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ABSTRACT
The last effective ruler of the Ottoman Empire II. Abdülhamid was completely
removed from the throne in 1909 and the State entered into wars that would constitute the last
steps of its disappearance into history. The Balkan wars, which were the builds of the
collapse, revealed demographic problems targeting social life with the population movements
they caused, as well as the lost land and material damage. In the years when the borders were
changing quickly, the states on the Balkan lands, in order to have a homogeneous structure,
almost entered the race to remove the Muslims from their homeland and to disseise their
assets. Non-Muslims who left the Ottoman lands migrated to places that belonged to Muslims
for centuries. Kalfa Village incident is an incident that Greece carried out with the
patriarchate and priests in Istanbul in order to create the perception that Muslims are
persecuting the Greeks in the international community in order to attract its citizens living in
the Ottoman lands to the country.
On the night of May 13, 1914, Greek villagers clashed with a group approaching their
village in Kalfa Village, which is now known as Mahmutbey Village of Bağcılar and was
connected to Bakırköy at that time. The Greeks, who were keeping an armed guard around
the village in order to prevent the immigrants from coming and settling in their villages,
opened fire on the group passing by and started a clash. This clash caused the death of two
Muslims and one Christian. The government made a statement regarding the incident and
announced that, according to the statements of the village priest, the headman and his
delegation, it was understood that the incident was carried out in order to provide a legitimate
basis for the migration of the people of the region. Newspapers, on the other hand, wrote this
event to their readers as a theater or comedy. Another detail is on the pages of the newspapers
is that the Greek villagers burned their villages for this purpose. Before the incident
happened, it was the village headman who organized the village people and acted in line with
the directives of the Bakırköy Metropolitan. In the investigation made after the incident, a
few people from the village told the true face of the incident in their statements.
The Kalfa Village incident took its place in history as a project of the Greeks to
disrupt the State through the Greek citizens who remained in the Ottoman lands. The Kalfa
Village incident, which is the extent of the study, is an event that emerged in the most
difficult periods of the Ottoman Empire and brought new problems to the State. While trying
to illuminate the Kalfa Village incident within the scope of this paper, the event was
evaluated by accenting the news in the newspapers of the period.