Hasan Tahsin

Hasan Tahsin, whose real name was Osman Nevres, was a young Turkish journalist and political activist whose name the Turks associate with the first shot of the War of Independence. On the morning of 15 May 1919, as Greek soldiers were landing at Smyrna, he is said to have fired his revolver at the column marching along the quay and killed the soldier carrying the colours, before being cut down himself by bullets and bayonets. In Turkey he is known as the man who fired the “first bullet” (ilk kurşun) in defence of the homeland, and his monument stands in the centre of İzmir. Historians disagree over whether it really was he who fired the first shot, but his legend has become part of the founding myth of the Turkish Republic. His short and turbulent life leads through the world of Young Turk conspiracies, the Balkan Wars and the collapse of the empire from which modern Turkey and its conflict with Greece emerged.

Salonika

He was born in 1888 in Salonika, the multinational port of Ottoman Macedonia, where Jews, Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians and Albanians lived side by side. Mustafa Kemal had been born in the same city seven years earlier. According to Turkish biographers, both began their education at the same school, that of Şemsi Efendi, one of the first modern schools in the city, although Kemal was older and they were not contemporaries. Some sources state that Osman Nevres’s family belonged to the Dönme, descendants of Jewish followers of Sabbatai Zevi who had converted to Islam in the seventeenth century and who in Salonika formed a prosperous, educated community closely linked with the Young Turk movement.

Salonika was the cradle of the Committee of Union and Progress, a secret organisation of young officers and officials which in 1908 forced the Sultan to restore the constitution and from 1913 ruled the empire. Osman Nevres grew up in this milieu. According to Turkish accounts, the Committee paid for him to study political science in Paris. In 1912, during the First Balkan War, Salonika was taken by the Greek army. The city of his childhood ceased to belong to the empire, and for many of its Muslims emigration to Anatolia began. This experience, shared by a whole generation of Young Turk activists from the Balkans, explains much of their later nationalism.

The Bucharest attack

Osman Nevres was a member of the Committee and, according to Turkish sources, also of the Special Organisation (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa), a secret body answerable to the Young Turk leaders which carried out intelligence, sabotage and guerrilla operations and which during the war played a central role in the Armenian genocide. The sources say nothing of any part he may have played in those crimes.

His most notorious act before 1919 was an assassination attempt in Bucharest. In the autumn of 1914 two British Liberal politicians, the brothers Noel Buxton and Charles Roden Buxton, were staying there while touring the Balkans on a political mission: they wanted to secure Bulgaria’s neutrality and draw it closer to the Entente. In October 1914, when the Ottoman Empire was on the point of entering the war on Germany’s side, a young Turk fired at them and wounded both, Charles seriously, in the lung. Both recovered. The would-be assassin was found to be Hasan Tahsin, the name under which Osman Nevres operated. A Romanian court sentenced him to several years in prison – five or ten, according to different sources. He was released when the troops of the Central Powers occupied Bucharest in December 1916.

Smyrna

After the Armistice of Mudros, which ended the war for the Ottoman Empire in October 1918, the Committee’s leaders fled the country, and its activists went underground or looked for new forms of action. In Smyrna, the largest port of western Anatolia, the Greeks formed a large and wealthy community, and after the armistice many of them openly looked forward to the city’s union with Greece. The Turks feared that they would share the fate of the Muslims of Macedonia and Crete, a large proportion of whom had emigrated after those lands passed under Greek rule. Hasan Tahsin settled in Smyrna, where he began publishing the newspaper Hukuk-u Beşer (“The Rights of Man”). In a city where the Greeks openly awaited union with Greece and Allied warships lay at anchor in the bay, the paper defended the rights of the Turkish population and protested against plans to partition Anatolia.

When news arrived on 14 May 1919 that Greek troops would land the following day, several thousand Turks gathered during the night at the old Jewish cemetery of Maşatlık. There the Society for the Rejection of Annexation (Redd-i İlhak) was founded. According to Turkish accounts, Hasan Tahsin was among the speakers and organisers of the rally. The Ottoman authorities ordered the garrison not to resist, but some of the young activists were ready to act on their own.

The first shot

On the morning of 15 May 1919 a battalion of evzones, put ashore too far to the north, was marching along the quay past the konak, the governor’s residence, and the Turkish barracks, through a crowd of Greeks welcoming the soldiers. According to Turkish tradition, Hasan Tahsin was standing near the konak and fired his revolver at the column, killing the soldier carrying the colours. Some Turkish sources name two Greeks who were killed. He emptied the cylinder before the soldiers’ bullets and bayonets reached him. He died on the spot. He was about thirty years old.

The shot, whoever fired it, triggered a massacre. The evzones opened fire on the konak and the barracks, and after the Turkish soldiers surrendered, Greek soldiers and civilians murdered prisoners and passers-by. According to Allied estimates at the time, several hundred Turks were killed or wounded. A few days later Eleftherios Venizelos sent the High Commissioner Aristeidis Stergiadis to Smyrna, and he brought those responsible for the violence to trial.

The dispute over the legend

The Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry that investigated the events of 15 May did not establish who fired first. Some accounts speak of shots from several places at once. The Turkish writer and historian Yalçın Küçük maintained that Hasan Tahsin’s name does not appear in connection with the first shot in any sources from before the 1970s, and he called the whole story into question. Other Turkish historians consider the tradition credible. What is certain is that he was killed on 15 May on the quay at Smyrna. Whether he fired the first shot, and whether he killed anyone, can no longer be determined.

Memory

In the Turkish Republic Hasan Tahsin became a national hero. In 1973 the First Bullet Monument was erected on the waterfront in İzmir, at the spot where he is said to have died. Ceremonies are held there every year on 15 May, and the İzmir journalists’ association awards a prize in his name. One of the institutions of the Turkish General Staff also bears his name. For the Turks his deed symbolises the fact that resistance began on the day of the landing, even before Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on 19 May.

Hasan Tahsin’s short life sums up the road travelled by his generation: from the Young Turk revolution in Salonika, through the Balkan defeats, conspiracies and the world war, to the struggle for the remnants of the empire in Anatolia. The Smyrna landing he opposed awakened the Turkish national movement, which within three years drove the Greeks out of Asia Minor and overturned the peace imposed on Turkey. Kemal’s victory was the first successful breach of the Paris peace settlement, and in the 1920s and 1930s revisionists in other countries, above all in Germany, watched it closely.