor Campaign.
The infamous and much-debated Fire of Smyrna occurred just four days after the Turks had taken back the city. The fire destroyed much of the place, with eyewitnesses reporting that it lasted for nine days. Amid the chaos, roughly 80,000 to 400,000 Greek and Armenian refugees crammed the waterfront to escape the blaze.
They were forced to remain there under harsh conditions for nearly two weeks. Turkish troops and irregulars had begun committing massacres and other atrocities against the Greek and Armenian population in the city before the outbreak of the fire. Many women were raped. Tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian men were subsequently deported into the interior of Anatolia, where most of them died in harsh conditions.
Alec and Gregory stated they thought the Asia Minor Campaign was a “total disaster” and “bad idea for many reasons” and that Pantelis’ later diary entries reflected this feeling, too.
“The [Western] allies made promises that weren’t kept, and this event really laid the groundwork for modern Turkey and for the geopolitics of today,” they said. “It’s related to other major events, such as the Armenian genocide of 1915.”
Gregory added: “The campaign was a bad idea for many reasons, including the fact that Greece had been in war since 1912. Also, I’m unsure whether the Greek population in Asia Minor and the population of Greece, were even ‘one.’ Greece really found out about the Asia Minor population and their Greekness only in the late 19th century.”
Alec concluded with some thoughts on war, saying: “The Smyrna situation, the Greeks, the Armenian, the Jews…it’s a miracle I’m alive today. We survived World War II, we survived Vietnam, and today we’re seeing Ukraine and Gaza. These are just terrible, terrible events that disrupt and kill hundreds of thousands of people.”
All net profits from sales of the book will go to the residents of Nymphasia to support projects that will benefit all.
See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!
