Ottoman Odyssey

by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)

  The rows of shacks became denser, the tracks between them busier, the looks more intent. Too late to turn back. I was walking aimlessly, with an increasingly false posture of confidence. Suddenly, around a corner: three women and three men sitting on plastic chairs by a fire, scribbling on pieces of paper on their laps – an adult literacy class perhaps, or a covert political society? The scene had a medieval aspect, all flickering firelight and secrecy.

  They looked up in astonishment as I passed. ‘Yassou,’ said one of the men, who was wearing a smart beige waistcoat entirely at odds with his surroundings.’Merhaba.’ I returned his greeting in Turkish, embarrassed by my inadequate Greek. The looks of astonishment deepened.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked one of the women, continuing my Turkish.

  ‘Oh, just . . . walking,’ I replied lamely. ‘I think I may be lost.’

  You’re definitely lost,’ said the man who’d first spoken. I noticed he had a dapper, square moustache. You are in the most dangerous ghetto of Komotini.’

  We were equally and mutually intrigued, the mysterious scribes and I. They talked together in Romani, throwing the occasional glance in my direction, as I tried to see what they were writing. One of the women, who had a grubby child clinging to her knee, noticed me looking.

  We are writing to President Putin,’ she said. We are asking him please to allow our brothers into Russia.’

  ‘Your brothers?’

  ‘We are the witnesses of Jehovah.’

  This was so unexpected, particularly in Turkish phrasing, that I assumed I had misheard.

  ‘There are only ten of us here but we are eight million brothers across the world, and we are all writing to President Putin today.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said, feeling like Alice. ‘I hope he listens.’

  ‘Drugs, knives, there are very bad people here,’ interjected the dapper man, gesturing at the nearby shacks. ‘You cannot continue alone. You know who sent you to us?’ He pointed a grave finger to the sky before allowing a beatific smile to spread across his face.

  ‘God. He knew we would help you.’

  As the male members of the group assembled to form my escort out of the ghetto, one of the women handed me some leaflets in Turkish. I gave them a polite glance before putting them in my bag – the usual colourful pictures of ecstatic-looking families under quasi-philosophical titles: ‘In Hard Times, What Gives Us Comfort?’ I looked back at the beaming faces watching me in the flickering light of the fire. This was too surreal.

  ‘There are only ten of us here,’ the lady repeated, proudly. ‘But we are strong. God sent you, there is no doubt.’

  The men took me through a passageway which opened into a makeshift shop selling everything from lentils to fizzy drinks. We were greeted by the owner (‘my uncle’, said the dapper man), who waved us through the front with the air of a speakeasy proprietor seeing off trusted customers. We emerged into the thick of the ghetto on the other side, and soon children were following us through the muddy tracks, as though I were the Pied Piper.

  My hosts patiently answered my questions as we walked – they spoke Turkish because they had attended the local minority school, where it was taught; they also picked up some English from satellite TV. Now their children attended the same minority school but the quality of education was poor, and the Roma parents had higher ambitions: the Greek public school, where their children would be treated ‘as the lowest’ but would receive a better education. No, they were not persecuted by the other Roma, even the Muslims. There were about a hundred Jehovah’s Witnesses in the whole of Komotini, Greeks and Roma combined. They supported the Panathenaic football club, based in Athens. They wished me very well.

  As we parted near the centre of town, the adults and then the children solemnly shook my hand, one by one.

  ‘Remember, God sent you,’ said the dapper man. ‘Don’t forget us.’

  Not likely. The irony of this conversation was only really relevant to an outsider: these men self-identified primarily as Jehovah’s Witnesses, then as Roma, but their most enthusiastic, tribal instinct was for an Athenian football team they had only ever seen on a television screen. Their overlapping layers of identity were just the way things were, not a contradiction. At the risk of manufacturing a Hollywood ending to my own story, perhaps their attitude helped me come to terms a bit with my predicament: I can be ‘of’ Turkey while I am not in it. Geography does not confer identity. It makes us homesick, but it does not define us.

  Back in Athens, I met Christos Iliadis, a young Greek political scientist who wrote his PhD on the Greek government’s efforts, from 1945 until the late 1960s, to combat ‘Turkishness’ in Western Thrace. His thesis was, as PhDs go, rather exciting – it was based on a secret government archive declassified in 2002, and shut down a few years after Christos and a few others wrote about it; the archived records described the ‘administrative harassment with repressive character’ by the Greek government of the Turks.

  Christos asked me to meet him outside his office just off Syntagma Square, most recently famous for the violent anti-austerity rallies of 2010–11. He corroborated much of what Sabriye and her friends told me in Xanthi, and emphasized that the animosity of the Greek government towards the Turkish minority had been particularly obvious since the 1960s. The timing was a reaction to the efforts of the Turkish government to expel Greeks from Turkey in 1964 (a decade after the infamous anti-Greek race riots of 1955 in Istanbul). Christos discovered some untoward – indeed, arguably illegal – behaviour from the Greek government in the briefly declassified documents he used for his PhD: ‘From the late fifties until the seventies – and probably later – the Greek state secretly funded Islamic conservatives in Thrace because they were anti-Turkish and anti-modern – in other words, not in line with the Kemalist (modern Turkish nationalist) agenda. Plus, they have always encouraged non-Turkish Muslim minorities, for example Pomaks and even Egyptians.’

  Christos described to me a kind of secret Cold War in Thrace, which was at its height in the 1960s, between the Greek and the Turkish propaganda mechanisms.

  ‘Between 1959 and 1969 a secret council was organized by the Greek foreign ministry. Its archive was found in Kavala [a city near Komotini]. Its members were heads of regional office – deputies of local police, military and intelligence units – and their job was to both implement and formulate minority policy in the region. Perhaps there were similar Turkish councils – who knows?’

  The mutual animosity and fiercely reciprocal treatment of the Turks in Greece and the Greeks in Turkey has continued for decades, with little outbreaks of violence, such as the riots in Komotini against the Turkish minority in 1989.

  ‘The reciprocity was a kind of hostage situation,’ as Christos put it. ‘In the sixties and seventies Greece was copying Turkish administrative efforts against Greeks (of Istanbul).’

  Both countries were particularly suspicious of the minority schools in their respective countries. In 1965, the Turkish government downgraded the legal status of Greek minority schools in Istanbul and stopped allowing graduates of Greek schools to teach. Christos found top-secret letters sent between the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the chief inspector of minority schools in Greece which agreed on reciprocal measures that would ‘relieve Greek authorities from spying on these fanatic janissaries [meaning Turkish teachers trained in Turkey before being sent to Greece]’. The tit-for-tat protocol regarding mosques in Greece and monasteries in Turkey shows that reciprocity has endured, half a century on.

  Thracian Turks are active in Greek politics, which is not as surprising as it might initially seem since they have an assured voting base of nearly 50 per cent in towns like Komotini, for example. There are four minority MPs in the Greek parliament today, including the MP for Xanthi. There is also a Turkish consul in Komotini in a secret battle with the Greek authorities for local hegemony, according to Christos. ‘The Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs has an office called the ‘Office of C
ultural Affairs’ in Komotini – it tries to counterbalance the influence of the Turkish consulate there, which also operates to some extent in secrecy.’

  In 1991, the Greek government decided to appoint local muftis (Islamic community leaders) in Thrace before they could be elected by the local Turkish community, a pre-emptive measure based on the argument that muftis are also judges and, technically, cannot be elected – but the real reason was that muftis had become ‘envoys of Kemalism’. When I asked Christos whether the Turkish community objected to this interference, he smiled.

  With the guidance of the local Turkish consul, they [the local Turkish community] just elect unofficial muftis who are de facto community leaders – everyone ignores the Greek government’s appointees.’

  This attitude mirrored what I had noticed among Sabriye and her friends in Xanthi – a kind of defiance against the status quo. It was clear to me that Sabriye would rather stay in Xanthi and fight the authorities than leave for Turkey; when I ask her why she didn’t follow her friend Emre’s example, she smiles and shrugs. This is our home.’

  Aegean Turks

  It was only when I started researching this book that I fully realized the ripple effects of the population exchange in both Greece and Turkey today. Almost every Greek and Turk has a family member who arrived after 1923, some dramatic story of loss and love. Christos’ grandparents were refugees from Asia Minor to Kavala (Greek Thrace), for example. Electra, a Greek friend of mine, has grandparents from Cappadocia in central Anatolia on one side, and from Istanbul on the other. Many Turks now living in Turkey have relatives who came from Crete, where there was a huge Muslim population. Selin Girit, the BBC’s Turkey correspondent, is literally called ‘Crete’ – an obvious clue to her heritage, since Atatürk only introduced surnames in Turkey in 1934, and people often chose their own based on a detail that vaguely distinguished them (for example, ‘Ahmet Son of the Rice Seller’, ‘Sinan Blond-Beard’ – or their place of birth).

  My mother told me about a distant relative of ours from Crete who hardly spoke any Turkish but did have an absurdly romantic life story

  ‘Her husband – your grandmother’s cousin – was enlisted into the British army during the Second World War [Cyprus was – in British eyes at least – a Crown Colony from 1914 until 1960]. In 1941, he was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war in a camp in Crete, which was occupied by Germans until 1945. When he was in the camp he fell in love with this Cretan girl, who came to give him food through the fence. He married her when he was liberated and brought her to Cyprus – she cried every day wanting to go back to her family.’

  Being my mother, she added a few gratuitous details: ‘He was very eccentric, it was said that his experiences in the camp made him go mad. I remember he dyed his grey moustache with black shoe polish, which ran when he sweated – like Aschenbach in Death in Venice. I remember that very well.’

  My friend Ziya the travel agent, who told me the story of his grandmother’s flight from Macedonia in 1912, also told me stories connected to the Cretan side of the family – more disturbing because of the relative proximity of Turkey’s more recent war with Greece.

  ‘My mother’s family were wealthy business owners from Crete. I have no doubt that my family used to be Christian, before they came to Izmir in 1923. Somewhere along the way, they were converted. We have never been conservative Muslims.’

  Ziya confirms something I have always assumed – that when people got converted they often practised a mild version of the religion, especially in the frequent cases when the conversion was for pragmatic reasons of avoiding non-Muslim taxes.

  Ziya continued: ‘I have a friend from Izmir, and her grandmother’s nipples were cut out by the Greek soldiers and she was raped, sometime between 15 May 1919 [when Greeks occupied Izmir] and Sept 1922 [when Atatürk routed the Greeks from Izmir]. This was a story that was well known in the family. People like my great-grandmother claimed they didn’t remember details of that period but it’s because they didn’t want to remember. They wanted those painful memories to fade, not to be passed on to the new generations. I could never persuade my grandmother to go back to Crete – she hated that idea. She was afraid to do so.’

  On every Greek island of the Aegean, and across much of mainland Greece, one can see the legacy of the Ottomans – there is always at least one mosque, hamam or crumbling stately villa built for the local Ottoman governor. Sometimes place names remain, like the Karatepe (‘Black Hill’) area of Lesbos, where there is now a camp holding around 1,500 refugees. On Kos, the two Ottoman mosques which had stood for 400 years collapsed in an earthquake shortly before I visited in August 2017, leaving alarming piles of rubble cordoned off with tape. That evening, looking for a good restaurant in the main town of Kos, I was surprised to discover Google’s recommendation, ‘Hasan’s Taverna’, in a suburb called Platani. Hasan was, as his name suggested, an ethnic Turk, and here were Turkish restaurants aplenty, people talking Turkish in the street, even a functioning mosque. These Turks – about 1,700 of them, I later found out – were definitely not recent immigrants.

  It was difficult to enquire about this without sounding rude – ‘Excuse me, why are you here?’ Then I remembered that the Dodecanese islands were under Italian occupation in 1923 (in fact, from 1911, when Italy won the islands from the Ottomans, until after Italy lost the war in 1943 and handed them to the Greeks). So today’s Turks in Kos were never involved in the population exchange; they have been there since the 16th century, still in a cocooned community, much like the even larger Turkish community in Rhodes – the other major island of the Dodecanese.

  Individual families did, however, manage to evade the exchange in territories where it was enforced. In 2012 I met an elderly couple in a village near Trabzon, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. They spoke to each other in Greek, and were, clearly, Greek (the old woman’s Turkish was ropey, and she was constantly being scolded by her husband for reverting to Greek) but they took pains to pretend otherwise. There was a large carpet with Atatürk’s face on it hanging on the wall, and even a mescid (Muslim prayer room) attached to the house. Somehow, these people’s parents had managed to remain in Turkey by appearing as Turkish as it is possible to be, but I would never be told the whole story, of course.

  Eighteen months after I reported on the refugees returned to Turkey under the 2016 EU deal, I found myself just across the tiny stretch of water from Ayvalik, this time on the Greek island of Lesbos – just south of ‘New Ayvalik’, in fact. Because of my entry ban to Turkey, I could not go back to Ayvalik, but I could see it, easily – could even pick out individual houses – from the beach near my house. For the first time, I fully understood how heartbreaking it must have been for the Christians taken from Ayvalik to Lesbos to see their old hometown every day, and not to be able to reach it again.

  In another instance of strange historical symmetry, the purge conducted by Erdoğan’s government against Turks in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt has led to huge numbers of middleclass Turks emigrating to Greece, where they have been welcomed with open arms, largely on account of an economy in crisis. In return for paying upwards of 250,000 euros on property, big spending Turks get a ‘golden visa’ which gives them citizen-like status and the opportunity to send their children to Greek schools rather than Erdoğan’s increasingly poor Imam Hatip (Koranic) schools. The historical twist is that many of these Turks have settled in the district of New Smyrna in Athens, named after the emigrant Greeks from Smyrna (modern Izmir) who made it their new home in 1922.

  Granny Şifa

  At the end of my Aegean travels, I went to Cyprus to visit the grave of my grandmother in the north of the island. Because of my entry ban to Turkey, I could not fly to Ercan, the airport in the north, which requires stopping in Istanbul. Instead, I flew to Larnaca in the south and took a bus up to Nicosia (Lefkoşa in Turkish and Lefkosia in Greek), the capital divided by the 1974 border. Crossing that border was an emotional challenge; I wa
s struck by the irony that, as a child, I had never been allowed to cross from the north to the south, which I thought of as an apocalyptic land filled with unknown monsters. The border was a protection. Now, as an adult, I was in the south for the first time in my life, worried about crossing to the north, no longer a place of childhood sunbeams but a place of vague political hostility because it was under Turkish control.

  The pedestrian border in Nicosia is busy, right in the middle of town, straddling a street deserted abruptly during the war in 1974 – a kind of ‘sniper’s alley’ full of shuttered windows. The sign on the southern side proclaims the city the world’s ‘Last Divided Capital’ in English, French and German. There is something mesmeric about that sign, the implicit pride of it. Each side fiercely contests the other’s sovereignty, but this was almost proof of a perversely shared sense of ownership.

  As I passed the Greek guard post and approached the Turkish post, I began to get nervous. After staring at my passport, then back at my face for a heart-lurching moment, an impassive guard waved me through.

  I was unprepared for how surreal it would be re-entering the north of the island. It was like being back in Turkey, like actualising my memories – the same adverts on billboards, the same products in shops, the familiar call to prayer, the simple magic of communicating in Turkish. I felt a slight tension this side of the border, a sense that people are less relaxed. I knew from a previous visit I’d made as an adult that many Northern Cypriots feel obscurely embarrassed, emasculated in the case of the men, knowing that their small and precarious republic only exists because of the money and soldiers sent by the Turkish government, which conveys an air of colonial-like ownership. There is a kind of cynicism prevalent, punctuated by outbreaks of frustration, like in 2011, when Turkish Cypriots protested against Erdoğan by gathering in front of the Turkish embassy in Nicosia, demanding reunification of the island and chanting, Ankara, get your hands off our shores!’