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Tenedos, now officially Bozcaada, is a small island in the Aegean Sea, part of Çanakkale Province in Turkey. Bozcaada/Tenedos (Greek: Template:Polytonic, Tenedhos) has a population of about 2,500. The main industries of Tenedos, and neighboring Imbros are fishing and tourism. The grapes, wines and red poppies of Tenedos have been famous for centuries. The population is mostly Turkish but there are still about 30 Greeks on Tenedos.
In antiquity
Tenedos
Tenedos was already an established sanctuary of Apollo in the eighth century, evinced in the Homeric formula for the god: "Lord Supreme of Tenedos" (Iliad I).
According to Greek mythology, the name "Tenedos" is derived from the eponymous hero Tenes, who ruled the island at the time of the Trojan War and was killed by Achilles; Philoctetes was abandoned on Tenedos. In Virgil's Aeneid, Tenedos is described as the island in whose bay the Achaeans hid their fleet near the end of the Trojan War in order to trick the Trojans into believing the war was over and allowing the Trojans to take the Trojan Horse within their city walls.
In ancient Greek history, there was an Aeolian settlement on Tenedos; there was a naval battle between C. Valerius Triarius and Mithridates' fleet off the island. In Pausanias' time, Tenedos was subject to Alexandria Troas.
Athenaeus remarks on the beauty of the women of Tenedos, and on its marjoram.
Between Turkey and Greece
The island was controlled by the Ottoman Empire from the time it was taken from Venice, after the Battle of the Dardanelles in 1657, until the twentieth century. (The Russians repeatedly captured Tenedos during the Russo-Turkish Wars and they used it as their military base to achieve the victories at the Dardanelles and Athos; but they did not hold it.) The Ottomans adopted the Byzantine practice of using islands as places for the internal exile of state prisoners, such as Constantine Mourousis.
Tenedos, which is close to the Asian mainland, had been ethnically divided between Greeks and Turks since the 14th century, and the division was more or less equal when counts were taken.
Because of their strategic position near the Dardanelles, the western powers, particularly Britain, insisted at the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913 that the islands of Tenedos and Imbros should be retained by the Ottoman Empire when the other Aegean islands were ceded to Greece.
In 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres with the defeated Ottoman Empire granted the islands to Greece. The present Republic of Turkey was not party to the treaty; and the Ottoman government did not ratify it. After the Turkish War of Independence ended in Greek defeat in Anatolia, and the fall of Lloyd George and his Middle Eastern policies, the western powers agreed to the Treaty of Lausanne with the new Turkish Republic, in 1923. This treaty made the two islands part of Turkey; but it guaranteed a special autonomous administrative status there to accommodate the Greeks, and excluded them from the population exchange that took place between Greece and Turkey, due to their presence as a majority.
However shortly after the Civil Law legislation of 17 February 1926 (Medeni Kanun), the rights accorded to minorities in Turkey were revoked, in violation of the Lausanne Treaty. The teaching in the Greek language in schools was forbidden with a law on the “Unification of Education” (Tevhid-i Tedrisat Kanunu).
The Greek population
In all likelihood, the island was inhabited primarily by ethnic Greeks from ancient times through to around the middle of the twentieth century. Because precise census records are a recent phenomenon, the detailed historic ethnic makeup of the islands must remain a matter of conjecture; however, a census taken under Greek rule in 1922 showed a bare majority of Greek inhabitants on Tenedos. The Greek Orthodox Church had a strong presence on the island.
Article 14 of the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) exempted Imbros and Tenedos from the large-scale population exchange that took place between Greece and Turkey, and required Turkey to accommodate the local Greek majority and their rights. Specifically:
The islands of Imbros and Tenedos, remaining under Turkish sovereignty, shall enjoy a special administrative organisation composed of local elements and furnishing every guarantee for the native non-Moslem population in so far as concerns local administration and the protection of persons and property. The maintenance of order will be assured therein by a police force recruited from amongst the local population by the local administration above provided for and placed under its orders.
In simpler language, the islands were to be largely autonomous and self-governing, with its own police force. Turkish policy consistently undermined both the spirit and letter of this commitment: The islands of Imbros and Tenedos were each given an official Turkish name (Gökçeada and Bozcaada respectively), schools were required to teach exclusively in Turkish, and the local Greek population was marginalized in multiple ways.
Large numbers of mainland Turks were settled on the two islands, and Greek property was expropriated by the Turkish government, which asserted security concerns. The adequacy of the compensation is disputed. Guarantees that were made to all the Greek inhabitants of Turkey in the Treaty of Lausanne were ignored, and the Turkish government implemented a policy of intimidation.
While the Cyprus conflict between Greece and Turkey escalated in the 1960's, the situation of the Greeks of the two islands continually deteriorated. Turkey opened an open prison for dangerous criminals on the island of Imbros, resulting in grievious harm both to the Greek islanders' property and, in some cases, to the Greek islanders themselves.
All of these events have led to the Greeks emigrating from both islands: If this was the intent of the Turkish policies, they have been successful. There remains only a very small Greek community on Tenedos today, comprising several dozen mostly elderly people. Most of the former Greeks of Imbros and Tenedos are in diaspora in Greece, the United States, and Australia, some in Anatolia.
References
- Oxford Classical Dictionary s. "Tenedos"
- Loeb Classical Library Athenaeus.
- Website on the misfortunes of the Greeks. While tendentious, the section (in the middle of the page) about the islands is not strident, and asserts several matters of fact.
- Text of the Treaty of Lausanne.
- Les îles d'Imbros et de Tenedos Template:Fr Source for population.
- Homer - The Iliad - Book XIII - Reference is made to a cavern located between the rocky isles of Imbros and Tenedos supposedly the home of the God Poseidon
See also
External links
Template:Districts of Çanakkale
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