Early relations between the Greeks and the young Turks

Abstract

The Young Turks’ revolution of 1908 was a turning point in the historyof the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turks made serious attempts to modernizethe Ottoman State, to introduce political and religious equality and to makea modem constitutional state out of the old multinational Empire. As a matterof fact the Young Turks wanted and to some extent needed the cooperationof these ethnic elements for carrying out their revolutionary aspirations.Moreover they contacted them even before the fateful July 1908.This paper, based on primary sources, attempts to trace these firstcontacts which the Young Turks tried to establish with the Ottoman Greeksand the representatives of the Greek Kingdom. The Young Turks suggestedto the Greeks to cooperate with them and abolish the Sultan’s absolutism.Instead, the Greek and the Hellenic response was rather ambiguous: on theone hand they feared that in case of failure they would be suppressed ruthlessly,and on the other they mistrusted a movement whose nationalistic toneswere imminent. But they were well aware that this time the revolutionarymovement was widespread not only amongst the army officers but alsoamongst the bureaucratic elite. Despite this fact the Greek Government andthe heads of the Hellenic Communities adopted an attitude of “wait and see”,which aroused the suspicions of the Young Turks