We’re Levantines … hold your head up high and say, ‘Yes, I am. What of it? Byzantine and Ottoman…’
These are the words of Lev- ent effendi, a dignified out-of-work teacher, a ‘Turk’ who turns out to have been born to a Greek family in Smyrna in 1922, rescued and raised by Muslim foster parents. ‘Why are you filling his head with this nonsense? This is dangerous talk for a child,’ Kakmi’s mother observes with uncharacteristic restraint. The boy’s primary school teacher, a ‘tall-as-a-poplar woman’ sent from the mainland, tells him, ‘Because you’re not a Turk, may the bread you eat be poisonous.’ Life was made impossible and, in 1970, the family left for Australia. To the nine-year-old child, it was a calamity.
Demetri Kakmi was born into a Greek community on the Turkish island of Bozcaada, formerly Tenedos, near the mouth of the Dardanelles. His superb account of childhood is sandwiched between anticipation and accomplishment of a return visit, 30 years later.
The Muslim call to prayer floats above the rooftop … I find it difficult to ignore so beautiful a song. ‘Mama’, I say, deliberately adopting the lilting whine she hates, ‘has the Greek God lost his voice?’
Then she ‘utters such a jaw-dropping blasphemy against the Muslim god that had someone heard her, she would have been stoned to death.’ The Greeks are not allowed to ring their church bells; their worship is furtive. Yet Dmetri has known the blacksmith, a Turk who greets the day in Greek, all his life, and loves him. Likewise Osil, the grocer, a Greek-speaking Turk from Mytilini. Dmetri’s best friend, Refik, is a Turk, but the two cannot be seen together outside school. It is the Turkish café-owner who tells a woman that she is not welcome after she rages that he should not play Greek music. That she is a Turkish-Albanian whose family were murdered by Greeks cannot be allowed to matter in such a volatile situation. She is ‘ill-mannered’.
