The Armistice of Mudanya

In the early hours of 11 October 1922 at Mudanya, a small port on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, General İsmet Pasha and three Allied generals – British, French and Italian – signed the armistice that ended the Greco-Turkish War. The Greeks were to evacuate Eastern Thrace as far as the river Maritsa within fifteen days, and authority there was to pass to the government of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. In return the Turks undertook not to cross a line drawn around the Straits and not to bring troops into Europe before peace was concluded. The Greek delegates, although they had sailed to Mudanya, did not take their seats at the table and did not sign. Their government acceded to the armistice a few days later, when it no longer had any choice. The armistice averted the threat of war between Turkey and Britain, which only days earlier had seemed close, and opened the way to the Lausanne conference. It was also the first document in which the victorious powers treated the government of Mustafa Kemal as an equal partner rather than a rebellious province.

From Smyrna to the Straits

On 26 August 1922 the Turkish army launched a great offensive near Afyon. Within two weeks it had shattered the Greek army; on 9 September it entered Smyrna, and on 18 September the last Greek units left Anatolia. In Smyrna a great fire broke out and consumed the Christian quarters, while hundreds of thousands of refugees waited on the quayside for ships. In Greece the defeat provoked a military coup. On 27 September King Constantine I abdicated and power passed to the revolutionary committee of Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras.

The victorious army moved north, towards the Straits. Between it and Constantinople and Eastern Thrace, where a Greek corps still stood intact, lay the neutral zone around the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, held since 1918 by British, French and Italian troops. On 15 September the London Daily Mail published an interview with Kemal in which he said that Turkey demanded Asia Minor, Thrace up to the Maritsa and Constantinople, and that he would prefer to obtain them by negotiation but would not wait for ever. The cabinet of Prime Minister David Lloyd George decided to defend the zone, and on 16 September issued a communiqué announcing joint resistance by Britain and the Dominions, although no one had asked the Dominions for their opinion. Canada refused to send troops, Australia and South Africa replied coolly or evasively, and only New Zealand and Newfoundland declared themselves ready to send soldiers. France and Italy withdrew their detachments from the Asian shore of the Dardanelles. At Çanakkale, the former Chanak, the British were left alone.

At the end of September Turkish cavalry entered the neutral zone and halted just in front of the British barbed wire. The soldiers of both sides had orders not to fire first. On 29 September the British cabinet instructed the commander of the Allied forces in Constantinople, General Charles Harington, to hand the Turks an ultimatum: if they did not withdraw from the zone they would be attacked. Harington judged that war could be avoided and did not deliver the ultimatum. Meanwhile diplomacy had done its work. After difficult talks in Paris, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, reached agreement with the French prime minister, Raymond Poincaré, and on 23 September the powers sent Ankara a note proposing a peace conference and promising support for the Turkish demands regarding Eastern Thrace up to the Maritsa, including Adrianople. The French politician Henry Franklin-Bouillon, who had already negotiated a Franco-Turkish agreement in 1921, went to Smyrna at the end of September to persuade Kemal to negotiate. Kemal accepted the proposal, ordered the army to avoid incidents and named Mudanya, a port not far from Bursa, as the venue for the talks.

The negotiations

The talks began on the afternoon of 3 October 1922. The Turkish delegation was led by the commander of the Western Front, İsmet Pasha, with the front’s chief of staff, Asım Gündüz, and several officers. Also at Mudanya were the Chief of the General Staff, Fevzi Pasha, and Refet Pasha, whom Ankara had appointed as the future administrator of Thrace. The powers were represented by Generals Harington, Charpy and Mombelli, while Franklin-Bouillon observed the negotiations and acted as an unofficial intermediary. Greece sent General Alexandros Mazarakis and Colonel Ptolemaios Sariyannis, but they took no part in the sessions and waited aboard a British warship offshore.

Thrace proved the hardest question. İsmet demanded that the Greeks hand it over immediately and unconditionally, and that the Turkish army be allowed to enter it. Harington and his colleagues, bound by the note of 23 September, agreed that Thrace should go to Turkey, but wanted it to be occupied temporarily by the Allies until peace was made, and Turkey not to move its army there. Between 5 and 9 October the talks came close to breaking down several times. According to Turkish accounts, on 6 October Kemal ordered İsmet to prepare a march on Constantinople should the handover of Thrace be refused. Harington asked for time to consult Curzon, who was once again in Paris and had to agree a joint position with Poincaré. The British meanwhile reinforced the garrison at Çanakkale, and some sources state that Harington had orders to attack if the talks collapsed. On the evening of 9 October İsmet accepted a compromise, the details were settled the following day, and on 11 October – at about six in the morning, according to Turkish sources – the armistice was signed.

The terms

The armistice had fourteen points and was drawn up in French. The most important were these:

• Hostilities between Turkey and Greece were to cease when the armistice came into force, at midnight on 14–15 October 1922.
• The Greeks were to withdraw from Eastern Thrace to the left (western) bank of the Maritsa within roughly fifteen days, taking their troops, equipment and supplies with them. Greek officials and gendarmes were to leave as quickly as possible.
• Civil authority in Eastern Thrace would be taken over by Allied officials, who would hand it on to Ankara’s officials immediately if possible, and at the latest within thirty days of the Greek evacuation. Ankara could bring gendarmerie into Thrace, but no more than 8,000 men including officers.
• Until peace was concluded, around seven Allied battalions were to be stationed in Eastern Thrace, and the right bank of the Maritsa, with Adrianople’s suburb of Karaağaç, remained under their control. Ankara undertook not to bring an army into Thrace until the peace treaty had been ratified.
• Turkish troops in Anatolia were to halt on lines drawn around Çanakkale and on the Izmit peninsula and not to cross them until the end of the peace conference. The Allies retained Constantinople, the Gallipoli peninsula and their part of the Straits zone.

The Greek revolutionary government protested for a long time. The loss of Eastern Thrace, which Greece had occupied since 1920 and which the Treaty of Sèvres had awarded to it, meant the departure of its Greek inhabitants. But when no power was willing to back it, and Eleftherios Venizelos, who represented Greece abroad, advised giving way, Athens accepted the terms. Sources state that Greece acceded to the armistice on 13 or 14 October 1922.

The evacuation of Thrace

On 19 October Refet Pasha arrived in Constantinople with a detachment of gendarmerie and was greeted with enthusiasm by the city’s Muslim inhabitants. In Eastern Thrace the evacuation began. According to contemporary estimates, more than 250,000 Greek civilians who did not wish to remain under Turkish rule left the region within a few weeks, and together with the army and officials the figure may have approached 400,000. They fled west along the roads and across the bridges over the Maritsa, with their cattle and belongings on carts, in the pouring autumn rain. A young correspondent of the Toronto Daily Star, Ernest Hemingway, who watched this column near Adrianople, wrote of a silent, never-ending procession of people. By the end of November the whole of Eastern Thrace was in Turkish hands.

Significance

The Armistice of Mudanya ended a three-year war that had begun with the Greek landing at Smyrna, and sealed the failure of the policy embodied in the Treaty of Sèvres. Turkey regained Eastern Thrace without firing a shot, and the powers agreed to negotiate a new peace with Ankara. Not everything went the Turks’ way, however. The Straits and Constantinople remained in Allied hands until the Treaty of Lausanne, and the ban on bringing an army into Thrace weakened Ankara’s position at the negotiating table. A few weeks after Mudanya the Grand National Assembly also settled who would represent Turkey at Lausanne, and did so in radical fashion.

The crisis that ended at Mudanya had its most far-reaching consequences, however, in Britain. On 7 October the former Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law wrote in a letter to The Times that Britain could not act alone as the policeman of the world. On 19 October the Conservatives meeting at the Carlton Club in London resolved to leave the coalition, and Lloyd George, the prime minister of the victorious war, resigned the same day. He never returned to power. He was succeeded on 23 October by Bonar Law, and in the November election Winston Churchill, one of the loudest advocates of a hard line towards Turkey, also lost his seat. Even more important was the lesson taught by the Dominions. Canada for the first time openly refused to go to war at London’s call, and its prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, declared that the Canadian parliament would decide on any participation in war. The Chanak crisis hastened the reshaping of the Empire that was set down in the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster of 1931. In September 1939 the Dominions declared war on Germany separately, each by its own decision: Canada only on 10 September, after a vote in parliament, while Ireland remained neutral.

The wider meaning of Mudanya did not escape Europe either. A few weeks after the armistice Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, and in Germany nationalists held up Kemal as proof that an imposed peace could be torn up if the victors had no stomach for a fight. The powers that had dictated terms to Turkey in 1920 were unwilling to die for them in 1922. The same reluctance of British and French public opinion to face a new war, visible for the first time over the Dardanelles, shaped their policy towards the revisionists until 1939.