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The Nineteenth Century
to regard Crete as their own country. They had a tag – ‘Me too, my
guts are Cretan’. After the Smyrna disaster the refugees started to pour
in; somehow they were accommodated, and everyone thought that
was the end of the matter.
Then, like a thunderbolt, came the news that there was to be a
complete and compulsory exchange of populations. The Turks and
Christians were staggered – ‘like a couple whose divorce is pronounced
at the very moment when they have buried the hatchet’. The Turks
were being torn away from land and property, from olives, vines and
orchards. ‘From one end of the island to the other the groans of Turks
preparing to leave were heard, mingling with those of the refugees
who had just been uprooted; and one asked oneself what profit could
there be in such distress for the monsters who held human grief at
nothing.’ When the ships arrived to take them away a kind of madness
possessed the Turks; they tore down the shutters from their houses,
ripped off doors and woodwork, intending to take with them these
scraps of their former life. The Greek refugees meanwhile, who were to
occupy these Turkish houses once they were vacated, took fright and
rushed furiously into the Turkish quarter. The militia was called out to
restore order. At last the Turks began to wind down towards the quay
in a long dejected queue. All night they were embarking, and in the
early morning the queue was still there. It was not till about midday
that the steamers hooted, the anchors were weighed, and, as the ships
began to move away, a great cry arose from thousands of Turkish
mouths – ‘Wild and full of entreaty, bitter and menacing, carried by
the wind in great surges to the shore.’
In Heraklion Elliadi watched the Turks kneeling in their cemeteries
before the time came for them to go. One of the transport ships, the
steamer Ujid, was wrecked outside the old Venetian harbour in a gale,
so that many of the Turks had to wait, having packed their things and
worked themselves up for departure, for new transport. Eleven thousand
Muslims left Heraklion alone; thirteen thousand Christian
refugees took their place.
Very few Turks were able to stay. Among those few who did was one
Fatme who worked in the Turkish baths; but then, it turned out that
she was not a Turk at all. She was Madame Hortense, the old French
courtesan, who after her admirals left Crete had spent twelve years in a
brothel in Canea – ‘with those Cretan wild beasts’ – and then become
an honest woman, her past shrouded in mystery, in the baths of
Rethymnon.
With the departure of the Turks a long chapter of Cretan history
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