306 | The Multiple Personae of Pavlos Carolidis
Greek patriarchate’s position. They argued that non-Greek speakers should not
be allowed to use their own language in religious services, because this would
be anticanonical. Carolidis denounced this view. For him, this was not a merely
ecclesiastical problem but a national one. Despite recognizing ethnic differences
based on language, he still subsumed them to the overarching notion of the his-
toric nation. His persistence in disconnecting language from nationality should
not be a surprise as someone who coming from a Turkish-speaking background.
It has been argued that the Greek Orthodox, especially through the ideol-
ogy of Helleno-Ottomanism, achieved a beneficial compromise. This meant that,
in political terms, they identified themselves with the Ottoman state, while cul-
turally they promoted the hellenization of their millet. Their cultural and social
hegemony over their own community enabled them to achieve state recognition,
whereas their high rank in the Ottoman administration, in turn, reinforced their
position among their coreligionists. The nation, within this framework, was ini-
tially treated as a cultural and not a political category. Under pressure from the
CUP, which politicized ethnic categories, hellenization of the millet took a more
aggressive form. Even then, however, the political project of the Ottoman Politi-
cal League, the official alter ego of the most influential secret organization of the
period, the Society of Constantinople, led by the military officer Souliotis Niko-
laidis (1878–1945) and the diplomat and intellectual Ion Dragoumis (1878–1920)
and attended by other non-Muslim parliamentary deputies in addition to Greek
Orthodox, was still the preservation of the Ottoman Empire. I have argued else-
where that support for the empire coexisted with the claim for national autonomy
and also the aspiration for sharing authority with Turkish-Muslims. Thus, the
boundaries between the Ottomanist (empire oriented) and nationalist (nation-
state oriented) discourses are difficult to discern. However, in the case of figures
such as Carolidis, ethnic origin made this distinction even more complex.
Carolidis, however, is not a unique case. A wave of migration led many
among the Turkish-speaking Karamanlı population of Cappadocia to Istanbul,
Smyrna, or Mersin and eventually even further to Athens. As a result of this
migration, many families that settled in Smyrna were involved in community
administration and managed, through charitable foundations, to dominate the
whole system of community representation. In a sense, this Cappadocian dias-
pora formed a quasi bureaucracy that acquired the skills and knowledge neces-
sary for running community affairs. One could go even further and suggest that
this quasi bureaucracy, for one reason or another, did not profit from the city’s
expanding commercial activity and, thus, was excluded from the class of new
commercial elites. Therefore, to counterbalance the social impact of these elites,
this group wished to dominate the only field available—namely, community ad-
ministration.