THE MIRACLE A True Story towards paying off their debt to the Turkish state. Most of them would have had to work for between 200 and 300 years to pay off the tax debt levied against them!    Thus Greeks, Armenians and Jews, some with vast amounts of both fixed and movable assets, were forced, as a result of this law, literally to give away their entire property at ridiculous prices and at the same time were exiled in order to pay off their "debts" through forced labour.    Furniture, gold, hand-woven carpets, tapestries -all these were the movable assets on which this legalised form of pillage had set its sights. Sick people were even turned out of their beds so that these items of furniture could be removed.    The property was purchased mainly by members of the confiscation and liquidation committees, who then resold it at a much higher price. In 1943, when the law was introduced, a total of 1,869 prominent members of Constantinople's Christian community were sent to the Turkish "Siberia" at Askale, once their property had been confiscated. Many of them died there as a result of the privations they suffered, but the names of only eleven of them are known. Two women who could not pay the unreasonably high taxes imposed on them were sent to Askale to clean the toilets and other public areas and were never seen again.    Conditions in these concentration camps were appalling. The prisoners lived in make-shift tents that afforded little protection from the extreme cold. They had to quench their thirst with water from a dirty lake, placing their fingers across their lips as they drank so as to prevent the frogs and waterweed from getting in their mouths. One of the first prisoners to die at Askale was the father of Dr M. Hekimoglu. The cause of his death was pneumonia. The testimonies of those who survived that period paint one of the blackest pictures in the history of mankind.    There is no doubt that introduction of the property tax, exile and the conditions at the labour camps all dealt a severe blow to the Greeks in Constantinople, but the measures did not "solve" the problem which the Greeks represented for Turkey, especially when in March 1944, seeing the end of the Second World War approaching, it was obliged to release all the prisoners in the concentration camps.    As soon as they were freed, of course, all those prisoners who had managed to survive the ordeal gradually began to leave Turkey in fear of their lives. The Greeks fled to Greece, the Jews to Palestine and the Armenians to Russia. Afraid their letters might be censored, the Armenians said before they left that as soon as they arrived they would send their family and friends still living in Turkey a photograph of the whole family. If the family was standing up, that would mean they were happy and give encouragement to those who stayed in Turkey to emigrate to Russia, but if the people in the photograph were sitting down, this would indicate that conditions in Russia were as bad as, if not worse than, those in Turkey and the family should not consider leaving.    Following imposition of the property tax in 1942, Turkey waited patiently for many years until September, 1955, when, with masterly organisation, it staged a pogrom against the Greeks in Constantinople and their property, destroying 4,350 shops and stores, looting 2,600 homes and setting fire to or ravaging 73 Greek churches, all within the space of six-and-a-half hours.    In the early 1950s, Cyprus's struggle for independence had horrified the British who were afraid they might lose their bases on the island. They therefore decided to activate 21 and 22 Leonidas Koumakis THE MIRACLE A True Story If you prefer a hard copy of the book, please send an email to HEC-Books@hec.greece.org Previous Page | Initial Page | Site Map | Next Page (23rd of 204) © For Internet 2001 HEC and Leonidas Koumakis. Updated on 19 June 2001.