298 | The Multiple Personae of Pavlos Carolidis
(CUP), the party of the Young Turks, in 1912. After parliamentary activity was
brought to an abrupt end a few months later, he fled to Germany. He remained
there until 1915, when he returned to Greece and taught at the university in 1917
and 1918. He was then dismissed from his university position, because of his
proroyalist stance, during the clash known as the National Discord between the
prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936), and King Constantine (1868–
1923). He was reappointed in 1920 but retired in 1923, once again because of the
political turnover of the period. He died in Athens in 1930.
It seems that Carolidis’s origins in a Turcophone region of Cappadocia, as
well as his thorough knowledge of Ottoman history and language, played a role in
his endorsement of a peculiar version of Ottomanism. Together with a few other
Greek Orthodox deputies, he disregarded the directives of the Hellenic govern-
ment and the pro-Hellenic circles in Istanbul and Smyrna. His political choices,
having supported in Greece the conservative king who lost to the liberal Veni-
zelos and in the Ottoman Empire, the CUP, which implemented policies against
the Christians, eventually made it impossible for him to settle in any of the cities
that had shaped his life: Smyrna, Athens, or Istanbul. This chapter examines the
political and ideological trajectory of one of the most controversial figures of the
period with an emphasis on the Second Constitutional Era (1908–1912) by using
his personal archive and his memoirs, published in 1913.
Figure 21.1 Carolidis as a young
professor. (Wikimedia Commons.)