incarceration at the Lucia (Liosia - 11 kilometers north
of downtown Athens) prison camp in Athens and,
secondly, about the conditions of Moslems on Crete,
where he spent about 25 days en route back to Turkey
as part of the Greek-Turkish prisoner exchange in 1923.
The portion about Crete will be provided in Part XXI-B.//
In the aftermath of the Battle of Sakarya (23 Aug. - 13 Sept.
1921), the Greek army retreated to Eskişehir.
The report of Ali Osman Efendi, the medrese director in
Akçağlan
village of Eskişehir:
Two months after the Greek hordes occupied Eskişehir, on
19
September 1921, I was taken from my home in Eskişehir and made
a prisoner. When it comes to the reason for my
captivity: while the
homeland was in dire straits and I was performing my
İslamic duties,
some vile men trying to make personal gains with methods that
no
person would stoop to, took me prisoner.
On 7 April 1923 I returned to my own homeland. En route to captivity,
we went via Karaköy,
Bursa, Mudanya and İzmir to Athens and then
for a while to Crete’s Kandia
city. I was transported by both train
and
boat. I returned on a steam ship from Kandia, stopping first at Klazomen
(quarantine island-station in Urla near Izmir) and then at Izmir, from
where I returned to Eskişehir by train.
During my incarceration those with me in Athens were: Judge
Naim
Efendi, Assembly Administration Secretary Tahsin Efendi and
Commerce Press
owner Mustafa Remzi Efendi. These men
were either
officials or entrepreneurs.
Also, former Mayor Ken’anzade Süleyman
Efendi, Eytam (orphans) Director
Hacı Nuri Efendi, former municipal
inspector Süleyman Nihad Efendi, Prison
Secretary Ahmed Efendi,
Deed Office official Refik Ahmed Efendi, teacher Ali Nazmi Efendi
from Ma’mure
village, İmam Hafız İlyas Efendi from İhsaniye village,
Hacı Hafızzade İbrahim
Hakkı Efendi, shop owner Kurt İsmail Ağa,
Hacı Adil Ağa, Karapazarlı İsmail
Hakkı Efendi, Veli Ağaoğlu
İbrahim Efendi from Cenudiye village, former Dede
village chief
Hafız Ahmed Efendi,
lawyers Cudi Efendi, hafız Osman Efendi and
his brother Şa’ban Efendi and
factory director Nacib Bey of Uşak.
The
22 of us were brought to the train station, where there were 31
Turkish officer
prisoners, as well. So all 53 of us went
by the route I
mentioned above to Pontada and Tepecik prison camps in Izmir for
15
days, after which we were transported to Athens. At the prisoners
inspectorship the officers
were separated from us and we went to Lucia
prison camp. Consequently, I don’t know about any of them. Of our
group, only Veli Ağa died.
Lucia (Liosia) POW Camp was located near the rail line
that is the dotted line running from top-center to center-left
(large green dot)
I make the following statement with regard to the prisoners
I saw and
knew from the day I was captured until my salvation, concerning where
they died and whether they died from sickness, filth or torture:
The number of prisoners who died from hunger, filth, torture
and illness
is beyond counting. I wrote
down only about the particulars of those
who died at Lucia prison camp but
unfortunately this list was lost at
Klazomen.
Hoca Hacı Hasan of Adapazarı and Hafızülakr Abdullah
Gülşen and their
companions took down the names and particulars of
those who died. It is possible that they still have these
particulars.
While there were those who
died from beatings and poisoning, mostly
the deaths were caused by
dysentery. The reason for this was that water
was provided to the Lucia prison camp by a water company but this
water was
cut off and the prisoners had to use well water. This water
was turbid and unhealthy and
contained all sorts of diarrhea-inducing
elements. After the cut-off, dysentery was rampant,
with the sick lying
in the mud. The
hospital wouldn’t accept them but, in any case,
someone who went to the
hospital never returned, only their bodies
came out. Daily there were 2, 3 and sometimes 10
deaths. As a result,
the area around the
camp became a Moslem graveyard. In this
regard,
I request that the competent officials make it a point to have this
graveyard enclosed by a fence, as a sort of memento of revenge.
Turkish POWs in Athens, preparing for repatriation to Turkey,
in the first part of 1923, gathered at the graves of their fallen
POW comrades.
Question: Where and how long were you in captivity and what
kind
of treatment were you subjected to?
To what degree were you able to
obtain food, clothing and humane
provisions? What kind of treatment
did
both you and your friends and the Moslems in your locality receive?
Write down
the details of what you saw and heard.
Answer: The length of my captivity was 18 months 19 days,
almost all
of which was spent at Lucia camp near Athens. The treatment we
received can be summarized
with these words: curses and filth, beatings
and degradation, working like an
animal. There were those who had it
worse than us – working in a place of searing heat, as if for years, in
disgusting conditions, without even a day of fresh air. The luckier ones,
relatively speaking, worked
in quarries or on waterless islands or in
fields and orchards – at least they
were able to breathe fresh air and get
some money for tobacco. The daily allowance for prisoner fod was
sometimes 100 drachmas and sometimes more but this wasn’t enough
for two meals with bread. The meals’ details: changing every other
day
or once in two days, a couple of ‘okka’ (1 okka = 2.8 lbs.) worth
of beans or
lentils in a pot of water, with rice, peas and a bit of filthy
olive oil. That would be one meal. The other meal would on some
days not more
than 10 olives and on other days a bit of cheese or some
fish or a bit of
helva. To get these meals, which were
greatly lacking
in what’s needed to sustain human life, we had to wait on line
for hours
in the rain and carry wood and water from long distances, all the
while
sustaining curses and degradation. Some were even beaten. I never
saw nor heard about prisoners
getting clothing, underwear or shoes.
But during the last days, when the prisoner exchange began to take
shape, civilian prisoners were given shoes, old clothes and overcoats to
wear
for their return to their homeland. Nevertheless, these lucky ones
were so few
that they only comprised about 5 percent of prisoners.
Nights for prisoners at
Lucia were spent in common tents, with a frayed
blanket for a cover. Since there were no Moslems living around
Lucia,
I didn’t get to see up close the conditions of Moslems living in
Greece.
Kandia (Heraklion), Crete (red marker).
Later we were transported to
Kandia, where we stayed for 25 days.
There we were able to go to the market and coffee houses. Consquently,
I was able to get some
information about the situation of our Moslem
brothers living there, as
follows: in order to look into the
factors that
have made life for Moslems on Crete so unbearable in the place
where
they were born and raised, one must examine the security situation,
means
of subsistance, military service, the tax burden, education and
places of
worship.
//END of PART XXI-A//
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