"The mountain looks on Marathon, And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free." Few words in the English language have such a lasting impact on popular opinion. Their composer, Byron, of course knew next to nothing about Greek nationalism, or of the complex nature of the relationship between Turk and Greek in the Ottoman Empire, in which many Greeks - the Phanariots - were in fact prospering enormously.
Ignorance didn't stop the poor fool meddling in business which wasn't his, and dying, and thereby adding an enduring lustre to the Greek nationalist argument in a dispute in which no outsider sensibly enters. Byron, freedom: those words have entered the popular perception of what the Greek uprising of 1820 was about, obscuring the truth that the Greek "uprising" largely consisted of the massacre of Turkish civilians.
No doubt the Ottoman response - the hanging of the Orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, along with some of his bishops, on Easter eve, was a little excessive. But the place is called Byzantium, and only fools like Byron think they understand it, or "freedom". The aim of many of the Greek revolutionaries, for example, was not freedom for Greece, or anywhere else for that matter, but the establishment of Greek Phanariot mastery over the Ottoman Empire.
A complex empire
Yet ignorance and Byronesque romanticism have combined to colour prejudices in western Europe towards the Ottoman Empire, which came to be caricatured as sick, diseased, incapable and venal: unlike, for example, the manly, vigorous and civilising empires of western Europe.
All rubbish of course. The Ottomans ran one of the most complex empires in the world with a great deal of imagination and legal sophistication and - a word not often used about the Ottomans - fairness. People of any nationality - Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Orthodox - could advance in the Ottoman Empire, provided they were loyal. We know since the Ottomans lost their stewardship of those imperial territories, nobody has been able to impose peaceful, democratic government on them successfully. Massacre, ethnic cleansing and vast population transfers occurred, not merely through the Aegean islands, but in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kurdistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria as well. The post-imperial history of those countries makes the Ottoman achievement all the most astonishing.
That achievement was brought to ruins - as was so much else - by the Great War, Turkey's reluctant involvement in which was in large part due to Byron's poisonous legacy. A reflex anti-Turkishness had entered the political culture of western Europe, and an aim which had been a keystone to policy in the area -keeping Russian hands off Constantinople - was abandoned by the British and the French. This was political idiocy of high and almost suicidal degree, the consequences of which the world has been living with since.
The only consolation is, it could have been far worse. Had the allied Gallipoli expedition been successful and Russia then been given Constantinople, we might have the glorious prospect of the Soviet Union, operating out of that lovely warm-water port, becoming a Mediterranean sea-power. The world would have been unthinkably different, and unthinkably more terrible too.
Act of stupidity
What drove the Turks into the arms of Germany was an act of such casual stupidity that it should have doomed the reputation of its author down the ages. It was the seizure by the British of two war-ships, Sultan Osman and Reshadieh, paid for by popular subscription in Turkey, which were building in British shipyards when war broke out. The man who pressed for the requisitioning of the ships was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who within five years was to give the world the Black and Tans. His piracy also had an Anglo-Irish dimension - Sultan Osman was renamed Agincourt and Reshadieh was commissioned as Erin.
How elegant that a warship called the Erin could have been a cause for thousands of Irish soldiers to find themselves serving in the invasion forces which landed in Gallipoli in 1915, and wasting their young lives in the wrong cause; for it would have been a calamity of grotesque proportions had that invasion been successful and Russian had been given dominion of Constantinople and the Bosphorus. Fortunately for us all, Ottoman forces were successful; the right side won, and the allies were expelled, at a total cost of half a million casualties. It is tragedy too terrible to contemplate.
Forgotten campaign
The Australians have manufactured a heritage-history out of the Gallipoli affair; and we have largely forgotten it. Has any Leaving or Inter Cert ever mentioned it? But the Turks have an altogether more terrible memory of the campaign, which consumed lives and the loyalty of the most energetic of their young men, crippling their country for a generation or more.
It is a side to the Great War we seldom hear about - in part because of the magnanimity of Ataturk towards the memory of dead invaders in the years after the war. He could, in fairness, have lamented more loudly about the injustice done to his fellow countrymen. What we do not know about the suffering of unfortunate Turks might be rectified at 7.30 tomorrow night at the New National Museum, Collins Barracks, when Professor Mete Tuncoku will speak of the appalling consequences for Turkey of a campaign which once joined us in conflict from the two extremes of Europe, and which today should unite us.