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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
33 
Greek territorial ambitions were aimed at adjacent areas in the southern Balkans such 
as Thessaly, Epirus and later Macedonia or the Aegean islands, especially Crete. 
While the cultural incarnation of the Great Idea could be associated with the attempts 
in the course of the later nineteenth century to rehellenise the orthodox communities 
in Anatolia through education,
12
the acquisition of Anatolian territory was 
throughout the nineteenth century and even into the second decade of the twentieth 
too impracticable an undertaking to be a credible policy
13
. 
Of the Anatolian inhabitants at the end of the nineteenth century who, being 
orthodox Christians, were regarded as Greeks some could claim a continuity with a 
time when the whole peninsula was Christian and some were relatively recent 
settlers from Greece and the Aegean islands. The former spoke either a distinctive 
local dialect of Greek or Turkish; they were to be found chiefly in the Black Sea 
region and Cappadocia with a sprinkling of economic migrants in many Anatolian 
towns. The latter, speaking standard Greek, were to be found mostly in the Aegean 
coastal zone. Although the exact proportions can still be debated, the Greeks were 
indubitably a minority in Anatolia overall and seem on any reasonable reckoning 
also to have been outnumbered by the Muslims in every vilayet and even sancak
14
. 
There seems to have been no more than one town, Ayvalık, which was wholly 
12
Ploumidis, 40-52 
13
Ploumidis, 83-86 
14
Karpat 1985 and Mutlu 
passim 
who follow the Ottoman census figures. Reconciling the summaries of Karpat 
1985, 168 and 188 with Mutlu, 11 and of either with those of Kitromilides and Alexandris, 28, who 
demonstrated, contrary to the aspersions of McCarthy, that there truly was a “patriarchal” attempt to count the 
orthodox population in 1910-1912, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Restriction to a plausible range of 
estimates suggests that in Anatolia as a whole there were between about eight and twelve times as many Muslims 
as Orthodox.

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