Greek population dwindles on Turkish Aegean Island

 

 

Gokceada, Canakkale (Dunya) – In a sing song tone, Metropolitan Bishop Yorgo Krilyos chants Sunday prayers from the pulpit of St. Maria Orthodox Church here, as two-dozen Greeks, seated in wooden pews, next to smoke-darkened icons, listen intently.

The members of the congregation, led by the bushy-bearded prelate, are mainly middle-aged and elderly couples, sprinkled with a few teenagers.

The churchgoers are among the last of the 300 ethnic Greeks living permanently on this rugged Turkish island of 4,900 inhabitants in the northeastern Aegean.

Migration to Greece and other European countries by young family members for work, settlement of Anatolian Turks over the past six decades and frequent eruptions of tension between Ankara and Athens over Cyprus have eroded the population of ethnic Greeks at Gokceada, formerly known as Imbros.

The Greeks of Gokceada and other parts of Turkey are Turkish citizens, but are Orthodox Christians, as opposed to 99.7% of the country's 76 million inhabitants who are Muslims.

Although persecution of religious minorities has long ceased and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to improve relations between the church and the government, only 3,000 ethnic Greeks remain in Turkey.

Turkish residents on the island, which is slightly bigger than the island of Malta, predict that no Greeks will be left on Gokceada, Turkey's biggest island, in a generation.

"In 30 year's time, there won't be any Greeks on Gokceada," says Kadir Ozbek, 54, owner of the popular Ozbek Hotel in the island's  main town, described simply as Merkez, or Center. 

Gokceada, Turkey's biggest island , was overwhelmingly Greek until the early 1970s, with more than 5,000 inhabitants.

Greeks on the island say that the decline of the Greek population was due to the decades of feuding between neighboring Greece and Turkey, nominal allies as members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, over Cyprus and by Turkish authorities prodding the Greeks to leave.

Mr. Ozbek doesn't agree.

"I have lived, gone to school and worked with the Greeks on this island for four decades. There has never been any pressure brought on the Greeks to leave. The only reason they have gone is for economic reasons to get educated and find better jobs abroad than in Turkey. The Cyprus crisis was only a pretext. The Greeks returning to the island are well off," he said.

In the summer months, many Greeks return to the island. The island's Greek population swells to 5,000 during the Orthodox Easter in August, when Greeks from around the world congregate in Gokceada.

 

Confiscation of church properties

Nevertheless, thousands of stone homes abandoned by ethnic Greeks more than three or four decades ago remain shuttered around the Gokceada. 

Turkish authorities confiscated some properties owned by church foundations at the five main Greek villages on the island, and some Turkish settlers have occupied homes left by the Greeks, leading to long legal wrangling.

Ayse Dilek Razlikili, a Turkish lawyer representing the Greek metropolitan bishopric and five church foundations, says she has won all 15 cases in court involving illegal expropriation of lands by the government.

"I have prepared 286 cases and will go to court, if the government fails to pay compensation," Ms. Razlikili says.

 

Attack on Greek cemeteries

The island's remaining Greeks were stunned two winters ago when unidentified vandals entered the island's main Greek cemetery at night and smashed tombs and crosses of individual cemeteries. Some 78 or 148 cemeteries were heavily damaged. A police investigation into the matter has been inconclusive.

Laki Vingas, head of the Union of Orthodox Church Foundations, said the attack  on the cemetery was "meaningless. This is an act of persons who have no civilization. You can't fight battles with the dead". 

 

Westernmost point

Situated at the mouth of the Bay of Saros, northwest of the entrance of the Dardanelles, Gokceada is a prefecture of Canakkale province. The westernmost point of Turkey, Inceburnu, is a tongue of land, located on the western end of the island. Daily ferryboats from Kabatepe (Gabatepe), on the Gallipoli Peninsula, run year-round to the island and a hydrofoil boat service operates between the island and the town of Canakkale in the summers. It takes about 75 minute to reach the island from Kabatepe, which is about five hours distance from Istanbul by bus..

A wind-swept island Gokceada is noted for its olive groves and vineyards. Island wine and olive oil is exported. The island is also famous for its animal husbandry, with sheep and goats roaming the slopes of the mountainous island freely.

Tourism is a booming business with new hotels and holiday villages being built along the sandy beaches the western part of the island, and an airport has been built in the plains around the central part of the island.  But the summer season lasts only for two and half months.

 

Byzantine Romans

Known as the Rum, or Byzantine Romans, Greeks have lived with Turks in war and peace since the 11th century.  After the Ottoman conquests, they shared Anatolia, the Balkans, Cyprus and Crete. 

Living together, they shared certain customs, cuisine and lifestyles. But the military victories of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the modern Turkish Republic in the 1920s, over an invading Greek army, led to the expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia, the birthplace of Hellenic culture.

The 1923 Lausanne Treaty, which settled the Greco-Turkish war, exchanged the Greeks of Anatolia with Turks of Greece. Nearly 1.5 million Greeks left Turkey and 500,000 Turks arrived from Greece.

Greeks living in Gokceada and the nearby Turkish Aegean island Bozcaada (Tenedos) as well as the nearly 100,000 Greeks of Istanbul were excluded  from the population exchanges, as were the Turks of the Greek province of western Thrace, where they have  hovered around 120,000 since then.

The Lausanne Treaty also guaranteed the continuation of the Patriarchate in Istanbul and protected the rights of Greeks remaining in Turkey and Turks in Greece, guaranteeing religious and education freedom. 

Prohibitive wartime taxation of Greeks and other religious minorities, bloody anti-Greek riots in Istanbul in 1955 at the height of the Cyprus crisis, and the deportation of 30,000 Greek nationals living in Istanbul all dealt heavy blows to the Greek community in Turkey.

Thousands of Greeks left Gokceada and Istanbul in wake of Turkey's 1974 military invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus, which brought Greece and Turkey to the edge of war.

 

Home of the Patriarch

Nowhere is the decline of the Greek population more apparent in than in the Gokceada village of Zeytinlikoy, birthplace and home of  Patriarch Bartholomeos, symbolic spiritual leader of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians. Bartholomeos lives in Istanbul but returns to his home in Gokceada in the summers.

The village, lined with cobbled streets and stone houses, clings on the face of a mountain.

Only a dozen persons, mostly elder Greek couples, live in Zeytinlikoy throughout the year.

"The Greeks have gone so has business fallen off," says Panayot Benago, 78, a cousin of the patriarch who operates a coffee house in the building that once housed the barber shop that was run by his uncle, the father of Bartholomeos.

The patriarch owns the home above the coffeehouse.