turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

The religion constituted a basic element of these populations’ identity that
couldn’t be distinguished racially, according to the class or in professional
terms from the Muslims, but only in religious terms. Thus, the collective
experience and the sentimental background that united them in a community
played a very important role and not the dogmatic theological attachment in
any detail that was described in Bible or in the decisions of the Holy Sessions.
However, the Church, beyond its symbolic dimensions, had also a material
presence in the life of the residents. The priest of community practised a line
of functions of administrative character, acting as the intellectual top of the
community. Thus, the Orthodox Church carried out two roles: from the one
side, it constituted the core of these populations’ collective identity and from
the other side; it functioned as the institutional organizer and representative
of this collective identity in all levels.
It was the Orthodox Christian identity that firstly allowed in these populations
to consider themselves as Greeks.
The beginning of the First World War, the invasion of Russia in the regions of
Ottoman Pont, the support that the Greeks provided in the Russians and the
later efforts of the constitution of an independent state of Pont had negative
consequences for the populations of the region. Generally, the region of Pont
and, more specifically, its western side, became the theatre of exceptionally
violent conflict between Muslim and Christian armed teams, with main victims
civilians of all nationalities.
The conclusion of the adventure of Minor Asia and the signing of Treaty of Lausanne
put an end in the conflicts. Those who survived from the implementations, the
deportations, the hardships and the war left from Pont, most times without
being able to transfer almost nothing apart from their personal belongings.
They left towards either to the Russian Caucasus or via Sampsounta by boat
to Istanbul. There, the Pont’s inhabitants, after being stacked in thousands in
settlements of refugees, lived the hunger and the cold; they survived from the
contagious illnesses that killed thousands of their own people and, after a few
months, they passed by boats in Greece.
In any case, we can suppose that roughly the one fifth from them was supposed
to have as its basic language the Turkish.
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The Turkish-speaking Pont’s inhabitants were distributed in almost all the
prefectures of Greek Macedonia and Western Thrace. There, they continued,
in general lines, their rural life. They faced the problems that all the refugees
went through: hunger, sordid conditions of hygiene, lack of roof, social
alienation.
The contact of refugees with the natives can be characterized as a traumatic
cultural shock. The wider environment faced the refugees circumspectively
and, sometimes, hostile, in individual and collective level, even touching the
limits of racism. The disputes that resulted for economic questions, like that of
the distribution of grounds, they deplored the population for a lot of years and
made the issue of relation between natives and refugees thorny.
The element that impended even more the relations between the Turkish-
speaking Pont’s inhabitants and the remainder indigenous populations was
mainly the language. Even if the official Greek government’s policy did not
identify the Greek character with the language that the populations were
speaking, the speech of Turkish language was considered as mark of not
national “cleanliness” by the mass of Greek-speaking indigenous populations.
Apart from the locals, it seemed that, quite often, the Greek-speaking Pont’s
populations were also hostile or suspicious in front of the Turkish-speaking
Pont’s inhabitants. The language functioned simultaneously as that symbolic
border that it determined them as a separate team in the borders of the Greek
national state.
The strict inbreeding strengthened the isolation of these populations,
contributing, thus, in the intensification of their different identity. We had to
reach the decade 1950, so that an important part of Turkish-speaking Pont’s
inhabitants learns to speak the Greek language. Those that initially learned it
were the men, mainly through their military service in the army. Furthermore,
an enormous effort was exerted for the learning of language via the school.
Special attention was given in the linguistic Hellenisation of Turkish-speaking
by various Venizelos’ supporters, who with various activities tried to find
resources and a way to found schools in the villages of the Turkish-speaking
people. A little time later, during the Metaksas’ dictatorship, it seems that
efforts were made for obligatory study of all the Turkish-speaking people in
nightly schools.
Population Exchange
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