Displaced families

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea.

Imagine, if you will, that it’s 1922 and you’re living in a small mountain village thousands of miles from Istanbul above the shores of the Black Sea. You’re a practising Christian, and there’s a tumble-down cruciform church in the central square, with an icon of the Virgin hanging above the altar. Life until now has been ruled by the Ottoman Turks, but you speak a version of Greek handed down from the days when this part of Asia Minor was ruled by the emperors of Byzantium based in Constantinople. Suddenly, a government communiqué orders that you, and everyone else in the village, must leave immediately and return to where you ‘belong’ — mainland Greece.

It seems incredible now to be reminded that one of the many outcomes of the chaos following the end of the first world war was the enforced repatriation of more than one million Greek Christians living in Turkey. Whole villages were abandoned, and families who had lived in the area for generations were transported away from the Black Sea to live in villages on the Mediterranean coasts of Greece. In return, half a million ‘Greek’ Muslims were shipped over from mainland Greece to be resettled in Turkey. People who thought of themselves as one nationality, one culture, were simply told they were another, and forced to move hundreds of miles — by order of the new Turkish republic ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne.

In the next fortnight, Radio Three is hosting a series of programmes about Turkey, the forgotten ‘European’ nation. Much wrangling is going on behind the scenes as to whether this crucible of much that we now consider European culture should be allowed to enter the European Union as a member state.