1922

In September 1922 the Greek army in Anatolia collapsed.

The Greco-Turkish War, begun in 1919 with the landing at Smyrna and the pursuit of the Megali Idea — the great idea, the incorporation of the Greek populations of Asia Minor into the Greek state — ended in rout. Turkish forces under Mustafa Kemal broke the front in August and reached the coast within three weeks. Smyrna burned between the 13th and the 22nd of September. And the Greek and Armenian populations of western Anatolia, who had lived there for three thousand years, went to the sea.

Chios lay seven kilometres from that coast, directly in the path.

The refugees came across in anything that floated: caiques, fishing boats, rowing boats, rafts. Tens of thousands landed on Chios, whose own population was around sixty-five to seventy thousand; at the peak the refugee numbers may have exceeded the resident ones, though most moved on to Piraeus, Athens, and Thessaloniki within months. The Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, signed at Lausanne in January 1923, made the movement permanent and gave it the force of law: the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia were exchanged for the Muslims of Greece, with limited exceptions for Constantinople and Western Thrace. Chios's small remaining Turkish community left. Anatolian Greeks settled permanently, founding new quarters and villages, and the island today has neighbourhoods named for the towns in Asia Minor that their founders had to abandon.

The effect on the island's culture was substantial and permanent: a significant population with its own dialect, cuisine, music, church traditions, and memory, layered onto a society that had itself been reassembled twice in the previous century.

There is a second reason 1922 belongs in a history of Chios, and it is one that is not widely known outside Greece.

The defeated Greek army that came out of Anatolia was concentrated on Chios and Lesbos. It was intact as a fighting force, it was furious, and it was convinced — with a good deal of justification — that it had been betrayed by the politicians in Athens. On 11 September 1922, officers of the units stationed on the two islands, led by Colonels Nikolaos Plastiras and Stylianos Gonatas and Commander Dimitrios Fokas, issued a proclamation demanding the abdication of King Constantine I and the resignation of the government. Aircraft flew to Athens and dropped leaflets. The revolutionary force embarked and sailed for Attica.

The government fell without resistance. Constantine abdicated on 27 September and went into exile, where he died within four months. The Revolutionary Committee took power, and in November 1922 it staged the Trial of the Six — the court-martial of five former ministers and the commander-in-chief in Asia Minor on charges of high treason, followed within hours of the verdict by their execution by firing squad. The executions caused an international rupture; Britain broke off diplomatic relations. They remain among the most bitterly contested events in modern Greek political history, and the National Schism they deepened ran through Greek public life for the next fifty years.

The revolution that reshaped interwar Greece began in the harbours of Chios and Mytilene.

The decades that followed were hard ones for the island. It had lost its Anatolian hinterland, absorbed a refugee population it could not employ, and then met the world depression. Emigration accelerated: to Athens and Piraeus, to Egypt, to the United States, to Australia — and, decisively for everything in Part VII, to sea.

The Second World War brought German occupation from 1941 to 1944, and with it, in the winter of 1941–42, the famine that killed people across Greece in very large numbers and killed them on Chios too. Requisitioning, executions, and reprisals followed the growth of resistance.

And the geography asserted itself one more time. That seven-kilometre strait to neutral Turkey became an escape route. Chian caiques ran across to Çeşme by night, carrying men who wanted to reach the Greek forces in Egypt, and information, and sometimes people who needed to disappear. A substantial number of the Greek merchant seamen and naval personnel who served the Allied cause — and the Greek merchant fleet served it at appalling cost, losing a very large proportion of its ships and men — went out through that channel.

Which brings us, at last, to the sea.