Children of War

This book is a great memoir of a turkish war survivor called Hassan when the turkish is being seized by Greeks. They are Cretan origins (people from an Island called Crete) and a village called Kamish. After being razed by Nazu war planes, they leave the village on carts to a town called Chania where his 26 years of friendships with good Greek guardians and education in printing that came along, his loss of families and his love with the Greek girl called Maria rolls. The violence was still getting worse at Chania well as all over Anatolia, the land of his ancestors day by day he needs to find ways to escape it.
It is a great book that me understand how turkish people had suffered under Greek's control and also muslim's sincerity towarde humane faith in peace.

This was a heart warming book during the war regarding Turkey and Crete. Love both of these countries and also love historical books on war. Brilliant book

“If you decide to cause trouble instead of getting along with people and living in peace, then you end up getting a beating. It’s the poor wretched people who end up bearing the brunt of the mistakes made by their ancestors and those in power!” _Kiri Vladimiros_
This book was really shocking, tragic and so real in an irritating way. It is about the story of Kiri Hassan a Muslim Turk from the island of Crete ( now part of Greece) and the tragic departure of about 1.8 million people from their homeland and to what so-called "motherland" due to the treaty of lausanne 1923.
In my opinion, this book is great. For the first time instead of seeing Muslims as terrorists, you will see them as victims. What I liked most was the writer's great descriptive way as you will feel that his words and phrases are graphic, the scenes are really vivid. My favourite character was the wise, big-hearted, great Kiri Vladimiros.

Without doubt, the Greco-Turkish War of 1919 is an important part of Turkish and Greek histories.

In Turkey, I, like my peers, began to study the history of the Ottoman Empire/the Republic of Turkey at an early age. Whenever we covered WWI and the decline of the Ottoman Empire in high school (many, many years ago), we took great pride in the victory of the Turkish Great Offensive that ended the Greco-Turkish War and gave birth to the Turkish Republic.

A remarkable moment in history, for sure–one that needed to be studied and remembered. As we delved into the facts, the dates, the ramifications, and so on in high school, I realized later in college that we had not gone beyond the history textbooks.

There’s so much that is left out when we study the history of the age-old rivalry between two neighbors, Greece and Turkey in general and the Greco-Turkish War in particular. For example, I don’t remember us covering the emotional, mental and physical challenges that Greek and Turkish refugees faced during the Great Population Exchange. I don’t remember us humanizing the process nor do I remember us delving deep into the injustices the two governments had inflicted on the refugees as they were compelled to leave their home, properties, friends, lovers, and memories behind.

Children of War fills this gap in the historical record by presenting an honest narrative about war, identity and collective trauma. Penned by Turkish journalist and author Ahmet Yorulmaz (1932-2014) in 1997 and translated from the Turkish by Paula Darwish in 2019, this brief work of historical fiction sheds a light on a forgotten part of Ottoman/Turkish/Greek history: the forced migration of Cretan Muslims from Greece to Anatolia. By signing the Lausanne Peace Treaty in 1923, Turkey and Greece agreed to displace two million people (app. 23.000 of whom were Muslim Cretans) on the basis of their religion. Yorulmaz’s beautifully written story explores the ramifications of the population exchange through the perspective of a young Muslim Cretan, Hassanaki.

Hassanaki narrates his experiences, as he explores what it means to straddle two identities at a historical conjuncture characterized by the rise of nationalist trends. As the number of anti-Muslim/Turkish hate crimes increases on the Island of Crete, Hassanaki struggles to comprehend the polarizing rhetoric that divides the Cretans into “us” and “them.”

As Muslim Cretans are increasingly viewed as a threat to Greek unity, it becomes more and more challenging to maintain peace on the island. Thus, Hassanaki is forced to flee Crete, and he emigrates to Ayvalik, Turkey, a coastal city located right across the Island of Lesvos, in 1923. In Greece, Hassanaki, like other Muslims, is seen as “the Other” in his homeland. Once he is compelled to “swallow the poison of leaving our homeland behind us” and relocates to Turkey, his struggle to belong continues.

Although he never tells the reader straightforwardly, it is evident that Hassanaki writes to remember–and to reclaim his Greekness and Turkishness. We can then say that the book that we are reading, which is based on the diaries of a Cretan refugee found in Ayvalik, serves as a tool through which Hassanaki preserves his hyphenated identity.

Children of War is one of the most important translated works released in 2020. Hassanaki’s story encourages us to resist the politics of demonization that breeds polarization and fear—fear of difference and of change.

Through all the marginalized characters whose voices it recovers, from the Black Cretan couple Mullah Mavruk and his wife Cemile to Hassanaki’s lover Husniye who is of North African descent, Children of War reminds us to challenge normative assumptions about ethnicity, race and identity.

Read my full review on http://readingundertheolivetree.com/2020/06/16/from-greece-to-turkey-children-of-war-by-ahmet-yorulmaz/

This is a beautiful, haunting story, based on notebooks left by a Cretan refugee after the population exchange with Turkey. It is told in a slow and deliberate manner, building a picture of the cultures and politics that shaped one man's life.

Hassanakis is a Muslim boy who is forced to first leave his village and then later his island, after his family has been there for generations. "So what if about fifteen generations of my family lived there? In the end, the Greeks cried 'Turks out!'"

Children of War offers great insight to a time and place that is not that well known in the West. I felt the very weight of history, the sense of confusion and loss throughout this novel that I felt when visiting Kayaköy, a Turkish city abandoned as a result of that population exchange.

Paula Darwish brings this important voice to life, and I am grateful to the publisher for this advance review copy.

This novel sheds light on an historical issue that I was mostly unaware of before reading this: the fight for Crete between Turkey and Greece, and what that meant for the people there, torn and living between two cultures, languages, religions, opposing forces. It is said quite nicely here towards the end, when someone points out that all the treaties and wars and population exchanges are for the big guys on top, the leader and politicians, and none of them truly care about the little people actually living in these places, and what the big decisions mean for them.

It was quite interesting to read about this Turkish Muslim first fleeing his village with his family, then living in a culturally mixed city, having to learn Greek, but also the Quran, working and loving Greek people, but not being fully accepted by them, and also looked down at for this by his own community. It was a multi-faceted issue. However, I found that it sadly cut off too short: right as the population exchange was happening and he was traveling to Turkey to live there, his "motherland" that he had never been to before, having to assimilate back into a purely Turkish community after having lived in the mixed world that is Crete, the book is over. That seemed like a weird choice. Also, in terms of narration, this is labeled as both historical fiction and memoir, though it leans a little more towards the non-fiction in my opinion. Not a lot of plot arcs and character development and the like - which is not bad, though maybe expectations need to be adjusted.

A war fought for either selfish or any altruistic reason, is detrimental to mankind. The perils of any war is not only horrendous but changes the course of life and history, lacerating them in numerous ways for generations. When you are taking in the enormity of a major moment in history, it is easy to forget that behind the epic events lie a multiplicity of individual stories. This book portrays the exact sentiments on how war-laden displacement can influence the working of human life. Ahmet Yorulmaz’s “Children of War” in English with a translation by Paula Darwish, is the story of Hassanakis, a young Muslim boy of Turkish descent growing up on Crete during WWI.
1919. The invasion of the Greek tropes. As Muslim Cretans were increasingly viewed as a threat to Greek unity, it resulted in the forced migration of Cretan Muslims from Greece to Turkey. Thus, Hassanaki is forced to flee Crete, and he emigrates to Ayvalik, Turkey, a coastal city located right across the Island of Lesvos, in 1923. Against the backdrop of such a terrible wholesale movement of people, which upended countless centuries of ownership and connection to the land, it is all too easy to find yourself swamped by the sheer enormity and horror of the events at hand. The story contained within this book captured one of the most overlooked aspects of the cruel war – the deliquescing of identity & nationhood, and the repercussions of the population exchange that occurred. Brutal and captivating, Yorulmaz is a talented writer, skilled in conveying a complex, long conflict succinctly while remaining even-handed in tallying the atrocities inflicted on the lives of people brandished by the war. It is through this propensity that the writer can humanise the statistics of forced migration, 1.6 million displaced. The virtue of great political fiction is that even if people feel far removed from certain events, a great writer will bring to life the human stories that will gage the interest of the reader and encourage awareness. I, for one, found myself researching Greco-Turkish war after reading this novel to increase my understanding.

i really enjoyed reading this book, I liked that it wasn't a typical memoir. The story was enjoyable and I was glad to go on this journey with them.

A well written account of an unfamiliar time in history. Crete, an large Greek island close to the Turkish mainland has been a place of refuge for Turkish migrants for many centuries, and for some, their homeland as they have never lived anywhere else. Cretans and Turks had lived alongside each other respecting each others customs and religious beliefs. We relive the ethnic cleansing of these migrants through a young Muslim boy Hassanakis, whose Turkish family have lived on Crete for fifteen generations. We join them in the aftermath of WW1 when powerful countries are deciding the future of Greece and the fading Ottoman empire, the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 renegotiated the borders of the Turkish Republic. They are continually on the move to escape harm yet meet friendly Greeks and Turks who support them along their journey. Hassanakis forms a bond with a Greek employer, falls in love and creates a life for himself despite the circumstances. A interesting read.

Thanks to Netgalley, the author and Neem Tree Press publishers for an ARC in return for an honest review

This novel, is set in Crete(Greece) during the period from the late nineteenth century to the years following the First World War. It is set against a background of real historical events and is based on three notebooks left by a Cretan refugee who died in Ayvalık in Turkey in 1948. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 lead to the mass deportation of an estimated 1.8 million people. Most had little or no connection with the country they were sent to and many did not speak the language at all.

A book written in first person format about a boy called Hassan who was born in a peaceful small village in Crete (a Greek island) in the times of the Ottoman Empire where the island later broke into a civil war.

Another beautiful heart wrenching book that will often leave you in tears, it certainly had me bawling my eyes out. I loved the writing style of the author, they would first talk about some incident in the main protagonist's life and then later unwind the story of who the person they are talking about are and how they met them.

Books like these are something we all should read atleast once in our lifetime. We all should be aware of the effects of controversial speeches and emotions of the privileged that more than often leaves the common folk's lives in shackles. Eventually it's them who suffer the most and this book does a phenomenal job at highlighting such factors.

It's under these circumstances do we truly know where our morals lie, if our friends are truly ours or our love for power overpowers our human decency of respecting someone's life, or even, sparing it to say so.

There were two things that took me by surprise, one of them actually disappointed me a lot and that was calling Palestine as Israel and the other was the lifestyle of the Cretan Turks who were mUsLiMs casually engaging themselves in activities that are strictly prohibited in Islam. I did not know what I expected but I surely was taken a back given how much the book revolved around those things at times.

3.7/5🌟