Anachronistic Identities

My first visit to Turkey was in 1982. I had a good friend on the island of Lesbos/Mytilene; Turkey was visible across the water. I found it strange that even from there it seemed different. Not in any definable, physical way of course; the mountains were the same color, the same shape, covered in the same olive trees and maquis. The only difference was in my own perception of it: Somehow I felt I could sense the vastness of the country even from there, as if I could somehow physically perceive that after crossing to that shore, I could continue eastward and traverse the entire country of China before coming to salt water once again.

The ferry to the town of Ayvalik took about an hour. In retrospect Ayvalik provided perhaps the most seamless entry into the “new world” of Turkey, both in terms of its physical appearance and its population. Ayvalik, known in Modern Greek as Aivali, is the ancient city of Kydoniai. A kydoni is a quince in Greek, as is the Turkish ayva, and though the name changed to Turkish, Ayvalik retained a chiefly Greek population until 1922. A wealthy port city, it is filled with splendid neo-classical houses, and due to its status as a “museum city,” it was forbidden to tear them down. The city was backed by a hill of red earth and a scattering of pine trees, and the domes of former Orthodox churches now used as mosques emerged from among the tile roves. If not for the handful of modern coffeehouses along the promenade and a few large signs in Turkish, there was little other than its size to distinguish it from the beautiful village of Molyvos back across the water.

(Update: I visited Ayvalik once more in 1996 and was horrified to see that more and more buildings have been destroyed, replaced by the faceless architecture that characterizes so many Anatolian cities. There is a ho$t of way$ to get around pre$ervation law$ after all. The once-picturesque hill above the town is now crowned by a truly monstrous building of monumental bad taste, which photographers for tourist brochures take pains to exclude from their shots.)

The history of the Ottoman Empire and the many nation states into which it was eventually divided, is a story of changing definitions of nationality and identity, and the fallout of this breakup continues today.

Though the original Greek inhabitants of Ayvalik have been gone since 1922, the city’s connection to Greece remained strong because it was largely repopulated by Muslims who were brought from Crete.

Some will immediately note that I said “Muslims” instead of “Turks.” This is not an expression of Greek nationalism but rather an attempt at an objective view of history. As soon as you really try to define them, the words “Greeks” and “Turks,” always lead to trouble, because the definition of each has been as changeable as the borders of the Ottoman Empire in which both peoples lived side by side for centuries. One could even argue that in terms of modern perceptions of ethnic identity, they went undefined, because within the incredibly complex mix of languages and ethnic identities within Ottoman lands, what language one spoke was of secondary importance. There were Muslims who spoke Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Greek, Laz, Georgian, Romany, Arabic and other languages. There were Jews who spoke Judeo-Spanish as their mother tongue, but others who spoke Turkish, Kurdish or even Greek. Trying to define all these people according to modern ideas of nationality would create more problems than it solved, thus it was much easier and more practical to divide people according to faith, because it was much more relevant to a person’s place in Ottoman society. The official division was into religion-defined millets.

This worked until the world began to be parceled into nation states; then people had to be classified within the new order, and it became largely a game of predicting their most likely allegiance. It was easy enough to call Turkish-speaking Muslims with an allegiance to the Ottomans, Turks, and Greek-speaking Orthodox with allegiance to the new country of Greece, Greeks. But what about people like the Karamans of Cappadocia, who were Orthodox but spoke Turkish, writing it in a specially adapted Greek alphabet? Were they Greeks who, surrounded by a Turkish-speaking majority, gradually lost their spoken language, or were they a group of Turks who adopted the Orthodox faith?

There are actually several different groups of Turkish-speaking Orthodox, with varying histories. Other examples are the Turkish-speaking Christian Gagauz of Romania, the over 80 villages of Greek-speaking Muslims in the Trabzon region of Turkey. The same holds true in the Balkans, where people such as the Pomaks, Bulgarian-speaking Muslims in Bulgaria and Greece, continue to be a thorn in the side of nationalists on both sides. Perhaps the bloodiest case in the continued reclassification of peoples is that of the Bosnians. In a part of the world where ethnic/national identity is based as much upon what one is not as what one actually is, to be Muslim became a distinct disadvantage within a Christian majority.

As for the Greek-speaking Cretan Muslims, they were almost certainly Greeks who converted to Islam, as they were such a large community with active ties to the Muslim world that it is unlikely they simply forgot Turkish. Nationalists on both sides argue about these issues, but in the end, Greece rejected them and Turkey accepted them. Thus it’s a bit late to argue about who they “really” are or were; the plain reality is that among the nearly two million Orthodox who were forced to migrate to Greece in 1922 were a large number who spoke no Greek whatsoever, and among the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who were uprooted and moved to Turkey were many who spoke no Turkish. So by some definitions, Ayvalik said goodbye to its old Greeks and imported new Greeks.

In the years since the exchange, the more isolated of the Cretan Muslim communities in Turkey have forgotten Greek, but those living in Ayvalik and other coastal cities have added linguistic reinforcements: Greek radio and television from the Greek islands often visible from their homes, and frequent Greek visitors who come for tourism as well as shopping. Despite the somewhat expensive ticket price for boats to Turkey, the shopping crowd has increased, especially since the inflation that hit Greece after it adopted the Euro. So while the Greek speakers farther inland in places like Mudanya tend to be elderly, and speak heavy Cretan dialect, those in Ayvalik though mostly unable to read or write Greek, speak a more standard Greek than their immigrant parents or grandparents. Especially on the little island of Cunda across the bay from Ayvalik, one is as likely to hear Greek in the neighborhoods as Turkish.

When I first went to Greece, looking for an identity, with little knowledge of history and a very standard map-style perception of ethnic identity, it was easy to classify myself as an American of partial Greek extraction, and identify with “Greeks.” Living in Greece I saw very quickly the ways in which I felt I fit in and the ways I did not, the attitudes I appreciated and those I didn’t. The eventual result was that I stopped trying to define myself in terms of the culture of a country where I did not grow up, or try and downplay parts of myself that didn’t fit that notion. And as I meet more people with the incredible variety of backgrounds, being claimed by one or more nation states for various reasons, I’m called upon to question once again the notions of nationality and ethnicity that I’ve accepted. What does it mean, for example, to consider myself part Greek when I don’t share the chief criterion used when Greece became a country, Greek Orthodoxy? If my answer is the remaining parts of “Greek” culture, what is it that separates that from the similar aspects of Turkish culture? As religion plays an increasingly minor role in the lives of many younger Greek and Turkish people, the answer seems to be “less and less,” until they get into arguments about the past, or get caught up in conflicts fomented by people who base their thoughts in the past. As the traumas of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire become further and further separated from modern consciousness, I hope that this obsession with forcing people into simplistic “A” or “B” identities will become as obsolete as the Ottoman millets are today.