Treaty of Sèvres
Ottoman plenipotentiaries sign the unratified Treaty of Sèvres
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗A treaty designed to dismantle Ottoman sovereignty was signed in an exhibition hall at a porcelain factory — and never entered into force.
Three signatures at the porcelain works
On 10 August 1920, the Ottoman plenipotentiaries Hâdi Pasha, Rıza Tevfik and Reşad Hâlis signed the peace treaty with the Allied and Associated Powers at Sèvres, outside Paris, in a hall at the Sèvres porcelain factory.
The document contained 433 articles. Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha took part in the negotiations and is frequently pictured with the delegation, but his signature is not among the three.
Mehmed VI's Istanbul government had concluded that it lacked the power to resist and authorised the delegation to sign.
What the text would have imposed
The signed text proposed extensive territorial changes, mandates and foreign controls, and limited Ottoman armed forces to 50,000 gendarmes and special troops plus a 700-man guard for the sultan.
Its territorial provisions were not simply direct cessions to Britain, France, Italy and Greece. They combined cessions, renunciations, League of Nations mandates, zones of influence, autonomy proposals and conditional independence arrangements, including provisions concerning Armenia and a possible autonomous or independent Kurdistan.
None of those clauses ever became operative.
Signed is not ratified
The treaty was never ratified, so it never became an operative peace settlement. Nine days after the signing the Grand National Assembly in Ankara formally rejected it and declared the Ottoman signers and other collaborators traitors.
Nor did that rejection start the war. The Turkish nationalist struggle and the Greco-Turkish fighting were already under way before 10 August 1920.
Hostilities ended with the Mudanya armistice in 1922; the Treaty of Lausanne supplied a new settlement in July 1923, and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed separately on 29 October 1923.
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