Even though I grew up in Iowa, Greece was always in the background, ready to insinuate itself into our lives. There were constant reminders of it – baklava, kourambiedhes, finikia and melomakarona at Christmas, the words we knew like “kalimera” and “parakalo,” records of music around the house that (little did my mother know) would steer me toward a life to a city two hours by fast ferry from her father’s birthplace. We called our maternal grandparents “yiayia” and “papou.” I must have been around six when I realized that they were “the same thing” as my grandma and grandpa on the other side! “Yiayia’s your mother?!” I remember asking my own mother. They were just these nice older people we visited. And they always talked about Greece.
So when I got old enough to know a bit more about Greece and wonder where in Greece my grandfather was from, I was surprised to find out that he wasn’t from Greece, but from Turkey, which was till the Ottoman Empire when he left. I remember being slightly disappointed. Greece was becoming my “mythical perfect land;” Turkey was…somewhere else. And somewhere in this “Not Greece” country was an island called Marmara.
A quick glance at any map of Greece will reveal a multitude of towns and districts which begin with the word “Nea,” or sometimes, “Neos.” It means “New.” Nea Smyrni, Nea Krini, Nea Moudania, Nea Koutali, Nea Karvali, Nea Irakleia, Nea Makri. They are the legacy of one of the most painful chapters in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Beginning in 1919 with the Greek invasion of Turkey and ending in 1923, nearly two million Greeks and 500,000 Turks were uprooted from their homes and sent to their respective nation states. Lest one think that the rather lower number of Turks means they suffered less losses, the reason is that the process of expulsion (and worse) of Turks from Greece began in 1821 and continued as Greece put itself together as it captured pieces of the former Empire. By the time 1922 rolled around, many of the Turks in what is Greece today had already left.
In northern Greece, on the central arm of the Halkidiki peninsula is a town called Neos Marmaras – New Marmara. Like all of the Neos/Nea towns, it was settled by refugees from its namesake in today’s Turkey. I have never been to the town but almost certainly still have a few distant relatives there.
“Old” Marmara – or more correctly the Island of Marmara, is the largest of a small group of islands in the western end of the Marmara Sea in Turkey, near the Dardanelles and across from the Kapıdağı Peninsula and the town of Erdek. It is rarely mentioned in tourist guides. Up until 1922, they were home to a population that included around nine thousand Greeks and smaller populations Turks and Jews. The largest of the group, also known as Prokonisos in Greek, is the source of some of the finest marble in the world, which was used in construction and statuary in Ephesus far to the south. Nearby are the islands of PaÅŸalımanı (Pasalimani) and AvÅŸa (Aphisia/Ophiousa) which had both Greek and Turkish villages. Directly across from Marmara is the smallest of the group which is officially known as Ekinlik but is still referred to by the villagers as Koutali, or “spoon,” because it resembles a spoon floating bowl-up on the water. It had a single, very rich village by the same name. All the islands were quite wealthy because in addition to sponge diving, they were directly on a very old and well-established trade route for boats coming from both the Aegean and the Black Sea through Istanbul.
Fast forward to 1983. Sitting in a bar in Athens, I got into a conversation with the man beside me; with his dark brown hair, beard and enormous eyes he reminded me of an icon. The usual questions were asked – why do you speak Greek, what are you doing in Greece, where was your family from? When I told him “Marmara Island,” his face brightened up. “You don’t say! My grandmother was from Koutali. And he told me this story:
In 1915, my grandmother was only 16 years old, Ottoman troops came to Koutali. They told the people that there was fighting coming to the area and they had to go across the water – to Artaki (Erdek) for their own safety. Thinking they would just be gone for a few days, they packed food, changes of clothes and bedding, locked their houses and boarded ships that had come to evacuate them. When they arrived in Artaki, the officers announced: “You no longer have a homeland here. You have a choice: You can either go to Istanbul, or to Greece. Most of them opted for Greece, because the dynamics between Greeks and Turks in the area, who had previously gotten on well together, had begun to change. Turkish refugees from Macedonia who had lived through unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the army and local villagers had begun reaching Turkey, and after what they had been through, they had little use for Christians and Greeks in particular. They began stirring up the local people and the town of Adramytion (Modern-day Edremit) became the scene of the first pogroms against the Greek community in Asia Minor. Some opted for Istanbul, unaware that it would be only three years before they too would be joining their fellow villagers in Greece. What had really happened was that the Ottoman army had decided to turn Koutali, the westernmost island of the group and closest to the Hellespont, into a military base.The blow to my grandmother’s psyche was immense. In one night, she had lost everything, the only world she had known. I had always been curious about Koutali and what life was like there, but all she would ever say was “Afta ine perasmena” – That’s all passed. It was just too painful for her to talk about. So one day, I decided to try a sort of experiment, maybe a slightly dangerous one. I started asking her indirect questions. Instead of mentioning Koutali, I started by asking her questions like “when you were a young girl, what was your room like?” Then, “what did you see when you looked out the window?” Later, “who lived in the house you saw out your window,” and so on. One day a friend gave me an old 78 recording of a karsilama dance from that area. I played it. And my grandmother, 84 years old, rose up and began to dance the karsilama in the style of her island. From that day on, the barrier went down and she began to tell me everything.What had happened to the rest of the islanders? They were settled in an empty region in the Peloponnese, and told that they would earn their living farming. These were sponge divers and merchants; they may have raised some grapes on their island’s arid soil but had done no other farming. Culturally they were also far removed from the villagers of southern Greece, who saw them as outsiders. They asked to be settle somewhere else. Even though the crushing wave of nearly two million people had yet to arrive, Greece was anything but a rich country, and did not have the resources to relocate people to suit their fancy. The authorities told them, “if you can find a place you like better, you’re free to go there.” They sent out scouts around the country, and before long news came of a tiny island off the coast of the third arm of the Chalkidiki Peninsula just before the entrance to the monastic state of Mt. Athos. Called Ammouliani, it was dry and uninhabited. Evidently the officials couldn’t believe it…”you want to go there?!” If they had seen Koutali, they would not have been surprised in the least.
Others who came later eventually established the village of Nea Koutali on the equally dry island of Limnos.
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