It all starts with a story. A story of an encounter, surprising, baffling. A story that shakes expectations, creates curiosity, invites an opening, establishes a promise. A story that changes life, starts a new orientation, determines a direction. Some have to wait for that story to come along. I have been lucky with my story; it happened before I even started waiting for it. Then it opened a road for me to walk along for many years to follow. A road with a tale. A trail of stories. The tale is composed of stories of cosmopolitanism told in the diaspora of the City, about the cultural identity of a community—the Rum Polites, primarily those residing in Athens—with respect to their everyday life, their social relations with others, their constructions of history, their traumatic memories of violence and displacement, and their attachment to the urban cosmopolitan legacy of the City. It is a tale I would like to tell in the following few hundred pages. It all starts with a story on the roadside.
The Roadside Story
It was the day of my arrival in Athens. I had left my suitcases in the room of a small hotel that was recommended to me at the airport. I did not know my way around in Athens, but I knew my destination: Paleo Faliro, the neighborhood dominated by the community that I wanted to study.
It was the summer of 1998, my first year in graduate school. I had decided to spend some time in Greece for language training and for testing the feasibility of conducting the kind of fieldwork I had in mind. My intention was to research the Greek Orthodox Rum minority from Istanbul who moved to Athens after being forced to leave Turkey. Having received various warnings about the kind of problems I should be prepared to face, I thought I would want to see the situation for myself. Would it really be difficult for a Turkish woman to investigate matters of political significance in Greece? Times were not great: that summer was marked by heightened tension between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus’s purchase of S-300 missiles. With the Imia/Kardak crisis of 1996 still fresh in people’s minds, the idea of a Turk doing research in Greece was bound to raise eyebrows. As it often happens in anthropology, the motivations of the fieldworker could be regarded with suspicion, both by the state agencies and by the people themselves. Having little concern about the former, I set out to measure the reactions of the latter, the Rum Polites in Athens.
So I started walking around Paleo Faliro. This being noon, and not the right time to call my contacts in their homes because of the siesta break, I had not much else to do besides stroll. On my way to an air-conditioned coffeeshop to escape the dizzying summer heat, I passed by two men on the side of the street. Otherwise unremarkable middle-aged men sitting on their motorcycles, these two drew my attention because they were talking loudly in Turkish. This was surprising to me, but I did not react, except for an unavoidable smile after overhearing a funny pun in slang. This did not escape them. One of them turned and said to me, with a slightly aggressive tone, in Greek: “What are you laughing at?” (Τi yelas;). I was not sure how to respond; my competence in Greek was not sufficient to enable me to work my way around any potential tension—which, if previous warnings were to prove correct, could easily arise out of this situation. I could not come up with anything better than to mumble in Turkish: “Sorry, I just heard what you said, so….”
This changed their attitude immediately. I had now their full attention and curiosity, so I continued: “I just came from Istanbul this morning, and when I heard Turkish being spoken….” My faltering explanation was interrupted by the men: “Oooh, so you came from Istanbul today? Why don’t you say so? Welcome, welcome!” The exchange took off with everybody talking simultaneously; they were as excited as I was surprised. One of them lowered his voice and asked, as if in confidence: “So you are not one of those Anatolians (Anadolulu), right? You are from Istanbul, right? Where exactly?” My family was living in Ayazpaşa at that time, which made them smile in approval: Ayazpaşa is an old neighborhood in Pera that lies next to Taksim and Cihangir, where many Rum families used to live. The other one mocked him saying that it was obvious from my Istanbul Turkish that I was indeed from the City. Their Turkish was no less fluent or no more accented than mine, even though they insisted that they had gone rusty. Some more questions followed inquiring into how far back my origins went in Istanbul, and it seemed to have pleased them that I, like my parents and grandparents, was born and raised in Istanbul, but also had family connections to Salonika and Crete. Then they said that although they came from Istanbul, they both had origins in Cappadocia, which explained their flawless Turkish.
“There are many of us here,” said one of the men, “everybody in Faliro is Turkish—well, Turkish speaking; they should really put up a flag there someday soon” (bayrak asacağız yakında buraya neredeyse zaten). When I told them of my intention to write about the Istanbul Rum community in Athens, they became even more enthusiastic: “This is wonderful,” they said, stealing half-sentences from each other, “come and we’ll show you around, we did the same last year with a journalist who came from Turkey, we’ll introduce you to people.” One of them produced a notebook and took a pen from the other to scribble down his phone numbers, insisting that I had to call him in case I needed something. As he handed the piece of paper to me, he also gave me a warning: “I give you my mother’s number as well, she also speaks Turkish. But if you call me at home, and I am not there, don’t worry. My wife does not understand, she is infidel (gavur ), you know?”
The conversation stopped there, the same way it started, with laughter. As I was leaving the scene, I realized that this was the story of the beginning. The story ended with a promise: I decided to research the Istanbul Rum community in Athens.
Stories of Basics
These two men were part of the community that I chose to study. I call them the Rum Polites; they are often referred to as Constantinopolitan Greeks in English, as Konstantinoupolites or Polites in Greek, and as İstanbullu Rum in Turkish. Among these multireferential possibilities and several others, Rum Polites, the term I prefer to use to designate the community, combines two of the most widely used emic terms of self-designation. By formulating this term my intention is threefold: to avoid confusion with other groups with similar names, to hint at their bilingual culture, and to acknowledge their self-emphasized identity as Istanbulites (Polites).1 The first term Rum is the Turkish word for Romios , a derivative of the word Romeos meaning Roman, after Eastern Roman or Byzantine. Today it designates an ethno-religious category of the Greek Orthodox in Turkey, as well as the wider Middle East. The word Rum also has a territorial connotation (Rumeli, Diyar-ı Rum) of the former Byzantine and subsequently Ottoman lands in Asia Minor and the Balkans (see Ergül 2012; Kafadar 2007). I have privileged Rum over its Greek or English alternatives in order to avoid a confusion of the term with the widely familiar use of Romios in the Greek context as in the binary construct Romeic–Hellenic . Another confusion would arise with the use of Rum only, in which case the Rum Polites could be conflated with other Rum communities from former Byzantine/Ottoman lands outside of Greece, such as Asia Minor, Egypt, or Cyprus. The second term Polites, on the other hand, has a further significance in indicating an attachment to an urban legacy as the word P oli means city as well as Istanbul, the City.2 These points that came up in the brief encounter at the side of the road constituted the main lines of research throughout my four-year fieldwork in Athens (2000–04) and built the thrust of the arguments that I am making in this book. This is why I started with the story that started my fieldwork. This is an ethnography of stories, whereby stories lead to theoretical arguments. Before telling more stories, let me first introduce the community of Rum Polites.
Any introduction to the Rum Polites has to start by addressing their diversity. Relating back to the Eastern Romans, even to the founders of the city of Byzantion, Rum Polites are one of, if not the oldest of, the resident communities in Istanbul. While they were always numerous and well-established within the urban society, constituting a quarter of the city population at the turn of the twentieth century, their numbers fell sharply in recent decades.3 The Rum Polites today are dispersed not only between Istanbul and Athens but are also spread all over the world. Among them, some have Turkish citizenship, some Greek, some both. Some are in-between, trying to cancel one and obtain the other. There are many different groups from within or linked to the Rum Polites, such as Fanariots ,4 Karamanlides ,5 Mikrasiates ,6 Imvriotes ,7 or Süryani Assyrians .8 Their mother tongue is mostly the demotic Greek, although with a large vocabulary unknown to non-Istanbulites, so some consider it to be a different dialect or even a language called Politika or Romeika , as I will discuss in detail in later chapters along with samples in oral and written form. Many are bilingual in Greek and Turkish, most are fluent in both languages, while there are some living in Greece who have never learned Greek, or a few who grew up also speaking French at home.9 They trace their origins in Istanbul for several generations, although many have mixed with people coming from elsewhere, like Cappadocia, Crete, Bulgaria, Russia, Egypt, or the Aegean islands. They have also intermarried with others, so there are a number of Rum–Armenians, Rum–Muslims, Rum–Jews, Rum–Levantines, and so on. The vast majority are members of the Greek Orthodox Church and adhere to a tradition of Orthodoxy maintained by the Ecumenical Patriarchate ,10 located since its inception in Istanbul. There are a few exceptions who are followers of national Orthodox churches, such as the Bulgarian, Albanian, or Russian churches, as well as a small number of Catholics and other Christians.11 Religion, though, has been the basic criterion for bureaucratic purposes in both nation-states: Ru...