Aristeidis Stergiadis

Aristeidis Stergiadis was the man to whom Eleftherios Venizelos entrusted the hardest task in Greek politics after the First World War: governing Smyrna and its hinterland after the landing of 15 May 1919. For three years he was Greece’s High Commissioner in a city where Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews and Europeans lived side by side. He tried to govern impartially, punished Greeks for violence against Turks and wanted to convince the Great Powers that Greece deserved Asia Minor. To the Turks he was the embodiment of the occupation; to many Greeks he was a traitor who failed to prepare the population for catastrophe and fled the burning city on a British warship. His story shows how hard it was to build just government on land over which two nations were at war.

Crete

He was born in 1861 in Heraklion on Crete, which was then still Ottoman. His family, prosperous and of Macedonian origin, was in trade: his father had come to the island from Thessaloniki and dealt in olive oil. According to Greek biographers, two of Aristeidis’s brothers were killed fighting the Turks. Stergiadis studied law in Athens and Paris, and from 1889 practised as a lawyer in Heraklion. He was a respected advocate and legal expert, and in the public life of autonomous Crete he stood at Venizelos’s side. He took part in the Theriso revolt of 1905, by which Venizelos forced Prince George to step down, and until 1910 he chaired the Heraklion municipal council.

Venizelos valued him as a lawyer. According to Greek studies, they worked together on Cretan laws on local government and on the affairs of the Muslim population, and in 1913 Stergiadis helped prepare the Treaty of Athens, which ended the Greco-Turkish war fought as part of the First Balkan War and regulated the position of Muslims in Greece’s new provinces. He thus knew from practice what coexistence between Christians and Muslims under Greek rule looked like, and he later took that experience with him to Smyrna.

Epirus

In 1917, when Venizelos took power over the whole of Greece, Stergiadis became Governor-General of Epirus. The region had only recently been annexed and was a restless borderland: the Italians occupied neighbouring Albania and pressed claims of their own, brigands roamed the mountains, and the population was divided. Stergiadis imposed order there with a firm hand. From this period dates his reputation as an honest, hard-working and ruthless man, as well as anecdotes that in fits of anger he could strike an official. Venizelos concluded that just such a man was needed in Smyrna.

High Commissioner in Smyrna

Stergiadis received his appointment as High Commissioner in Smyrna even before the landing, but according to Greek sources he hesitated for a long time and pleaded ill health. He was not in the city on 15 May 1919, when a battalion of evzones was thrown into chaos on the quayside and, after the first shots, Greek soldiers and civilians killed hundreds of Turks. He arrived a few days later. Greek sources state that he took up office on 8 May in the Julian calendar, that is, 21 May. Venizelos ordered all Greek authorities in the zone, including the army, to obey him.

Stergiadis’s first decisions surprised Greeks and Turks alike. He brought those responsible for the violence of 15 and 16 May before a court martial, which convicted 74 people, 48 of them Greeks. He set up a commission, with representatives of the Great Powers, to pay compensation to the victims. He proclaimed that all inhabitants were equal before the law. On the commission building the Turkish flag flew beside the Greek one, since Smyrna formally remained part of the Ottoman Empire. He kept Turkish officials in their posts, and the affairs of the Muslim population in his administration were run by a Turkish Muslim. He personally took action against abuses by Greek soldiers and residents. British and Greek accounts repeat that he walked about the city with a cane and beat Greeks caught mistreating Turks with it.

He ran the zone as an efficient administrator. He reorganised the gendarmerie, the courts and the administration, and brought back from Greece more than a hundred thousand Christians who had been deported from the coast during the war. He created a health service open to all inhabitants and founded an experimental farm and a bacteriological laboratory. With the help of the eminent mathematician Constantin Carathéodory he prepared the Greek Ionian University in Smyrna, whose building was ready in 1922, but which never got as far as starting classes.

Enemies

Stergiadis’s impartiality won him the respect of some Turks and of foreign observers, but made him enemies among the Greeks. The local Greeks expected that, after years of oppression and wartime deportations, Greek rule would give them the upper hand over the Turks rather than punish them. Officers, above all the commander of the army in Asia Minor, General Leonidas Paraskevopoulos, opposed his policy towards the Turkish population and wanted to extend the zone of occupation. Venizelos sided with the commissioner. According to Greek authors, he said that if the military were allowed to run policy for even a single day, all would be lost.

The sharpest conflict was with Metropolitan Chrysostomos, who had blessed the soldiers on 15 May and saw the landing as the beginning of the liberation of Ionia. Stergiadis believed that the cleric was stirring up the Greeks and meddling in politics. It is said that he once interrupted one of the Metropolitan’s sermons, declaring that he would not tolerate pronouncements of that kind. In his first months in office he several times wanted to resign, but Venizelos would not let him go.

In the autumn of 1919 an inter-Allied commission of inquiry chaired by the American Admiral Mark Bristol blamed the Greeks for the bloodshed on the day of the landing and recommended that their troops be replaced by Allied ones. The Supreme Council did not publish the report and the Greeks stayed, but Stergiadis knew that his zone was under scrutiny. Courts martial, compensation and discipline were meant to convince the Great Powers that a Greek administration could protect all the inhabitants.

After Venizelos’s fall

In November 1920 Venizelos lost the election, and King Constantine I returned to Athens. The new royalist government purged Venizelists from office but left Stergiadis in Smyrna, though it tried to impose its own people on him. The commissioner defended his administration’s independence from party influence. Meanwhile the war in the interior of Anatolia intensified. The Greek army marched on Ankara and in 1921 was halted on the Sakarya by the forces of Mustafa Kemal. The Smyrna zone became the rear of the front, through which troop transports and the wounded passed.

In 1922, when it became clear that the Great Powers would not defend the Greek gains, local Greeks from the Asia Minor Defence movement looked for a way out in autonomy for Ionia and offered Stergiadis its leadership. According to Greek historians he refused, and in the summer he himself considered a plan for an autonomous state under formal Turkish sovereignty, with a mixed administration. It was too late for anything. On 26 August 1922 the Turks launched their great offensive and within a few days shattered the Greek front.

September 1922

Stergiadis’s conduct in the last days of Greek Smyrna is the most controversial chapter of his life. According to Greek accounts, he asked Athens for ships for the army and the population, but at the same time did not want to allow panic and a mass flight that would flood Greece with refugees. The Christian population was not called on to evacuate in time. Some historians quote him as saying that it was better for these people to stay and die at Kemal’s hands than to go to Athens and turn everything upside down. The remark is known only from second-hand accounts and cannot be verified, but it has clung to his name ever since.

On 8 September 1922 (26 August in the Julian calendar), the day before the Turkish troops entered, Stergiadis left Smyrna as the last senior Greek official. Under the protection of British sailors he went aboard the battleship HMS Iron Duke, while on the quayside a crowd that had long hated him was ready to lynch him. The next day Turkish cavalry rode into the city. Metropolitan Chrysostomos was murdered by a mob, and a few days later the Great Fire consumed the Greek and Armenian quarters.

Exile

From Smyrna Stergiadis sailed to Constantinople, from there to Constanța in Romania, and then by train to Paris. At the beginning of 1923 he settled in the south of France, in Nice. He never returned to Greece. In a country that had taken in more than a million refugees from Asia Minor he was regarded as one of the main culprits of the catastrophe, but he was never brought to trial, unlike the royalist politicians and generals who were shot in November 1922. He kept silent, giving only two interviews in which he defended his decisions. He was visited by a few old acquaintances, among them General Nikolaos Plastiras and the writer Nikos Kazantzakis. He lived modestly, and where his means came from remained a matter of speculation. He was the stepfather of Beata Kitsikis, the mother of the historian Dimitri Kitsikis. He died in Nice in June 1949. Greek sources usually give the date as 23 June, some studies a day earlier.

Assessment

To this day historians judge Stergiadis in sharply different ways. Some see him as an honest and competent administrator, the only Greek official in Asia Minor who tried to treat the Turks as citizens rather than enemies, and who foresaw that the war in the Anatolian interior would end in defeat. Others charge him with being a cold autocrat without political judgement who alienated the Greeks he was supposed to look after and, at the decisive moment, left them without warning. In Greek collective memory his name was long associated with betrayal. The writer Ilias Venezis portrayed him as a solitary, dry and domineering man.

The fate of Stergiadis and his zone shows how fragile were the gains that the peace conference handed out to the victors without the consent of the defeated and without any readiness to defend them. Impartial administration could not make Greek Smyrna acceptable to the Turks, who saw it as the beginning of the partition of their homeland. The defeat of 1922 and the population exchange ended centuries of Greek presence in Ionia. Two decades before the Second World War, Smyrna became a warning about the disputes over nationally mixed lands that the post-war order had left unresolved throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans.