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CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION 
9 
The literatures of the War of Independence and of the Asia Minor Disaster are 
closely related to the shaping of the respective national narratives about the 
foundation of the independent national and “homogeneous” states of Turkey and 
Greece. The end of the 1919-1922 war also ended the process of dismemberment of 
the Ottoman Empire as well as the process of the formation of the independent Greek 
state. The latter had started with the Greek revolution in 1821 while the former 
nearly sixty years later with the Berlin Congress in 1878. The outcome of the war, 
victorious for the Turks and disastrous for the Greeks, consolidated the borders of 
two independent states. Turkey retained Anatolia but did not regain any of the 
Ottoman provinces of whose recovery some had dreamed, while Greece achieved the 
sway of a Greek state over the populations of Asia Minor not by extending its 
borders across the Aegean but by their removal to “old Greece” through the 
exchange of populations. The demographic changes in both states were dramatic. 
They were felt more in Greece as she had to accommodate a proportionately larger 
number of refugees within a smaller area. The arrival of the refugees in Greece and 
its impact has been and is still studied and discussed extensively. In Turkey interest 
in the study of the refugees has been more recent.
The literature which in one way or another has been inspired by these events in 
Greek and Turkish since they occurred nearly a century ago is enormous in bulk. It is 
far beyond the capacity of a single work to survey it all. This brief introduction will 

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CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION 
10 
attempt a very general survey and then describe the principles underlying the 
selection of the works chosen for study.
There is a recognisable canon of works and existing scholarship divides it into 
chronological periods.
1
The first such period starts with the war itself and extends 
into the 1930s.
Works of literature written at the time of the war and the next decade and drawing 
their subject matter from the war and its impact on all aspects of life in the newly 
emerging Republic of Turkey are generally classed under the heading of Millî 
Edebiyat (National literature)
2
or are commonly referred to specifically as Kurtuluş 
Edebiyatı
3
in the most histories of Turkish literature
4
. This literary movement had 
appeared much earlier and took its definite shape and character with the 
constitutional changes of 1908. It is an offspring of the more general Turkish 
nationalism which eventually prevailed over various other “isms” (eg. Westernism, 
Islamism, Ottomanism, Turanism) which had made their appearance in the mid 
nineteenth century as possible paths to the future
5
. 
Kurtuluş Edebiyatı, as generally conceived, does not include every relevant writer. In 
Turkey authors of different ideological inclinations wrote prose and poetry with a 
1
Turkish prose literature has been surveyed by Balabanlılar and Greek prose literature by Doulis and more 
briefly by Mackridge. A very brief bibliographical survey to 1972 which includes poetry is by Liatsos. 
2
Kudret ΙΙ, 11-15
3
Şapolyo, 5. Şapolyo coined the term Kurtuluş Edebiyatı. The literary meaning of 
kurtuluş
is salvation, 
liberation or emancipation. He first published the book as
 Kurtuluş Edebiyatı Tarihi 
(History of the Liberation 
Literature) in 1965. The subsequent and more comprehensive edition of 1967 appeared as 
İstiklâl Savaş 
Edebiyatı Tarihi 
(History of the Literature of the War of Independence).
4
Kurdakul Ι, 129 
5
Ertaylan 1926, Introduction. Also for an up-to-date analysis see Köroğlu 2007, 25-45 

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