Uğur Z. Peçe Uncovers a Forgotten Part of the History of Crete

Though unique in many ways, one of the root causes of the Cretan Civil War is hardly unique at all: sectarianism.

In the years prior to the crisis, dating back to the 17th century, Peçe says, the multi-cultural people of Crete coexisted mostly without serious incident. Though the island was home to both Christians and Muslims, both groups were of Greek origin, spoke Greek, and shared a Cretan culture distinct from either Greece or the Ottoman Empire.

But starting with the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, geographic divisions began to develop between the two cultures, with Muslims being driven to the island’s urban enclaves and the Christians settling in the more vast rural areas. A tenuous peace, punctuated by occasional conflict and Christian uprising against Ottoman rule, would hold over the following few decades. But in 1895, simmering tensions finally gave way to a series of isolated clashes. Those isolated clashes eventually sparked the conflict that would prove to be the endgame for Crete’s multi-ethnic identity.

“When the island devolved into civil war, what we have is the phenomenon of internal migration—an island full of internally displaced people,” Peçe says. “The Muslims that live in the countryside leave their villages for the cities on the coast, and for months they live there essentially as refugees.”

The growing crisis created a vacuum of power and control, and it is at this moment that the European powers intervened. A destabilized Crete was not in the best interest of any of those powers—a great concern was that an uncontrolled crisis on Crete could spread into the Balkans and eventually into Europe—but a Crete under the control of any of their other rivals was even more problematic. Which is why England, France, Russia and Italy all rushed to fill the void, or at the very least, assert their presence on an island on the brink.

“When you look at the confidential correspondence in the French documents, especially, the thing you see is very profound suspicion toward the British,” Peçe says. “They were thinking, ‘The British will probably wait for the right moment, and they will grab this island because of its strategic importance, especially thanks to having one of the deepest natural harbors in the entire Mediterranean.’ So the French are very suspicious.”

That suspicion was shared among the other powers as well, and so the rivals ultimately decided on a power-sharing strategy: they would keep the peace in Crete, in order to keep the peace in Europe.

“Even though they have suspicions toward one another, they were trying to find common ground to move forward,” Peçe says. “And why were they there? You can see in these diplomatic documents a big anxiety about what’s going to happen to Europe if this crisis cannot be contained. If it spilled over into the Balkans, the major worry was that it was going to spill into Europe—which happened, of course, in 1914.”

In one sense, the European interlopers succeeded in containing the Cretan Civil War to Crete itself. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they succeeded in preventing a crisis, at least for the Cretan Muslims.

As Peçe explains, the situation on the island only devolved in the years between 1895 and 1898, with Crete’s Muslim populations finding themselves under siege in their urban centers. The hostilities drove the Muslims slowly from the island, and by 1908, the increasingly Christian-controlled territory had moved to formally leave the Empire and become part of Greece. It was a union the international community formally recognized by 1913; a year later, the continent would descend in the greatest cataclysm the world had ever seen, and except for the thousands of Cretan Turks who were forced to leave Crete as part of a massive population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923-24, the conflict was taken out of the spotlight.

But now Peçe is working to bring that spotlight back, with the hope of shedding light not only on the dynamics of a violent conflict that fractured a culture and tore apart an island, but also how what happened on Crete would ultimately portend the greater disaster, rooted in many of the same dynamics, that was yet to come.

“When [World War I] started in Europe, it started in the Balkans, and while it didn’t erupt specifically because of Crete, when you look at the complex power struggle of the European states about Crete before 1913, you cannot help but think that there is a relationship between the dynamics of the Cretan crisis and the world conflict that began in 1914,” he says.