Today’s Zaman, Turkey
May 5 2013
Memories of Turkish-Greek population transfer fade
5 May 2013 /NOAH BLASER, Ä°STANBUL
With a carefree whistle on his lips, Fatih Ã-zkadılar sits on a park
bench one evening in the town of Çatalca, watching the last rays of
sunlight flitting through the trees above him.
Across the tiny park from where Fatih sits is the Population Exchange
Museum, a defiant neoclassical outpost of red brick amid Çatalca’s
rambling concrete apartment blocks. `You’re too late — by this time
they’re all gone,’ he says of the museum curators and researchers who
left earlier in the day for a conference in Greece.
He might as well be talking about the Greek refugees who made their
way from this insular Thracian town 90 years ago this month, when an
agreement by Greece and the new government of Turkey kicked off one of
the most momentous demographic and cultural transformations in
Mediterranean history. In the wake of a bitter ethnic war in 1922 that
destroyed the multicultural fabric of the Ottoman Aegean — a place
where Muslims, Christians and Jews had for centuries lived in relative
harmony — 400,000 Muslim Turks and 1.2 million Christian Greek and
Armenians were relocated from their homes to their respective `home
nations.’
`That’s another century,’ says Ã-zkadılar. `There’s not really anyone
around here now who can talk about that kind of thing.’ A decade ago,
a handful of octogenarians with vivid memories of the population
exchange still lived to pass on the bitter memories of war,
relocation, loss and integration. But 90 years after the population
exchanges that began on May 1, 1923, the direct link those survivors
provided to the past is gone, and memories of the Aegean that once was
are slipping fast.
Inside the museum, display cases in a long hallway are cluttered with
photographs of Greek and Turkish families gathered in sober poses for
weddings, circumcisions, funerals — mementos of the past made
heartbreaking by the thought that they were discarded by the displaced
or, perhaps, taken along as keepsakes by refugees departing for an
unknown land.
Outside, Fatih points to a statue in front of the museum, a lonely
slab of aircraft aluminum that bears the visage of Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk, Turkey’s founder and victorious general of the 1922 war
between a rebel Turkish army and the invading Greek military. `Our
lost refugees are forever in the country’s memory,’ an inscription
reads. Just below, a hole cut in the shape of a train of beleaguered
refugees suggests those Muslims who never made it to Turkish shores.
Few here might suggest the statue be read in the other way, that the
missing silhouette might also suggest the departed Greek families who
once sent their children to school in the building that today houses
the museum, the families that lived side by side with the town’s
oldest Muslim families until the last days of Ottoman rule. As Fatih
explains, the Greeks overestimated their strength, Turkey won its
right to independence in a baptism of gunfire, and when the smoke
cleared, both sides agreed that Greeks could no longer live in
Anatolia with Turks, and Turks could no longer do likewise in the
Peloponnese or today’s Greek islands. `After the war, what other
solution could there have been?’ Fatih asks.
But for those Turks who can retell stories of their own family’s
displacement from Greece, the `unthinkable’ memory of a multicultural
Anatolia seems less strange. `We were from Salonika,’ says
shaky-handed museum attendant Kadir, who says his grandfather was
deported and resettled to this town in the summer of 1923. `For time
to time, my father would talk about the Greeks like they were still
his neighbors, still his close friends. He belonged to that
community.’ Kadir’s hazy childhood memories recall an encounter this
correspondent had in the summer of 2012 with the descendant of a
refugee from Salonika, Mehmet Karademir.’ How could we hate [Greeks]
for living through the same catastrophe?’ We lost our homes in Greece,
they lost them in Turkey. We switched places. We know their pain,’ he
said on one hot summer day in the Aegean city of Ä°zmir.
The surprising closeness shared by neighbors of different faiths in
the Aegean of Ottoman days is difficult to understand today. Even
after the formal independence of Greece in 1830, Greek traders and
farmers preferred the Ottoman ports of Smyrna (Ä°zmir), Salonika and
Ä°stanbul over backwater Athens. Even when Salonika passed to Greek
hands in 1912, Turks were among the wealthiest traders in the port.
The closeness is well recounted by Turkish scholar ReÅ?at Kasaba, who
details in his paper `Ä°zmir 1922: A Port City Unravels’ the surprising
lengths Muslims and Christians often went to in order to protect one
another during the years of successive Greek and Turkish occupations.
Greek families hid Turkish neighbors when the Greek army advanced into
Anatolia in 1920. Turkish families did the same when fortunes reversed
in 1922. The closeness was a result of centuries of mutual
interaction, a careful synthesis that was destroyed as the Greek army
and Anatolian Turkish resisters thought little of upsetting ethnic
ties amid the chaos of war. Of course, sporadic ethnic violence and
individuals eager to cash in on a neighbor’s misfortune can also be
found in memories of the conflict, points out Bruce Clark in his book
on the exchanges, `Twice a Stranger.’ But, as he argues, the synthesis
was surprisingly robust before it came crashing down.
Those ties were ultimately made impossible by the ethnic nationalism
that swept the Ottoman Empire in its death throes, but as Kasaba
writes, the ambiguity of language, race, and religion was startling
before the empire was destroyed. In `Ä°zmir 1922,’ he writes: `In
Anatolia there were Armenian-speaking Greeks who used Greek letters to
write Armenian; in Istanbul, there were Greek-speaking Jews who used
the Hebrew. Turkish novelist Halit Ziya attended a Catholic school
that was established by Spanish priests, where he was assigned a
geography book written in Turkish with Armenian letters.’
Who stayed and who went in the population exchanges was ultimately
decided by religion, so vague was the idea of `ethnic Turkishness’ or
`Greekness’ even in 1922. In `Twice a Stranger,’ Clark memorably
writes that Greek Orthodox refugees from Anatolia, who often spoke
more Turkish than Greek, were accused by mainlander Greeks of being
`baptized in yogurt,’ while the Muslims from Athens, Salonika and
Crete were branded `infidels’ for their unsteady Turkish accents or,
in some cases, their inability to speak Turkish. Greek Turkish and
Armenian, the learned families in cosmopolitan port cities like
Salonika and Smyrna — which was tragically burned to the ground by
Turkish troops at the end of the war — were not only disinherited of
their fortunes when they arrived penniless in their new nations. They
were also robbed of the multilingual world of French, Italian, English
and Greek, which had thrived just years before.
National memory on both sides of the Aegean takes little of this
account in respective narratives of victimhood and recrimination.
Though relations between the two states are cordial today, the same
narrative still survives. On a visit last year to Ä°zmir to see the
90th anniversary of the Turkish army’s retaking of the city from the
Greeks, few remembered the fire that swallowed the city and killed
tens of thousands of Greeks and Turks. `They left as they came!’
exclaimed one ultra-nationalist publication of the hasty, desperate
retreat of Greek soldiers and civilians alike. Across the sea, burned
Smyrna is seen as a `lost Greek city.’ In the Greek imagination, there
is little room for the large Muslim and Jewish populations that called
Smryna home alongside Greeks.
`You can’t imagine the past; it was a time without cellphones or TV,’
says a half-asleep Fatih as the sun finally disappears. But that might
not have been what was most different a century ago. Rather, maybe it
was the ambiguity, the variety and cosmopolitanism that would confuse
those who think in today’s terms of `one nation, one race.’
The world which vanished 90 years ago won’t ever rise again except in
museum display cases. But as immigrants from Africa, the Middle East
and Asia increasingly flood Greece and Turkey both, multiculturalism
is no longer a relic of the vanished past. It’s the future, too.
From: A. Papazian