turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

your government?” The peasant repeats, “Of course”. “How about two cars?”
“Yes, of course. Who else do I have other than my government?” and similar
questions follow one another. Finally, the statesman asks, “If you had two hens,
would you grant one? And the peasant says, “No”. When the statesman asks for
the reason, the peasant replies, “Because I do have two hens.”
This is surely a fictional story by Occidental authorities to criticize the
infrastructure of socialist order.
I shared this anecdote because in the panel speeches or some sources there were
some different discourses upon positional conflicts between the good and bad
sides of the state of war, which are probably not recollected in a correct way
any more and distorted by false memories. These objective subjects in front
of us are not only architectural matters but also matters on the consequences
of all kinds of concrete cultural property. However, we do not behave like the
peasant in the anecdote, which is very important. We still keep our positions.
The meaning of all of these - the property belonging to people exchanged
between two countries and the period during which exchange was done
between the two countries - is important.
In the 1970’s, the countries in the region accepted the Venice Agreement of the
1960’s. Between 1890 – 1891, An Austrian author Regal wrote on how to take
values into consideration. Undoubtedly, many philosophers had dealt with the
value of the logic before Regal did, however the first time we come across with
the descriptions in the agreements in force today is when we look at Regal’s
writings. It does not have a long history; 150 years. Thus, we can reflect on
what is collective value, what is historical value, what might permanency be
through his historical classification. The West has fallen behind in the sense
of the articulation and elaboration of all these concepts or defending them in
the field.
We, especially our intellectual community, can discuss about anything whereas
we are not aware of what we possess in an objective way. I do not say that
there has not been any investigation into the exchange in Turkey but the studies
on the issues I want to mention here can be regarded as the first ones in this
field.
Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe
Kemal Arı and Nedim İpek of Turkish History Institution, among many other
researchers, have studied the documents of the great exchange. This study
has been completed in about three years through scanning 10557 documents as
financed by the Land Housing General Directorate at the Republic archives. But
how did Turkish Republic deal with it?
There is a document from an archive which was opened in 1998. This document
is a thrilling one for me as it is the first visual material I obtained coincidentally
while I was doing research for some other two studies. Having been victorious
after a war which passed in poverty and debts, Turkish Republic was able to
become organised and prepare three different sheltering and housing policies.
One of them is to build up ready-made huts. We must be objectively aware of
what we have pertaining to past and today.
The result is interesting; there are Ministry sub-directives for ready-made hut
import for places having access to import harbours and buildings of reed-dried
mud mixture in places far from the import harbours. The second housing type
is economic houses in which houses are built for individuals or groups of small
number of people where a family is to accommodate or for bigger number of
people who had to be accommodated or located there.
Therefore a sample village consists of 52-54 houses inside of which are a
market, a mosque, a school, a fountain and outside of which are a cemetery,
a harvesting, a halo. The third reaction is the article we found in the achieves
makes use of “enval-i metruke”, that is to say “abandoned property”.
At first, the use of enval-i metruke houses remaining from the Armenian and
the Greek of Turkish nationality by state employees was encouraged for about
eight-ten months, especially in Ankara where enval-i metruke was abundant.
Later, however, it turned out that there could be inconveniencies regarding the
treaty; thus, making use of enval-i metruke was ceased and the residents of
these houses were asked to evacuate their residences. Today we do not know
clearly at what rate this evacuation initiative was successful but there are
documents showing that residence in enval-i metruke continued illegally. Just
as we try to evacuate the shanty houses today, they also tried to evacuate the
enval-i metruke at that time.
The exchange documents shed light on the issue regarding the architecture
history with some directives and circulars. These documents include detailed
Population Exchange
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