Who arrived first? Who are aborigines?

By Naim Ibrahim (Naimbe)

Greek islands must be visible from here in Çeşme. Most of Turkish islands at the end of the 1st WW war were given to Greeks.

I like it that way.

Rick Riordan’s stories of Greek mythology made you prefer Greeks over Turks. But it’s actually a lot more complicated. Turkey & Greece had been bitter rivals for a long time.

Did they fight wars?

Yes, they did. But at the end of the 1st WW Turkey was forced to give up much of her Ottoman era territories because they were on the wrong side.

With the Germans?

Yes, that was largely a decision Ottoman empire had to take in its last days because Russia was with the Allied forces. Here at the Çeşme Castle Museum we saw sections on the Ottoman-Russian wars. It was in fact one of the longest series of wars in European history. In 1770 Russian forces defeated & destroyed the Ottoman fleet right here at the harbour on Çeşme. Imagine a war happening here. Battleships approaching from the Aegean sea towards the shore & cannons firing from Çeşme castle above. A day or two later the entire bay & the beach must’ve been bloodied and hundreds of dead bodies floating in the bay.

The entire area was Greek before. Shouldn’t it belong to Greece now?

If you go back to the time of Alexander the Great, yes. But the divisions that we see now on the world map are the results of endless cycles of occupations, conquests & reconquests by many armies over thousands of years. Over here around the Aegean the cycles of conquests & reconquests have been more common than most other parts. Turkey was born out of the remnants of the Ottoman empire. Before that the Seljuk Turks ruled here. And the Byzantines before that. The Romans were the rulers before that. There was the Hellenistic & Greek period before that. And even before that around 500 BC Achaemenid Persians ruled the entire Anatolia. So its a question of how far back in history you want to go to find the original inhabitants of your liking. Even if we go back to the time of the Hittites we can’t say for sure they were the original inhabitants. They probably conquered from some other people. That’s how history has been unfolding itself.