by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
A hundred years ago, the Zeitgeist feeling in this part of the world – and much of the West, too – was for nationalism and monolithic identity. As the decades passed, it became increasingly fashionable, at least within self-professed ‘progressive’ nations in Europe, to promote multiculturalism and the inclusion of minority identities within the nation state. Today, in the wake of the refugee crisis, Brexit and exclusionary politics, we seem to have seen a swing back to nationalism. Now more than ever we have to deal with fundamental questions: who gets to decide where people belong? What have we learned from the political lessons of the past, and how do we achieve consensus on the responsibilities of dealing with ‘other’ people? With great difficulty, it would seem.
The cynical deal between the EU and Turkey in 2016 betrayed a fear of outsiders, and an acceptance of political blackmail as a means of indulging that fear. The forced exchanges of 1923 – contrived and crazy though we now consider them – were in many ways more humane, and logical, than the deportations of today. The historian David Feldman has said that ‘History can explain to us why we are in the situation we are in today, [but] it cannot make choices for us.’34 We leave those choices to our leaders, who tend to favour instant political gratification.
There was one happy postscript to my trip to Ayvalik. In 2012, a team of Greek and Turkish founding editors opened a publishing house called Istos in Istanbul, dedicated to publishing Turkish and Greek books in their respective translations in support of the small Greek Orthodox Christian community still remaining in the city. I went to the Istos offices in Karaköy four years later, and picked up a copy of Ayvali, a graphic novel published in both Turkish and Greek, about a young man’s attempt to track down the Greek family who lived in his parents’ house in Ayvalik before the population exchange. The book, and the publishing house that produced it, are the literary embodiments of a shared attempt to understand the traumatic legacy of the exchange.
Thrace
A year after my trip to Ayvalik I went to Greece to meet the Turks still living in Western Thrace, the older generations of whom are the children of the Ottoman Muslims who were exempt from the population exchange of 1923 and allowed to stay in towns a few miles west of the Turkish border (in other words, the same generation as the cards-playing old men in Ayvalik). The most significant city in Thrace is of course Thessaloniki, which the writer Giorgos Ioannou called ‘the capital of refugees’, and which once held a Jewish majority. The historian Mark Mazower makes the case that the incoming Christian refugees in 1923, who arrived daily in their thousands between 1922 and 1923, were ‘the means by which the New Lands [territories in the north of Greece, until recently Ottoman] and their capital, Salonica, finally became Greek’.35
Like the neglected Jewish hamam that I described in the previous chapter, many signs of the city’s previous Muslim presence do not announce themselves. The Hamza Bey mosque is locked, barred and dusty, its single minaret removed after the 1923 exchange – the city’s Muslim minority is negligible, and even if it weren’t, there are ugly political reasons why the Greek government would not bother to restore and open it, although technically, after a period of being used as a cinema and shopping mall, it is now the responsibility of the Greek Ministry of Culture.
In 2014, there seemed to be an improvement – rhetorically, at least – in Thessalonikan Greek-Turkish relations when the maverick, tattoo-sporting seventy-two-year-old Yiannis Boutaris was re-elected as mayor and declared that Turks are our brothers’. However, for decades, the Turkish and Greek governments have pursued a stubbornly reciprocal policy concerning the churches and mosques in their respective jurisdictions. The Turks refuse to allow the restoration of churches and monasteries on the traditionally Christian islands off the coast of Istanbul, for example, until a mosque is built for the Muslim population in Athens. While the Greek government has legislated to build the mosque, it remains mired in bureaucratic delay. The mighty Parthenon, originally built for the goddess Athena in 43 8 BC, was converted into a mosque by the Ottomans at the end of the 15th century, shortly after they conquered Athens. They added a minaret to the tower already built by the Roman Catholics who had previously occupied the city, but by 1687, the temple was being used as a gunpowder storeroom, and the invading Venetians blew up the interior with a direct hit during their siege of the Acropolis, almost destroying the dreams of the 17th-century Ottoman travel writer, Evliya Çelebi, who had prayed only twenty years earlier that ‘a work less of human hands than of Heaven itself, should remain standing for all time’. Today, it is difficult to imagine the various incarnations – temple, church, mosque, armoury – of an incomparably majestic edifice now sadly riddled with scaffolding, cranes and tourists.
The all-important pilgrimage destination for every Turk that visits Thessaloniki is the childhood home of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, which lies in the grounds of the Turkish Consulate, a short walk uphill from the harbour. If I had not visited it, there is a real chance I might have been excommunicated from the family. Turkey’s founding father was born in 1881, in what was then Salonika. His home was a modest two-up two-down which today draws committed patriots to take exhaustive photographs of the four rooms, filled not with trinkets from his youth (these are lost to history since the child Mustafa was yet to shoot to superstardom as the pasha who led Turks to victory and independence) but with odds and ends from his adult life, mainly pilfered from the museum of Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, where he died in 1938. One glass cabinet contains his evening wear, another his collection of wooden spoons and egg cups; in the corner of one room is a spooky waxwork of his mother, clothed all in black, while Atatürk himself in both child and adult guise sits gravely in the other rooms: a Madame Tussauds solo exhibition, in situ. His school certificates adorn the walls (annoyingly for him, he was always second or occasionally third or even fourth to a boy named Ahmet Tevfik, who must have been truly brilliant). It is a monument to patriotism, to the worship of a founding father treated as a secular god.
After walking through the house, and experiencing the frisson of devotional pride which almost every Turk feels for Atatürk – even anti-nationalist, mongrel Turks like me – I popped next door to the consulate to get the stamp I needed to cross the land border into Turkey the following week. I had already tried to get one online and had been refused, but was fairly confident it was a system error that could be corrected in person. Not so: I was told by the bored civil servant in a tiny office that I was ‘not eligible’ for a visa, after years of living in Istanbul and taking my access for granted. If I wanted to appeal the decision, I would have to return to London and take it up with the Turkish Consulate there.
This information was devastating but not a complete surprise, given what I had been writing about the government in recent years as a journalist. However, the news transformed an experience which should have been a straightforward research trip into a kind of odyssey of lament. As I wandered through the Turkish neighbourhoods of Xanthi and Komotini in Western Thrace in the coming days, talking Turkish with local shopkeepers and eating Turkish food, it felt as though I was in a consolation prize-version of Turkey, just a few miles away
Xanthi lies just south of the Rhodop mountain range that borders Greece and Bulgaria; a river, bordered by plane trees, winds through the quiet town, and picnicking families sit on its banks. Around 25,000 people in the town – about a third of the population – refer to themselves as Turks’, speak Turkish and attend a school staffed by Turkish teachers, but the Greek government refer to them only as the ‘Muslim minority’. They have been here for generations, because Xanthi, in common with the rest of Western Thrace, was exempt from the 1923 population exchange. Shop signs in Xanthi are in Greek, but some also have Turkish translations underneath, in Latin script. Sometimes, Turkish words are transliterated into Greek script, an odd deciphering experience for a Turkish speaker like me with a hazy memory of ancient Greek – μπακκβά for baklava, for instance, or even weirder, Turkish names awkwardly
converted into Greek characters which cannot adequately replicate the original sounds. I spent a few minutes puzzling over the names next to the buzzers at a block of flats before finally figuring out the Greek rendition of Sabriye Delioglu. When she opened the door, she reminded me immediately of my grandmother – a brisk, cheerful woman in her early seventies with carefully combed hair, large square dark glasses and sensible shoes. She had a twinkle in her eye, and looked me up and down before giving me a bosomy hug. ‘Little Alev! Well, here you are. Let me show you our neighbourhood.’
I was put in touch with Sabriye by an elderly Turkish gentleman, Emre, who now lives in Istanbul, where he has been since the late 1970s, when he left his home town of Xanthi, his family’s home for many generations. I had met Emre in a café on the third floor of Metrocity, a vast mall in Istanbul, before I left; he was incongruous among the shoppers, immaculately dressed in a brown three-piece suit, and with a purple rinse in his white hair – a kind of Quentin Crisp figure, even down to his cut-glass British accent, which he acquired while working for the British Council as a younger man. As we drank our coffee, sometimes struggling to make ourselves heard above the tinny boom of the mall’s sound system, he told me that in the aftermath of the 1974 war in Cyprus, nationalist tensions were exacerbated in both Greece and Turkey, and the Greek authorities stepped up their existing programme of persecution against the resident Turks in Thrace. By 1978, Emre had had enough and left the beautiful Ottoman house in which he had grown up and moved to Istanbul, where he became effectively stateless. Stripped of his Greek passport once he left the country, he lived without an official nationality for a decade, before the Turkish authorities decided to grant him a passport.
‘Would you care to meet another Thracian exile?’ he asked me, leading the way in stately fashion down the escalator to an optician’s shop on the second floor. Here, I was introduced to the optician Adnan, who left Xanthi about a decade after Emre. Although Turkish like Emre, he is much more comfortable speaking Greek. The two men are at least twenty years apart in age and very different, but their shared sense of exile had made them friends. Emre, a man of leisure, often came to visit Adnan in Metrocity mall, walking serenely past the neon signs and mannequins in his smart suit and brogues to chat about the good old days.
So before I arrived in Thrace, Emre had given me some insight into the indigenous Turkish minority of the region, who are a stubborn bunch, discriminated against for decades in a low level but relentless fashion by the Greek government, who have always been wary of Turkish nationalism on Greek soil, and particularly since the 1974 Cypriot war. Turks in Greece are classed as ‘Muslim’ regardless of whether they are actually religious, to avoid recognizing that these people are Greek citizens who identify culturally, and indeed ethnically, as Turks – an impossible paradox for many.
In 1987, Emre’s friend Sabriye worked as a teacher at the minority school and tried to set up the Turkish Teachers’ Association of Xanthi, only to have it struck down by the Supreme Court in Athens on account of the word ‘Turkish’, a word which is banned when applied to official groups in Greece. All attempts at forming explicitly Turkish associations are banned to this day. In 2008, Sabriye and her fellow teachers took their appeal to the ECHR and won, only to have the ECHR’s decision rejected by the Greek government. She complained to me of other, everyday injustices – for example, until the 1990s, when a report by Helsinki Watch embarrassed the Greek government by making the situation internationally known, Turks had been denied permission to repair their houses, and encountered problems trying to set up phone lines or buy cars, forcing people like Emre to give up in disgust and move to Turkey.
Sabriye is made of sterner, or at least more stubborn, stuff and took it upon herself to give me a tour of Xanthi, starting with her old haunt the local minority school, where Roma and Pomak children learn alongside the Turkish children, ostensibly because they are all Muslim, but actually because they are miscellaneous misfits (some of the Roma are Christian, for example, and Pomaks are Slavic Muslims from the Balkan region who are usually at pains not to associate as Turks, although many people think they are). The school has a sign in the national Greek colours of blue and white, emblazoned with the Greek flag and proclaiming its minority status in Greek characters – it could not be more nationalist-stamped. Next, we walked through some historically Turkish streets in search of Emre’s house, which we eventually found: a large white building, now converted into apartments. Sabriye, her husband, Necme – a stooping, humorous man who ignored the incessant but affectionate scolding of his wife and told himself jokes when no one was listening – and Esref Bey, an old friend of Emre’s who proudly owns the only Turkish coffee shop in town, posed in front of the house while I took a photo to send to Emre (What a change!’ was his uncharacteristically brief, and rather sad, response). Later, I discovered a much older, tumble-down house higher up in the town. When I stepped inside, climbing up a curved marble staircase with missing steps, and startling a cat, I discovered that the interior boasted cracked but still-beautiful stained-glass windows, a brass chandelier dramatically lying where it had fallen decades ago, judging from the dust, and even a bed frame in the corner of one of the rooms. A mysterious tableau of loss, typical of the area.
I noticed that the elderly Turkish entourage I had acquired spoke rather halting Greek in shops, despite the fact they had lived here all their lives. There was certainly no mention of Greek friends. At one point, we piled into a car and drove off to a nearby village where a middle-aged Turkish couple, Nuri and Ayse, received us in a bucolic wooden farm house with many cups of tea and tales of school days – Ayse had been Necme’s pupil in biology class, about forty years ago. Her husband Nuri showed me photos of the protests they staged in 1981 against the seizure of their land by the Xanthian municipality, appealing for support from the central Greek government. We stayed there fifteen days, but we didn’t succeed,’ said Nuri. The government told us to leave because of Easter, and then they didn’t help us.’
The trip to Xanthi showed me that a diaspora community can be both entirely at home and entirely at odds with a host country, often simultaneously. By chance, I happened to be there on 25 March, Greek Independence Day, and watched headscarf-wearing Turkish mothers cheering as their miniskirt-wearing teenage daughters marched in a parade celebrating the beginning of the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule in 1821. The irony of the situation was not important, or perhaps apparent, to them; these mothers cared much more that their daughters had been selected for an important role in the celebrations, and were cheering as proud parents, not as Turks. The children, claimed both by the Greek state and by Turkish families, marched on, their sense of allegiance still malleable.
Politicians in both Turkey and Greece know the younger generations are there to be wooed, and the older generations to be kept sweet. In December 2017, President Erdoğan arrived with great pomp and majesty in Athens, the first visit by a Turkish president for sixty-five years, and possibly the last for another sixty-five. The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, winced visibly throughout the visit, particularly when Erdoğan referred to the borders of Greece and Turkey drawn up in the Treaty of Lausanne as a ‘mistake’ (this was uniformly reported in Turkish pro-government papers as ‘Erdoğan teaching a lesson to Tsipras’). He was soon off to the town of Komotini, a few miles east of Xanthi, which has a 50 per cent Turkish population. Here, he was finally given the rapturous welcome he craved – ‘Reis [Leader] we would die for you!’ his supporters cried, as he handed out toy dolls to the children crowding round him.
When I arrived in Komotini on a Saturday evening, the first building I passed after I parked the car was the ruin of an Ottoman synagogue built into the old city wall. A hundred yards away was a mosque. I walked on towards a noisy bar with its doors flung open, playing Turkish music – I could hear lilting, arabesque melodies from some kind of clarinet, hands tapping a drum, indistinct singing. ‘Amazing!’ I thought. ‘This could be Istanb
ul.’ Walking into the bar and hearing the Greek lyrics, I realized my mistake in prematurely “claiming" the music, which the waiter informed me was actually “Thracian”. Dolma or dolmades? Cacik or tzatziki? Oud or bozouki? Music, like food, cannot be boxed into a nationality but type ‘Thracian music’ into YouTube and read the comments under any of the videos to discover the astonishing vitriol of people – Turkish, Greek, Macedonian, Bulgarian – who claim the genre as theirs, and theirs alone.
People are also willing to box themselves in, conceptually and geographically. I had been informed there was a specific ‘Turkish quarter’ in Komotini for the town’s 50 per cent Turkish population and had been trying, without success, to find it as night drew in. When the call to prayer rung out, I followed the nearest-sounding muezzin to a small mosque, which proved to hold just two elderly men praying under strip neon lighting. Across the street was a small cemetery with tombstones topped by the Bektashi fez rather than the usual Greek Orthodox cross. I was definitely in Turkish territory, and trudged confidently up the road in search of some kind of neighbourhood hub – a backgammon café, or a central square. Soon the houses thinned out. It was hard to see in the gloom, but I became gradually aware of a rural landscape around me; the air was heavy with wood smoke, dogs bayed in the distance, mud squelched underfoot.
Soon I was walking past shacks made of corrugated iron. Little campfires broke up the darkness; huddled around them on the ground were people speaking a strange language, neither Greek nor Turkish nor Pomak: it was Romani. Clothes were hung on ramshackle fences, bedding piled up by the doors of the shacks. A refugee camp calcified into permanence. A dog rushed up to me, barking – I crooned at it, over-friendly, and it sniffed me before trotting off. Soon people were staring at my European face and city shoes; I marched blithely along, determined to invite as little interest as possible with the aid of some swagger.