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. Meanwhile very little fanfare has greeted the accession this year of Istanbul to European City of Culture status (an accolade determined by the very same European Union that wants to keep Turkey out). We’re still so confused about whether Turkey is East or West, with us or against us, European or Asian. Yet much of what we think of as Western art, Western religion, philosophy and mathematics comes from what was once Byzantium, which lay where Turkey now resides.
Songs of Trebizond (Sunday night, Radio Three) took us to that fabulously named city on the Black Sea coast, once famous for its peach orchards, its silkworms and hazelnuts. From there we journeyed up into the mountains, to the Soumela Monastery, perched on the edge of a cliff, which every year on 15 August still celebrates the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Orthodox style. It was emptied of its monks by the dictates of 1922 and 1923, but in recent years descendants of the displaced Greeks who once worshipped in the monastery’s Byzantine-style church have begun returning on annual pilgrimage, anxious to rediscover their roots and find meaning for the dances, the music, the language which they have preserved in exile. Tom de Waal went in quest of these Pontic Greeks and Turks (named after the Pontus region from where they once came). The church’s belfry has gone, replaced by a minaret, the altar and icon have long disappeared, and the monastery is now a museum run by the Turkish cultural institute. But a group of visitors from around the world begin singing the Greek National Anthem, followed by a Byzantine chant.
Higher up the mountain, de Waal joins the Kemanje music festival, run by the Turkish citizens of the area, devout Muslims who when at home speak a version of Greek that comes straight out of Constantinople in the fourth and fifth centuries AD. After the music they begin dancing, in Greek style; behind them hangs a huge portrait of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic. The politics of nationality melts away as Turk becomes Greek and vice versa.
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