My first view of Thessaloniki (Salonica) must have been less than breathtaking. I say that because I lived there for a year and spent a lot of time in those outer neighborhoods; places like Stavroupolis and Evosmos, populated with villagers who built their houses (or at least the outer shells of them) overnight, illegally. They were ugly places and our approach to the city must have taken us right through the middle of them, but I have no memory of them. Perhaps because everything was so new, the only picture that remains in my mind is the sweeping view of white apartment buildings lining a wide sea walk along the deep blue Thermaikos Gulf, the White Tower, and the amphitheatre of the city, topped by the old Byzantine walls. It is no accident that the Greek flag is blue and white. I was not the only one impressed; I remember a chorus of “oooooh”s in the bus.

When we finally stopped in the plaza near the White Tower, where the families of students who were staying there were waiting. Being jet lagged and exhausted, I didn’t really look forward to yet another bus ride – almost four hours back then to Kavala – and was also a bit sad that I wouldn’t have the chance to explore Thessaloniki. As soon as the bus doors opened, a local representative entered and called my name. It turned out that I wouldn’t be going to Chrysoupolis after all, as the father had taken ill and they couldn’t deal with a foreign exchange student just then. So until a new family was found, I was going to stay in Thessaloniki for a few days with a Mrs. Chasirtzoglou.

A language nerd sidenote - having lived in Turkey for nine years now, my brain automatically transforms that name into Hasircioglu – a Hasirci is a straw mat weaver; the many surnames in Greece ending with “-oglou” (Turkish –oglu, “his son”) are a reminder of the thousands of Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox refugees that came from Anatolia in 1923. The Greek counterparts are the endings “-opoulos, -idis and –akis,” as well as more local forms like “-ellis” (Mytiline) and “-atos” (Cephallonia).

As everyone in the family worked and was out during the day, I was pretty much on my own. The only person left in the house was Mrs. Chasirtzoglou’s ancient mother, a classic black-clad, toothless elderly Greek woman with deep set, beaming eyes and a constant almost manic smile who talked a mile a minute, quickly demonstrating how insufficient my attempts at learning Greek on my own had been. Well, she, and the telephone. I still have telephone phobia. That first night in Athens, I had tried to call my distant cousin Kaiti in Athens. Beep beep beep beeeeeep, click, then through the static of Greece’s then-stone-age telephone system, a woman came on. “Parakaló, anaménete sto akoustikó sas,” she said. In my best pidgin Greek, I told her I spoke only a little Greek, did she speak English? Interrupting me, she repeated the same mysterious sentence: “Parakaló, anaménete sto akoustikó sas.” Using another well-rehearsed line, I pleaded “excuse me, I don’t understand, can you please speak slowly?” And as she said, once more, “parakaló, anaménete sto akoustikó sas,” I realized I was talking with a recording, the one that came up when all the lines were busy, telling me “please wait at your receiver.” Everyone had a good laugh, but now I see it more or less like preliminary training; anyone who has ever tried to argue with a Greek telephone company employee knows that it’s not much different from talking to a recording.

In my three days in Thessaloniki, I managed to 1) get myself lost, 2) make five new friends in the course of an afternoon simply because I played guitar and knew the English words to “Ourane pou pernas” (the Greek knockoff of “Country Roads”), and 3) discover that there was a gay cruising ground right in the middle of the city (no, I didn’t go for it; I was way too chickenshit for that and in retrospect I’m sure that was a good thing). Finally a family was found, and I was even more disappointed to find that I was getting sent to the town of Komotini, about an hour from the Turkish border in Thrace. I felt like the exchange student coming to the US with images of New York in his mind, finding out he had been placed in Podunk Center, Iowa.

But though it’s not on many (any?) tourist itineraries, Komotini is actually a very interesting place; with its remaining Muslim population, it provides a picture of what Greece could be like today if the 1922 population exchange had never taken place. The Treaty of Lausanne which stipulated the exchange of Orthodox Christian and Muslim populations between Greece and Turkey, contained three exemptions: the Muslims of Western Thrace (Greece) in exchange for the Greeks of Istanbul; and the Turks on the Greek islands of Rhodes and Kos in exchange for the Greeks of the islands of Imvros (Gökçeada) and Tenedos (Bozcaada). Komotini has a Turkish population of nearly 40% and driving through the countryside, the minarets rising out of every other village bears witness to the region's Muslim population.

You might notice than when I speak of Thrace, I say “Muslim” rather than “Turk.” This is neither to deny the existence of Turks there, nor deference to the language of the Treaty of Lausanne (which has been used in Greece to prohibit the use of the word “Turk” in certain official organizations), but rather to make it clear that Turks are not Greece’s only Muslims. In addition to Turks, there are also Pomaks, who are Muslim Bulgarian speakers. The Pomaks have been caught up in lots of politics between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey; nationalist Turks refer to them as "Pomak Turks," and nationalist Bulgarians sees them as Bulgarians who have gone over to the other side (similar to how some Serbs and Croatians see the Bosnians). There are also Muslim Roma (Gypsies). Komotini actually has two separate Roma neighborhoods; the Christian Roma live on the west end of town while the Muslim Roma live on the northeast side of town on the edge of the large Turkish neighborhood. Before Greece’s break from the Ottoman Empire and the various incidences of “ethnic cleansing” that ensued over the following decades, Greek also had a large population of Greek-speaking Muslims in Crete as well as Albanian-speaking Muslims in central Greece known as Chams (Gr. Tsamides). The well-known Tsamikos dance takes its name from this group. It is also a little-known or advertised fact that most of the villages in the area of Athens originally speak a far-flung dialect of Albanian known as "Arvanitika," which is gradually dying out. In the farmer's markets in Athens in the early 80s, I would regularly hear the vendors greet each other with "Tsi bin? Mire!" (How are you? Good!).

But although they did not lose their homes, life was not rosy for the remaining minorities on either side of the border. Both peoples had second-class status in a variety of ways and during the conflict between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, each came to be used more or less as hostages by their respective states. In the end, if Greece did more of the agitation (the Papadopoulos junta colluded with Makarios to unite Cyprus with Greece), it was also their own people in Turkey who paid the highest price. Today, less than 100 Greeks remain as permanent residents of Imvros and Tenedos. Of Istanbul’s one-time population of over 300,000 Greeks, only around 1,500 remain and many of these are elderly, the majority of young people opting to go to Greece as soon as they finish high school. It’s a sad thing to me; but sometimes I have to wonder if, considering the decades of unresolved issues between Greece and Turkey and their effect on each other’s minorities, the population exchange didn’t help to avoid many more decades of suffering by even more people. The mübadil (exchanged people) lost their homelands, but at least they got on with their lives.

I came to Komotini in 1975, only one year after Turkey invaded Cyprus and divided the island in two. Although there was little in the way of outward conflict, relations between the Greeks and Turks of Komotini were strained on many levels and the two peoples lived as neighbors but separate. Still, we had no fear of going into the Turkish neighborhood, which because of restrictions on building permits, was much as it had been in 1920. These were Turks who had not undergone the reforms of Atatürk, the women wore (and most older women still do wear) the traditional black cloak and white headscarf with subtle gray design. The presence of this clearly different people, their mosques, different dress and language (which remained mysterious to me because of their habit of speaking softly) were just a new thing to become curious about rather than be afraid of. Years later when teams from Athens came to “help the two peoples live together,” many on both sides laughed at the irony of the situation, saying “we’ve lived together for years despite what comes out of Athens, and now they are going to come and teach us how to get along?”

I had no idea at the time, but the view of Greece, Greeks and Turks that I got in Komotini sowed the seeds of a curiosity that would eventually lead me to Turkey, to be the first (and as far as I know, the only) member of our family that has visited my Grandfather’s birthplace, and to eventually settle in the world of conflicts – between past and present, Turks and Other, realities and national myths – that is Istanbul.