Kechriotis|299The Second Constitutional Era: Laboratory of Identity for Non-Muslims
The parades and celebrations in all the urban centers of the empire following the
restoration of the constitution in July 1908, after thirty-three years of absolut-
ist rule under Sultan Abdülhamid II, are no less well known than the prisoner
releases, electoral disputes, and strikes, protests, commercial boycotts, and vio-
lence used to suppress them. The intensity of the events that unfolded within the
span of a few months was remarkable. The four years that followed, however, were
themselves a laboratory of parliamentarianism that nurtured expectations for a
better future.
All non-Muslims had to deal with some common issues at the time, such
as the compulsory military draft in the context of equal citizenship for all, the
curtailing of the autonomy their educational institutions had previously enjoyed,
and the attempts to create a national economy. Apart from these shared issues,
the Greek Orthodox also had to deal with the anti-Greek commercial boycott,
which was initially implemented against those of Hellenic nationality as a re-
sponse to the unilateral proclamation, by the autonomous polity on the island of
Crete, of the island’s annexation to the Hellenic kingdom. Soon it became clear
that it was impossible to distinguish between Ottoman and Hellenic Greeks, so
both groups, as well as Greeks of other nationalities, suffered the consequences,
starting from the summer of 1909 and reaching a climax during the Balkan Wars.
The Armenians, on the other hand, who had already suffered massacres and
devastation in Anatolia, would now experience a second round of violence, start-
ing with the notorious Adana events in April 1909, as a response to the counter-
revolutionary movement of March 31 of that year, ostensibly orchestrated by the
sultan himself against the Young Turks, because the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation was a CUP ally. The culmination of the violence against Christians
would come during World War I and its aftermath with the deportations, massa-
cres, and forced migrations that put an end to the Christian presence in Anatolia.
Yet at the beginning of this period, very little indicated that such a course
of events lay ahead. Religious leaders, from the start, did not seem to share the
enthusiasm expressed by their flocks at the proclamation of the new regime. This
reserve, however, alienated them from their people. Large parts of the Greek
Orthodox and Armenian middle class were confident that the constitution and
the new regime would promote the secularization of the millet, a term used to
describe ethnoreligious communities, which would result in the weakening of
the patriarchs’ authority. Hence, they saw in this development the opportunity
they had been seeking and supported the new regime against their patriarchs’
will. Indeed, within the new regime and with the abolition of the millet system,
the recognition of the patriarch as leader of the millet by the Ottoman state lost
ground. Since the patriarchates were no longer an integral part of the Ottoman