DBWI: What if the Hagia Sophia hadn't been restored?

JJohnson

Banned
It might be weird to think of today, but what if the Greeks hadn't restored the Hagia Sophia as the main church in their capital city of Constantinople? What would it be today? Where do you think the Greeks would have their capital if they hadn't gotten Constantinople back after about 400 or so years? Smyrna is probably the least likely...
 
Wait what? How would Smyrna be likely? Smyrna is like half Greek at most and is surrounded on all sides by Turkish regions. They only control the place because they where absurdly lucky against the Turks. No the most likely capitals are Athens and Thessalonika, the two biggest cities that aren't completely indefensible. Mount Athos is probably going to end up the primary holy place in Orthodoxy too.
 
Wait what? How would Smyrna be likely? Smyrna is like half Greek at most and is surrounded on all sides by Turkish regions. They only control the place because they where absurdly lucky against the Turks. No the most likely capitals are Athens and Thessalonika, the two biggest cities that aren't completely indefensible. Mount Athos is probably going to end up the primary holy place in Orthodoxy too.

He said Smyrna is probably the least likely. I agree, Athens is probably the most likely.
 

The Sandman

Banned
Well, given that this means they wouldn't have taken Thrace and the Anatolian coastline, they probably wouldn't have spent the next few decades bleeding away international goodwill and utterly enraging the Turks.

So, you know, there might still be a Greek capital today, rather than the Italo-Turkish partition of their country after the Great Balkan War.
 
Well, given that this means they wouldn't have taken Thrace and the Anatolian coastline, they probably wouldn't have spent the next few decades bleeding away international goodwill and utterly enraging the Turks.

So, you know, there might still be a Greek capital today, rather than the Italo-Turkish partition of their country after the Great Balkan War.

Two of my great-great uncles, and two great-great aunts were all Greek emigrants to the U.S. not long after that conflict ended. They used to tell all sorts of horror stories about the Turkish occupation when my mother was growing up in New Jersey.....

At least these days, though, Greece is doing surprisingly well as a self-governing satellite within the Italian orbit; ironically enough, by the way, the Italians and the Turks ended up fighting each other in the Global War, and the Ottomans got their asses kicked so badly that they never got back up again(Most of the former Ottoman Empire, including the former "Syriac Autonomous Region" has been a shithole ever since the Civil War ended in 1979, with the exception of the Anatolian Republic and a few other places. Smyrna, btw, sits in the south of the A.R. and is probably one of the most well-kept cities in the Near East outside Constantinople and Tehran; though they're kinda mediocre compared to Paris, Montreal, Buenos Aires and Tokyo). And of course, the Turkish nationalists blamed the Armenians and the Greeks for everything.
 
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