The uncertain future of Greeks in Turkey

OUTSIDE a small chapel on Imbros, a windswept Turkish island on the Aegean Sea, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians relaxes under a canopy of oak trees, catches up with old friends and reminisces about his birthplace’s dark past. Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, born Dimitrios Arhondonis, left the island in the early 1960s to study abroad. By the time he returned a few years later, he could hardly recognise it. The vast majority of the island’s 6,000 Greeks were gone, replaced by settlers from Turkey. Convicted prisoners, also shipped in from the mainland, terrorised those Greeks who remained. Some women were raped; several men were killed. The government in Ankara closed the Greek schools, seized nearly all the arable land, and changed the island’s old Greek name, to Gokceada.Over the past few years the island’s Greek culture has come back to life. Tourism has taken off. On summer evenings in Zeytinlikoy, the village where Bartholomew grew up, restaurants, many of them Greek, swarm with mostly Turkish diners. After Turkey’s government, headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, allowed three Greek schools to open on Imbros a decade ago, descendants of the Greeks displaced in the 1960s began trickling back, their children in tow. The island’s Greek population, which had plummeted to under 200, has since tripled. Dimitris and Maria, a lorry driver and a biologist, arrived from Thessaloniki in 2015, enrolled their four children in school, and learned Turkish. They now run a popular café in the island’s main town. “In terms of the Greek language and education,” says Nikos Lemopoulos, the local headmaster, “we’ve experienced a small renaissance.”