by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Orthodox Greek Christians were shipped off to mainland Greece and islands in the Aegean and Mediterranean, and Greece-born Muslims were brought in to take their places in the new Republic of Turkey. Both struggled to start new lives among strangers – in most cases, the outgoing ‘Greeks’ could speak only Turkish and the incoming Turks’ only Greek, and were treated not as long-lost returning kinsmen but as strangers (the Greek name for the incoming refugees was Mikrasiates – ‘the Asia Minors’).
The community of Sinasos in Cappadocia, in central Anatolia (modern-day Mustafapaşa) was a rare example of what happened when residents had time to plan their departure; while the convention on the population exchange was signed at Lausanne on 3 July 1923, the Greek Orthodox community of Sinasos did not leave until 2 October 1924. They used the time to gather support, both logistical and financial, from members of their community who had moved to Pera to set up a successful caviar business (and were thus exempt from the exchange, as residents of Istanbul), as well as support from relatives who had already moved to Greece. A special committee of elders arranged the journey to the port of Piraeus in Athens; before they left, they even managed to commission a couple of photographers to capture the most beloved parts of the town – including the churches and people’s individual homes – for a photo album that was shipped out to the community once they had settled in Nea Sinasos (‘New Sinasos’), on the island of Euboea, near Attica. The album – utterly useless in practical terms, but of great sentimental value – took its place among the heirlooms that the community had painstakingly transported with them.
De Bernières imagines a much more representative, shambolic departure for the Christians of Eskibahçe. Given a few hours’ notice, they hurriedly collect their transportable belongings and the bones of their ancestors from the church ossuary in a mad, tragicomic scramble. Later, when they reach their departure port of Telemessos (modern day Fethiye), ‘some Christians took a leaf or a flower or even an insect or a feather or a handful of earth because they wanted something from their native land’.
I always think of this line when I pass the sign in Athens international airport warning against bringing ‘foreign soil and plants’ into Greece because of the possibility of contamination – in 1923, the feared contamination from victims of the exchange was social. Anything ‘Turkish’ about the incoming refugees to Greece was rejected, and vice versa – hence the title of Twice a Stranger, Bruce Clark’s book on the exchange, which describes the ostracism experienced by refugees who were supposed to be coming ‘home’.
Both sets of refugees were – ironically – associated with the enemy in the wake of the bitter war of independence won by Turkey in the aftermath of the First World War. The Muslims coming from Greece to Turkey brought with them the Greek language and, in the case of the many Cretans, a kind of dance called the pentozali. Christian refugees coming from Turkey to Greece brought with them a culture that was regarded as equally alien – the Turkish language, and typically Anatolian food – hence dolmades (dolma – stuffed vine leaves), boreki (borek – savoury pastries) and kourabiedes (kurabiye – biscuits), which are staples in Greek cuisine today. There was even a new music genre – rebetiko – created in the 1920s and 1930s by the refugees who settled in shanty towns in the Piraeus, a kind of sombre oriental blues. Many of the original ‘Pireotiko’ songs were about drugs and underground life, while the more sentimental ‘Smyrneiko’ songs (from Smyrna, their melodies and instruments more closely resembling those from Asia Minor) were generally about a longing for home.
Rebetiko is still performed today in the traditional mournful manner; I heard it performed by young Greeks in tavernas in Lesbos, and got the sense it is very much a living part of Greek culture, not a dusty relic from a hundred years ago. Likewise, ‘Karagiozis and Hadjiavatis’ is the Greek version of the Ottoman shadow theatre show ‘Karagöz [‘Black Eye’] and Hacivat’, which was performed throughout the Ottoman Empire during the holy month of Ramadan, with a supporting cast of Jewish, Arab, Iranian and Greek characters and universal storylines like wife-beating and other forms of exaggerated violence. ‘Karagiozis and Hadjiavatis’ is still performed in Greece today with live music; the stories are localized, so that supporting actors include the character of Vlachos, from Northern Greece, or from the Ionian islands. In 1876, the French writer Pierre Loti predicted the enduring popularity of Karagöz and Hacivat performances in his adopted home of Istanbul: ‘The adventures and misdemeanours of His Lordship Karagueuz have entertained countless generations of Turks and there is nothing to indicate the popularity of this individual is nearing its end [. . .].’
A particular pitch of animosity has been kept alive over the centuries by governments in both Turkey and Greece, preying on old nationalist tensions, and sporadically fanned by outbreaks of xenophobic violence. In 1955, a rumour spread in Turkey that a Greek had tried to bomb Atatürk’s childhood home in Thessaloniki, and this provoked a wave of attacks on resident Greeks in Istanbul and the destruction of their property, prompting nearly 15,000 to leave the city in the next few years – other minorities were also caught up in the mania, particularly Armenians and Jews. After the war in Cyprus in 1974, mutual hatred escalated again in both Turkey and Greece, and there is an evergreen political animosity that has been fanned most recently by the refugee crisis.
Ayvalik
In March 2016, Turkey signed a deal with the European Union – known as the ‘common declaration’ – to take back Syrian refugees who had fled from Turkey to Greece, in exchange for money and negotiation talks. I was living in Istanbul at the time and headed down to Dikili, near Ayvalik on Turkey’s coastline, to cover the story for Politico Europe. It struck me that history was in some way repeating itself with this new shipment of unwanted people across the waters of the Aegean. Yet again, this misleadingly tranquil coastline, dotted with olive groves and fishing villages, was witnessing politicized human traffic on the borders of Europe.
Ayvalik – ‘The Place of Quinces’ – lies just ten nautical miles east of Lesbos, on which thousands of refugees are still held in two detention camps. It is a sleepy harbour town of vague nostalgia and faded beauty, of crumbling villas converted into cheap hotels, and abandoned churches converted into mosques or automobile museums – the adjacent island of Cunda, accessible via a bridge from Ayvalik, is given over to tourism, and several high-profile industrialists have built discreet holiday homes on its shores.
Until 1922, Ayvalik was an entirely Greek Orthodox town in the heterogeneous hotchpotch of the Ottoman Empire; a hive of trade and commerce, bustling with merchants, olive farmers and black-robed priests. All the Christians who once lived there were either killed in the last years of Turkey’s War of Independence (19181922) or shipped off to mainland Greece in 1923, to be replaced by Muslim Ottomans, many of them from nearby Lesbos. The elder generations among the imported Muslims sit playing backgammon under slowly turning fans in seafront cafés today: weather-beaten but upright, dignified men chatting quietly in a mixture of Turkish and a Greek dialect learned from their parents, who were brought here from the Greek island of Crete (Turkish ‘Girit’) in 1923. The dialect is Cretan, or ‘Giritli’ as the Turks call it – a rougher version of standard Greek, which marks its speakers as non-natives in Turkey.
At 5pm every Friday and Sunday, to mark the beginning and end of the weekend, the Ayvalik Municipality plays the Turkish national anthem on loudspeakers in the town square. As the first few bars of the Istiklal Marşi (Independence March) ring out, everyone stops what they are doing and stands in complete silence for the duration of the recording. Most of the fishermen living here today are ultraloyal followers of the Turkish Republic’s secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, despite (indeed, because of) their Greek roots: they are steeped in the uniquely fierce nationalism of an adopted state, a nationalism which grows only stronger as the generations pass and the memories of displacement fade.
Ayvalik’s current locals may be patriotic, but they are n
ot religious; the call to prayer from Cunda’s single mosque is inaudible, and the only covered women are day-tripping tourists from the mainland. A striking number of men sport Atatürk’s distinctive signature as a tattoo, generally on the inner forearm. The newspapers in the seafront cafés are all copies ofHurriyet or Sözcü, Turkey’s traditionally liberal dailies (although less outspoken by the day), and the blue eyes of the old men who read them signal an obviously different ethnic make-up to Turks from further east in Anatolia – indeed, it is debatable how clear the difference is between ‘Greeks’ and ‘Turks’ on either side of the Aegean, both from a cultural and genetic point of view. The inhabitants of Ayvalik are not unaware of this vague interweaving themselves, particularly the younger generations, who can look back at their family history with more detachment than those who remember traumatic details of the exchange, or heard it directly from their parents.
Murat is a tour operator in his forties who ferries Turkish tourists to the Greek islands in the summer season on a little boat. He speaks good Greek, not because his family still speak it but because he needs it for work. His pale blue eyes squint against the sun in a face wreathed in premature wrinkles.
‘Look into my eyes and tell me – am I a Turk?’ he demands rhetorically. ‘No way.’
Murat’s parents’ generation would not dream of uttering such a statement – the incoming Muslims in 1923, who had lived in Greece for generations, were told that they were Turks now, coming ‘home’ to live among their brothers. Their status as refugees – people who had left their homes, most of their possessions, neighbours and friends, and arrived in a strange place where they had difficulty speaking the language – was officially swept aside as a matter of mere practicality, and socially, they were not particularly welcome. These Greek-born Muslim Ottomans were Turks now, expected to be unquestioningly proud of their identity and new home.
The terms of their ‘return’ had been fiercely negotiated in Lausanne between Allied representatives and envoys of Atatürk – including his right-hand man Ismet Pasha, who exaggerated his slight deafness whenever convenient. The Treaty was signed on 30 January 1923, formalising, extending and making compulsory an exodus that had already started – hundreds of thousands of Christians, primarily Orthodox Greeks, had already fled Anatolia since autumn 1922. In 1914, the number of Christians in the Ottoman Empire was around 6 million, or 23 per cent of the population. By 1924, after forced marches, massacres, voluntary exodus and the compulsory exchange, as well as the loss of vast swathes of the empire’s territories, the Christian population was reduced to 700,000. Not everyone involved in the creation of the Republic of Turkey was in favour of this drastic reduction in the numbers of valued Christian members of society. The feminist writer Halide Edip, who collaborated with the Young Turks during the First World War by running ‘Turkification schools’ for Armenian orphans, and who was later accused of treason by Atatürk’s government and fled from Turkey to Europe in 1926, wrote in her memoirs of her regret about the population exchange:
‘A great number of the Christian minority, mostly Greek and some Armenian, spoke only Turkish and looked very Turkish. It was a mistake, I believe, and not good policy to let them enter into the exchange in the Lausanne Conference. If a Turkish church had been recognized independently of the Greek and Armenian churches, there were enough conscious Christian Turks, and a very valuable element too, who would have stayed in Turkey.’
‘Christian Turks’ would have sounded bizarre at the time, but in fact, there was a self-styled Turkish Orthodox Church, which has never been recognized, and has a tiny congregation (Sunday services today in Istanbul are often attended only by the priest and his mother). It was founded in 1922 in Kayseri, central Anatolia, by Papa Eftim (grandfather of the current priest, Papa Eftim IV), a Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christian who indignantly rejected the conflation of Christian identity and Greekness. His church went on to become one of the most aggressively nationalist institutions in the Republic; his granddaughter was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2013 for her involvement in the infamous Ergenekon movement allegedly directed by secularist Turkish army generals in the 1990s and early 2000s. Papa Eftim was so incensed by the continued presence of the Greek Orthodox Christians in Istanbul in the 1920s that he twice besieged the Greek Orthodox patriarchate with a mob of supporters, almost leading to the emergency removal of that patriarchate from its 1,500-year-old seat in Istanbul to Mount Athos when the patriarch himself was injured. Eftim considered himself the model Turkish citizen, oddly blind to the incompatibility of Turkish Republicanism and Christianity; crucially he and his maverick church had the full backing of Atatürk, who was happy to take all the Turkish nationalist volunteers he could get.
Atatürk himself certainly believed that the population exchange was ideologically important on the grounds that his new Republic must be rid of ‘un-Turkish’ elements. The 1923 Lausanne negotiation came after four years of war, during which his soldiers managed to fight off Allied forces – primarily Greek – and save at least the Anatolian heartland of the previously vast Ottoman Empire to form the officially secularist Republic of Turkey, populated overwhelmingly by Muslims. In this barely there but proud new nation state, there was no room for the foreignness that refugees inevitably brought with them, only state-branded Turkishness. The new motto of this country was a kind of compulsory pride in a freshly minted identity, best exemplified by the famous slogan: Ne Mutlu Türküm Diyene – ‘How happy is the one who calls himself a Turk’ – the words written on the statue of Atatürk that was vandalized by a Kurd in the town of Batman in 2013.
While brutal, the 1923 Turkey-Greece exchange had both rhyme and reason, at least according to the logic of the time. In the early 20th century, newly formed nations were intended to be religiously uniform and ethnically uncomplicated, united and strong. The motley remnants of the polyethnic Ottoman Empire in 1923 were anything but that. The apparently obvious solution seemed to be to cleanse these new states of ‘unsuitable’ minorities, resulting in a Turkey purged of the Christians who had lived there for centuries, and a Greece purged of the Muslims who had lived there almost as long. However misguided or wrong we may consider such a ruthless uprooting today, the infamous population exchange of 1923 was at least partly conducted in a constructive spirit, unlike the deportations of 2016.
Ayvalik is one of the harbours from which tens of thousands of Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees have departed under cover of night since the war in Syria broke out in 2011, hoping to reach Greece undetected – and alive. It is also near the harbour where these same refugees have been brought back under the terms of the EU-Turkey deal; in return for receiving these ‘irregular’ migrants, Turkey negotiated for billions of euros of aid, visa-free travel in the Schengen area and renewed EU negotiations. A month after the deal was signed, Pope Francis visited Lesbos and took twelve Syrians away with him on his papal plane in a symbolic gesture of rebuke to European governments who have failed to welcome refugees through their borders (disappointingly, these Syrians do not live in the Vatican but in refuge centres in Rome).
What of the local reaction? Some Greeks who had seen their livelihoods drop dramatically with the corresponding demise of tourism might have been forgiven for resenting the incoming refugees. But I witnessed great kindness from the residents of Lesbos, who have helped to feed and clothe the refugees and said they were inspired to act by the knowledge they are of refugee stock themselves – around 60 per cent of the 90,000 current residents of Lesbos are descended from Christians deported from Turkey in 1923. Near the eastern shore of Lesbos, I visited a small and ramshackle village called Nees Kidonies – ‘New Place of the Quinces’ (kidonies or ayva is the Greek for quince) or ‘New Ayvalik’. High up on a hill, its view is of the original Ayvalik clearly visible across the bay.
Today, the Cunda community of Cunda island in Ayvalik is peaceful and close-knit. Its members talk of the past when prompted, but do not spontaneously offer their family histories �
� some wounds are still too fresh, and Turkish nationalism allows only so much deviation from a central story of unity and cohesion. Many of the older generations congregate every day in Taş Kahve (Stone Café), an old high-ceilinged café on the seafront. An ancient stove sits in the middle of the café and swallows nest all around the eaves, producing a shrill cacophony. Elderly men with knitted waistcoats and carefully parted strands of grey hair sit playing Yamk (‘Burnt’), their favourite card game, or backgammon all day long, drinking çay and coffee. Occasionally they exchange a few words in Cretan Greek, before lapsing back into Turkish.
Hüsnü Bey, a retired state accountant in his early eighties, used to have a special green passport for state employees which granted him visa-free travel to Greece. He made a habit of popping over to Lesbos, and twelve years ago he visited Crete to find the birthplace of his parents. He explains with gentle regret that now he’s retired, he’s lost the right to a green passport. He speaks in the Cretan dialect with his friends, all children of Muslim Ottomans who arrived in 1923 from Crete and spoke it to their children in turn. One of the men sitting playing cards with Hüsnü Bey does not feel comfortable speaking Turkish – he can understand it, but prefers to speak in Greek. Another is the opposite – Hüsnü speaks to him in Greek, and he answers in Turkish. Bilgin Bey, the owner of the café next to Taş Kahve, is a second-generation Cunda resident, one generation younger than the old Yanik-playing men and yet he tells me he spoke Greek with his Cretan-born grandparents; on his first day in school, when the teacher pointed to a picture of bread, he automatically said its Greek name.