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Testimonial Fiction of the Greco-Turkish War: A Comparative Textual History of Truth-Telling and Myth-Making in the Mediterranean
Abstract
The Greco-Turkish War and Population Exchange (1919-1924) uprooted over two million Greek and Ottoman citizens, signaling the definitive end of empire in the region. Long-standing connections, trade systems and mobility patterns were severed so deeply in fact that Horden and Purcell have described this period, more broadly, as “the end of the Mediterranean” (Corrupting Sea, 474). This sense of twentieth-century fragmentation and disconnect is particularly acute in literary production. In the war’s aftermath, Greek and Turkish literatures effectively turned their backs upon each other; for over four decades no direct translations were made from Turkish to Greek or vice versa. Working within this process of national compartmentalization, my paper will nonetheless attempt to recover a broader map. To do so, I will return to the Greco-Turkish war and population exchange itself as a shared site of textual production: it served as an important milestone in the historical and literary narratives of both nation-states, leading in fact to the proliferation (in both languages) of a new literary genre: the testimonial -- i.e., “first-hand accounts” of survivors. From the 1930s until the end of the Cold War, the testimonials of the Greco-Turkish war and population exchange enjoyed a significant place within both national literary canons, whose aesthetic regimes were deeply invested in traditional realism. Indeed, literary historians in both countries continue to speak of these “eye-witness” testimonials as if they offered readers direct historical access. They are, as one critic remarked, “a valuable document for the world to learn what happened there in Anatolia ... The truth emerges from facts, not from rhetorical flairs.” I will complicate this assessment, using the methodological tools of Book History to recover the problematic textual history of certain key testimonials (from among the work of Stratis Doukas, Ilias Venezis, Halide Edib and Recai Sanay). In addition to examining successive editions and their emendations, I will pause over the multiple hands involved in the production of these texts -- survivors, interviewers, writers, editors, translators and transcribers -- and their role in shaping and reshaping these narratives. They were narratives, I will argue, that were articulated and embellished only over the course of several decades and editions, and through multiple layers of material, social, and ideological mediation. In both Greece and Turkey, the testimonial emerged from within the complex interplay and struggle of multiple authorial agencies, bearing the traces of the larger ideological projects of the twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Mediterranean Countries
Sub Area
None