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CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION 
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The book was reissued in the Latin alphabet in the early 1970s
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with a preface by 
İnci Enginün. She quotes Fevzi Lütfi who explicitly emphasises the birth of a 
nationalist literature in a literature of suffering:
There was up to now a nationalistic yearning in Turkish Literature but 
nobody could perceive what this was. Essentially this could not be found 
either by chance or with logic. The book ‘From Bursa to İzmir’ is the 
herald 
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of this yearning. The authors found it in the ruined roads of the 
Motherland and inside its anguish and they put it to use.
 
Interestingly despite the casting of the Anatolian peasant as victim there appears to 
be no systematic attempt of a kind familiar from later practice in Greece to record 
experiences of the victims of the war in their own words
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. Instead we read words 
from the skilful pens of the Kurtuluş authors describing their own observations
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. 
In a similar manner but a year before and recorded by a journalist and not a literary 
figure, Κ.Faltaits, reporting on behalf of the newspaper 
Εμπρός
(Forward), they 
appeared in a book under the title 
These are the Turks
. 
The Narrative of the 
Massacres of Nicomedia
in 1921. Faltaits writes down and retells the stories he 
heard by those who witnessed and survived the massacres. This work seems to be a 
response to the report of May 1921 by the Interallied Commission criticising the 
Greeks for similar actions against the Turks. In contrast to the Turkish case there was 
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The book bears no date; bibliographical entries indicate its publication after Falih Rıfkı’s death in 1971 and 
before Yakup Kadri’s death in 1974. 
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Adıvar nd, 7 
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The best known oral history enterprise in Greece is by Melpo Merlier’s Centre for Asia Minor Studies which 
began collecting refugee stories in the 1930 and is discussed in the following pages.
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One of the stories, “Teslim Teslim” (Surrender Surrender) by Yakup Kadri has the peasant victim tell his story 
in response to questioning. 

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