Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [39]
This second is from a man named Isa Erol, who was born in Greece and returned to his birthplace in 2003. Before leaving on this journey, he stated that he didn’t miss his old home, saying, “Turkey is my homeland now.” (Clark notes that most other Muslim survivors of the exchange would echo this sentiment, accurately so, since Turkey has provided for them for most of their lives.) However, when Erol returned from his village, he told a journalist that he felt differently:
I found the place where my house stood, but it wasn’t there any more, there were just green fields. The new residents of the area—Greeks from Karaman in central Turkey—had built a new house just beside ours and they welcomed me in. I got very emotional when I stepped on the piece of land where I was born. My homeland is Turkey, but I wish the population exchange had not taken place, I wish we still lived there. After seeing my village, all my feelings had changed. Turkey is my homeland, but in these [Greek] places a good life could have been lived. But there is nothing that can be done about it any more.
In a review of this book, writer Theodore Dalrymple noted that “good fences make good, if not necessarily amicable, neighbors,” and indeed Clark maintains that, on one level, the exchange can be viewed as a practical way of handling an immediate political and humanitarian crisis. With only Clark’s final section of the book (bibliography and notes) in hand, an inquisitive reader would be well served for setting out on a fact-finding journey of his or her own.
Clark concludes that it is no longer possible for Greece and Turkey to “remain hermetically sealed and neatly divided from one another” in the twenty-first century simply because it’s practically impossible for anyone to be hermetically sealed in a global economy; Europe is also much more multicultural today. He believes that the spiritual severance of the Byzantine-Ottoman world was never entirely complete, and that in it, and other, similar cases, “it is perhaps inevitable both that separation will be attempted; and also that it will never entirely succeed.”
A few other worthwhile related reads are
Farewell to Salonica, by Leon Sciaky (Current Books, 1946). Like Thea Halo’s book below, Sciaky’s is a memoir, telling of his life in Salonica in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It’s a portrait of Jewish life in Salonica and equally valuable for that fact as accounts like this aren’t numerous. “Salonica became a Spanish city,” writes Sciaky. “The Jews of Turkey, and especially of Salonica, retained their Spanish character, in their customs, in their cooking, in their social amenities, and in their pride and dignity.” Sciaky reveals a childhood in which he felt secure and happy, but then recounts the changes that occurred as the Ottoman Empire fell apart and World War I began. Oddly, he doesn’t say much about the population exchange, but he does portray well the tension that was created by it in the city.
Not Even My Name: A True Story, by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000). Halo reveals the story of her mother, Sano, who at the age of ten was forced to leave her home with her family in 1920 on a death march to Syria. Halo’s family and all the others from their remote village, south of the Black Sea, were Pontic Greeks. (Pontus is an ancient Greek word meaning “sea,” pontios means “person of the sea,” and the mountain range in the area is also known as Pontic.) Without doubt, Halo’s is a harrowing, heartbreaking story, and it is nothing short of a miracle